As China entered the early modern period, the I Ching took on renewed relevance in both Confucian and Daoist studies. These aspects of Chinese cosmology are familiar to those who teach China’s indigenous religion, Daoism, and often we start with these concepts.

The majority of these books were serious works of philology, reconstructing ancient usages and commentaries for practical purposes. A Companion to Yi Jing Numerology and Cosmology: Chinese Studies of Images and Numbers from Han (202 BCE–220 CE) to Song (960–1279 CE). There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day.Zhu Xi's reconstruction of I Ching yarrow stalk divination, based in part on the Great Commentary account, became the standard form and is still in use today. The "changes" involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination.

After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the I Ching lost its significance in political philosophy, but it maintained cultural influence as one of China's most ancient texts. It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time; the Rites of Zhou name two other such systems, the Lianshan [ zh] and the Guicang. Since then, it's seemed like just about any handy object lying around—books, chickens, even cheese—has been used to attempt a glimpse at upcoming events, leading to a host of compound words formed with the suffix - mancy (which can be traced back to the Ancient Greek for "seer" or "prophet"). Over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500 –200 BC), it transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the " Ten Wings". Detailed study of divination techniques using the ritual calendar among Quiché Maya in the Guatemalan Highlands.

note 3] The statements were used to determine the results of divination, but the reasons for having two different methods of reading the hexagram are not known, and it is not known why hexagram statements would be read over line statements or vice versa. Actually, the traditional philosophical Taoists would probably object to the I Ching idea of a predictable destiny, at least by principles different in essence from that of Tao, the Way, itself. In China and in East Asia, it has been by far the most consulted of all books, in the belief that it can explain everything. Still others may feature images of cultural displacement, such as English knights, pentagrams, the Jewish Torah, or invented glyphs. objecting to the science of divination because he believed it bore too much similarity to pagan practices of invoking spiritual entities that were not God.