What is Meihua Yishu (梅花易数)?

The name comes from a story

The method is attributed to Shao Yong, a Song-dynasty scholar. The story says he watched a sparrow fall from a plum branch while two people were talking, and read the moment — the time, the branch, the bird, the words — as a hexagram.

That is the whole idea of it: the moment already contains its own numbers. You do not need to throw anything.

Numbers in the moment, not coins

In practice you take the numbers your moment gives you — the hour, the date, the count of something you see, or something you said — and reduce them to the six lines of a hexagram.

It is the same sixty-four hexagrams as any other method. What changes is where the randomness comes from: your moment instead of your hands.

How YUBAO uses it

When you write a question, YUBAO takes two or three characters from your own words and uses their stroke counts to cast the hexagram. Your words are the numbers, which keeps the reading tied to what you actually asked.

It also means two people asking the same question rarely get the same hexagram — the reading is made out of the question itself.

Why a method like this survives

Because it is portable and honest. You can cast without tools, anywhere, in under a minute — and because the number comes from the moment, you cannot rig the answer you were hoping for.