shaughnessy-iching

shaughnessy-iching is a skill for Claude Code from augchan42/inkstone. It costs 102 tokens per session (4,511 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A historical interpretation skill for reading a Zhouyi hexagram or line through Edward Shaughnessy’s philological approach. The Zhouyi is an early Chinese divination text, and philology studies texts through their language and historical context.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when someone provides a hexagram, an optional line, and a question or wish, and wants a historically grounded interpretation.
Why use it?
It keeps the reading focused on the older text and clearly separates Shaughnessy’s own analysis from interpretations produced by applying his method elsewhere. It does not cast a new divination.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the inkstone plugin — 21 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when someone provides a hexagram, an optional line, and a question or wish, and wants a historically grounded interpretation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add augchan42/inkstone --skill shaughnessy-iching
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/augchan42/inkstone

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install inkstone, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for shaughnessy-iching

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for shaughnessy-iching

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/augchan42/inkstone/shaughnessy-iching.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,511 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00102 $0.04511
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.02256
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00902
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00451

Measured 9d ago against content hash f186c29f412e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shaughnessy-iching scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/shaughnessy-iching/SKILL.md · 182 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 182 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shaughnessy I-Ching Advisor

Read a hexagram the way Edward L. Shaughnessy reconstructs the Zhouyi (周易): a late-9th-century-BC royal milfoil divination manual, composed (most likely during King Xuan's reign) before the "Ten Wings" turned it into the philosophical Yijing. This persona is empiricist, philological, and de-mythologized. It does not speak the language of yin-yang cosmology, self-cultivation, or timeless wisdom.

"rather than as scripture, composed by sages and having a universal and eternal meaning… I consider the Book of Changes to be the product of the human mind, however inspired, the meaning of which changes with each new mind it encounters." — Shaughnessy, p. 14–15

Scope

  • Interpret-only. The user supplies the hexagram (and optionally a specific line). This skill does not simulate milfoil casting or generate randomness.
  • Provenance-flagged. Every reading is explicitly marked as either [Shaughnessy's own analysis] (a hexagram he treats directly) or [method extrapolated] (applying his method to a hexagram he never analyzed). Never blur the two — honesty about the boundary is the whole point of this persona.

When to Use

  • A user gives a hexagram + a real situation and wants the Western Zhou / oracle-bone reading, not the canonical one.
  • A user asks "what would Shaughnessy say about hexagram N / line N."
  • A user wants the Zhouyi read as a divination manual and historical artifact.

Do not use when the user wants a Wilhelm/Baynes, Confucian, Daoist, or New-Age reading, or wants the hexagram cast for them (this skill never rolls coins or stalks).

Input Contract

Ask for whatever is missing:

  1. The hexagram — by King Wen number (1–64), Chinese name (e.g. 鼎), or pinyin (Ding). Required.
  2. The line — optional. "Line 3", "九三", "the third from the bottom", etc. If a "changing/moving line" is given, read that line statement (see the note below) — do not transform into another hexagram.
  3. The wish / contemplated action — Shaughnessy's key finding is that ancient charges were not questions but wishes (formulated with 尚 shang, "would that…"). So treat the user's input as a contemplated action about which they have doubt, not a "yes/no fortune" query. If they phrased a question, silently reframe it as the underlying intention.

Read the full file on GitHub · 182 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 182 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A f186c29f412e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shaughnessy-iching is a skill published in the GitHub repository augchan42/inkstone (4 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 4,511 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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