Gradations of binary expression based on yin and yang -- old yang, old yin, young yang or young yin (see the divination paragraph below) -- are what the hexagrams are built from. Yin and yang, while common expressions associated with many schools known from classical Chinese culture, are especially associated with the Taoists.

Another view holds that the I Ching is primarily a Confucianist ethical or philosophical document. This view is based upon the following:
The Wings or Appendices are attributed to Confucius.
The study of the I Ching was required as part of the Civil Service Exams. These exams only studied Confucianist texts.
It is one of the Five Confucian Classics.
It does not appear in any surviving editions of the Dao Zheng.
The major commentaries were written by Confucianists, or Neo-Confucianists.

Both views may be seen to show that the I Ching was at the heart of Chinese thought, serving as a common ground for the Confucian and Taoist schools. Partly forgotten due to the rise of Chinese Buddhism during the Tang dynasty, the I Ching returned to the attention of scholars during the Song dynasty. This was concomitant with the reassessment of Confucianism by Confucians in the light of Taoist and Buddhist metaphysics, and is known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. The book, unquestionably an ancient Chinese scripture, helped Song Confucian thinkers to synthesize Buddhist and Taoist cosmologies with Confucian and Mencian ethics. The end product was a new cosmogony that could be linked to the so-called "lost Tao" of Confucius and Mencius.

In his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (1703) Gottfried Leibniz writes that he has found in the hexagrams a base for claiming the universality of the binary numeral system. He takes the layout of the combinatorial exercise found in the hexagrams to represent binary sequences, so that :::::: would correspond to the binary sequence 000000 and :::::| would be 000001, and so forth.

The binary arrangement of hexagrams was developed by the famous Chinese scholar and philosopher Shao Yung (a neo-Confucian and Taoist) in the 11th century. He displayed it in two different formats, a circle, and a rectangular block. Thus, he clearly understood the sequence represented a logical progression of values. However, while it is true that these sequences do represent the values 0 through 63 in a binary display, there is no evidence that Shao understood that the numbers could be used in computations such as addition or subtraction.

The Flag of South Korea contains the T'ai Chi symbol, or tàijítú, (yin and yang in dynamic balance, called Taeguk in Korean), representing the origin of all things in the universe. The taijitu is surrounded by four of the eight trigrams, starting from top left and going clockwise: Heaven, Water, Earth, Fire.

The flag of the Empire of Vietnam used the hexagram number 30 and was known as cờ quẻ Ly (Li hexagram flag) because the hexagram represents South. Its successor the Republic of Vietnam connected the middle lines, turning it into hexagram number 1. (see Flag of the Republic of Vietnam).