Number of words: 98

The Book of Changes is thus a work that has grown organically over thousands of years and consists of many layers stemming from the most important periods of Chinese thought. The starting point of the book was a collection of sixty-four figures, or ‘hexagrams’, of the following type, which are based on the yin-yang symbolism and were used as oracles. Each hexagram consists of six lines which may be either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), the sixty-four of them constituting all possible combinations of that kind. 

Excerpted from Page 109 of ‘The Tao of Physics’ by Fritjof Capra