What you are actually looking at
A hexagram is six horizontal lines, read from the bottom up. Each is yang, drawn unbroken, or yin, drawn with a gap. Six positions with two states each gives sixty-four figures, and sixty-four is not a mystical number here — it is 26, and the count is the whole of it.
Each figure splits into two halves of three lines, called trigrams, and there are eight of those for the same reason: 23. The eight carry the images most people recognise even without the book — heaven, earth, water, fire, thunder, wind, mountain, lake.
Which trigram sits on top of which is the first thing a reading looks at, and it is often the whole of the reading. Hexagram 11 is earth above heaven — the heavy thing over the rising thing, so the two move towards each other, and it is called Peace. Hexagram 12 is the same two the other way up, each moving away from the other, and it is called Standstill. Nothing has been added to get from one to the other except turning the figure over.
Changing lines, which are the actual mechanism
This is the part that makes the Yijing different from a deck of sixty-four cards. A line is not only solid or broken — it can also be moving, which means it is in the process of becoming its opposite. Flip every moving line and you get a second figure, the relating hexagram.
So a reading is not a state. It is a state, a direction, and the state it is heading towards. A figure with no moving lines is a situation that is not currently going anywhere, and a figure with five is one that is barely itself any more.
In the traditional three-coin method each line is thrown with three coins, and the two throws out of eight that come up all-alike produce a moving line. That is one chance in four, and it is exactly the rate used above, so a reading here averages one and a half moving lines the way a coin consultation does.
Why the figure comes from a date and not from coins
A real consultation is random. Fifty yarrow stalks divided and counted, or three coins thrown six times — and the randomness is not incidental, it is the point of the method.
This site's standing rule is the other one: the same inputs return the same reading, because a fortune that changes on refresh cannot be checked, and anything that cannot be checked can only be believed. So the six lines are derived from the birth date, and from both dates in an order-independent way when there are two. That is a real departure from the practice, and saying it out loud is the point rather than an apology.
If you want a genuine consultation, three coins and a table will do it far better than any web page, and you will not need this one.
Why there is no box to type your question into
Nearly every I Ching site has one. This one will not, and the reason is not modesty.
A question field implies the answer responds to the question. It cannot. Whatever this page computes, it computes from six selects holding a day, a month and a year — the text of your question does not enter the calculation and could not, and a field that sits there collecting it is telling you something untrue about how the page works. The traditional practice puts enormous weight on framing the question well, and the honest thing to say is that the framing does its work in the reader's head rather than in the figure.
What is deliberately missing
No judgement text, no image text, no line text — in any translation. The Wilhelm–Baynes English version of 1950 is the one nearly every I Ching site quotes, and it is in copyright. What this site shows instead is the Chinese name and its literal sense, the structure of the figure, and one line of characterisation written here and marked as ours. That is the same separation the rune pages keep between what a source says and what we say.
The full reference has all sixty-four, with the eight-by-eight grid, the King Wen pairing rule, and the binary arrangement that Leibniz was shown in 1701.