The person behind this

Filling Water is made by one person — Steven Nichols — as a passion project, which is both a disclosure and most of the explanation for how it feels.

I came to the Book of Changes the way many people do now: sideways, through the Taoist shelf — Lao Tzu's water that wears down stone, Alan Watts's watercourse way — and then found that the oldest book on that shelf was also the strangest and most practical one. What kept me was not fortune-telling. It was that the Book turned out to be a patient catalogue of situations, and that sitting with one chapter and a real question was a better thinking tool than most things built for the purpose.

I built this site because I wanted a quiet place to do that sitting: the Wilhelm/Baynes translation whole and unrewritten, the yarrow arithmetic kept honest, the book's own web of cross-references made walkable, and nothing here designed to hook you. No accounts, no streaks, no notifications. One cast at a time.

Everything on the site is derived from the source text at build time; where I add words of my own — the notes on the hexagram pages, the essays — they are labelled as mine. The translation's rights remain with its holders.