Yin & Yang
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Yin and Yang
literally mean "dark side" and "sunny side" of a hill.
They are mentioned for the first time in the Hsi tz'u, or
"Appended Explanations" (c. 4th century BC), an appendix to
the I Ching (Classic of Changes): "One [time] Yin, one
[time] Yang, this is the Tao." Yin and Yang are two complementary,
interdependent principles or phases alternating in space and time; they are
emblems evoking the harmonious interplay of all pairs of opposites in the
universe. First conceived by musicians, astronomers, or diviners and then propagated by a school that came to be named after them, Yin and Yang became the common stock of all Chinese philosophy. The Taoist treatise Huai-nan-tzu (book of "Master Huai-nan") describes how the one "Primordial Breath" (yüan ch'i) split into the light ethereal Yang breath, which formed Heaven; and the heavier, cruder Yin breath, which formed Earth. The diversifications and interactions of Yin and Yang produced the Ten Thousand Beings. The warm breath of Yang accumulated to produce fire,
the essence of which formed the sun. The cold breath of Yin accumulated to
produce water, the essence of which became the moon. Yin and Yang are
often referred to as two "breaths" (ch'i).
Ch'i means air, breath, or vapor--originally the
vapor arising from cooking cereals. It also came to mean a cosmic energy. The
Primordial Breath is a name of the chaos (state of Unity) in which the
original life force is not yet diversified into the phases that the concepts
Yin and Yang describe. Every man has a portion of this primordial life force allotted to him at birth, and his task is not to dissipate it through the activity of his senses but to strengthen, control, and increase it in order to live out his full span of life. Another important
set of notions associated with the same school of Yin-Yang are the "five
agents" or "phases" (wu-hsing) or "powers" (wu-te):
water, fire, wood, metal, earth. They are also "breaths" (i.e., active
energies), the idea of which enabled the philosophers to construct a coherent
system of correspondences and participations linking all phenomena of the
macrocosm and the microcosm. Associated with spatial directions, seasons
of the year, colors, musical notes, animals, and other aspects of nature,
they also correspond, in the human body, to the five inner organs. The Taoist
techniques of longevity are grounded in these correspondences. The idea
behind such techniques was that of nourishing the inner organs with the
essences corresponding to their respective phases and during the season
dominated by the latter. Click
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