Why Chinese Yin-Yang Theory is NOT What you Think

If you have taken any amount of interest in East Asian and especially Chinese culture, chances are you have seen this symbol. Whether that is in association with Taoist cosmology, with Tai Chi boxing, variations on it on the Korean and Tibetan flags, or you've just seen it on the ridiculously large number of Westerners who insist on tattooing it on themselves. And these Westerners normally portray the yin and yang symbol as being about balance. They think it's all about balance and inner peace. Inner peace. Dinner please. Dinner with peas. It's the sort of champagne spiritualism of our time. Get something just because it looks cool, don't fully understand it, and even make your own novelty version. Now interestingly, this guy from a channel called Tongue Saying recently uploaded this video on the yin yang concept, basically saying Westerners have got it all wrong and it's not about balance at all. Now I have a video on yin and yang from a long time ago, but it hasn't been updated in many years, and so I thought it would be interesting to do an updated version and also talk about some of the points raised in that yin and yang video from our Tongue Saying friend. So this is why Chinese yin yang theory is not what you think. So first of all, the symbol is not called yin and yang at all. It is actually called the Tai Chi Tu or the Tai Chi symbol, or if you want to completely translate it, the supreme ultimate symbol. The same Tai Chi as in Tai Chi boxing, the martial art or slow moving exercise that people practice in China. The symbol depicts a light and dark sided circle with a dot of the opposite color in the largest section of each side. The black side is known as yin and the white as yang. Now originally, yin meant the shady side of a hill and yang meant the sunny side of a hill. The two characters for yin and yang appear in the Oracle Bones, the oldest known Chinese writing that is preserved today, but they don't appear together. Thus, in the Oracle Bones, their meaning is just light and dark. The earliest known Chinese literary text to use the words yin and yang together is the Shi Jing, the classic of poetry in the poem Gong Liu. But there, yin and yang simply mean the shaded and sunny sides of hills. Having made the land broad and extensive, he measured the shadows upon the hills, examined their yin and yang and observed the flowing springs. So in a way, yin and yang in this poem means topography, okay? We're not deep and cosmological yet, although we do have the idea that yin is dark and yang is light. So when does yin and yang start relating to the energy of the universe? Well, we start to see written references to yin and yang as cosmic forces during the late Zhou Dynasty and Warring States period. In this book, Guo Yu Zhou Yu Shang, or Discourses of Zhou, which is also quoted in the Shi Ji, the Records of the Grand Historian, it discusses an earthquake during the reign of King You of Zhou, who reigned from 781 to 771 BC. The Zhou Dynasty was about to fall. The energy, or qi, of heaven and earth normally follows a set order. If it transgresses from that order, it is often caused by the population becoming immoral. When yang energy is suppressed and cannot expand, or when the yin energy is constrained and cannot rise or evaporate, thus an earthquake happens. This was written later than 700 BC, but it references an event of that time. Then we have the reference that is probably the most famous, and that comes from the Tao Te Ching's chapter 42, written by the Taoist sage Lao Tzu around 500 BC. The Tao gives rise to the one. The one gives rise to the two. The two give rise to the three. And from the three come the 10,000 things. 10,000 things contain both yin and yang, and that qi of yin and yang, through its interactions, creates harmony. It's funny that this is from chapter 42, since in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the meaning of life that that supercomputer Deep Thought spends years figuring out is 42. The answer to the great question is 42. Is that a reference to Taoism, or just a coincidence? I don't know. Anyway, there is potentially an earlier reference to yin and yang, and that is in the Book of Changes, or Yijing, which is an ancient book that was supposedly published around the 9th century BC, but actually may be much older. It uses eight trigrams, which generate 64 hexagrams, to describe the multitude of changes of states in the universe. But the trigrams are made up of lines. Later commentaries on the Yijing view a solid line as yang, and a broken line as yin. This isn't stated in the original text, but when you look at how Laozi described the universe, okay, the one becomes the two, which are the lines, then the two become three, which are trigrams, okay, because there's three lines in a trigram, and there's hexagrams and 10,000 things and whatever. It fits in perfectly. It's kind of like a computer where the Dao is the hardware. Then the two polarities that are produced are the most basic layer of code, okay? It's either one or the other, okay? A one or a zero. Binary code, which is the most basic layer of code in all computers today. And then out of that come the next layer of trigrams, okay? Maybe that's the next layer of programming languages. Maybe that's the operating system, all right? And then the next layer of hexagrams, right? Individual applications on the computer. And then from that, 10,000 things would emerge, all the things that you can create with a computer. And you know, the NES was 8-bit, kind of like 8 trigrams, and the Nintendo 64 was 64-bit, all right? Like the 64 hexagrams. It's the exact same math. Just an analogy. Don't think you're going to enlighten to the Dao by playing Nintendo. Anyway, Yin and Yang describe that first layer of polarity, the idea that something can only be one or the other, okay? Extreme hot or extreme cold. Light or dark. Male or female. Hard or soft, with no nuanced degrees of changes in between. So Yang would represent the hottest part of the day, the brightest sunlight, the sun itself, and life, while Yin would represent the dead of night, the moon, the cold, death, and many other things with those properties. So what is the relationship between Yin and Yang, and how have Westerners been misunderstanding it, like our friend from Tang Seng said in his video? So the main point that our friend argues in his video is that people in the West think that the symbol itself represents balance. Then he also argues that people think that these are two opposing forces, okay, the light and the dark. You don't know the power of the dark side. When actually, that's not really the case. Obviously, Yin and Yang are opposites, but they're not necessarily opposing each other. What the classical texts focus more on is representing the motion and changes that the universe goes through. I mean, that book that we talked about is literally called The Book of Changes, after all. So day leads to night. Night leads to day. Summer leads to winter, which again goes through spring back to summer. Life leads to death, and from that, decayed remains return to the earth and lead to new life. Kind of like the five elements in Chinese thought that also have a constructive cycle where each one leads into the next. But it isn't that all Westerners misunderstand this. Just listen to this clip from Star Wars. Life, death and decay that feeds new life. That is basically the changes between Yin and Yang described using the fictional concept of the force, which is based on qi from Chinese thought anyway. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together. In Chinese wisdom, there is a saying, When something reaches an extreme, it turns around, which describes this process perfectly. When you reach the full moon, it starts waning, disappears to nothing, but then from that extreme, it comes back. When you reach the hottest day of summer, it gradually gives way to fall and then to winter. But when you get to the coldest day of winter, gradually things turn around and spring arrives. The yin and yang are the extremes and all the other nuances in between. And the 10,000 things that come out of the changes between yin and yang are represented by the trigrams, hexagrams and other aspects of Chinese thought like the five elements. But in the West, I believe the idea of yin and yang was made popular by the spiritual community, people who do meditation, qigong and tai chi. In those practices, they do strive to achieve a balance between yin and yang. For example, people practice tai chi at six in the morning or at six in the evening because it is halfway between the strongest yang qi at midday and the strongest yin qi at midnight. The qi is balanced between yin and yang. They also strive to achieve that balance in their own body's energy. In Chinese medicine, you can get sick because your qi is out of balance. You have too much yin qi, for example, although you're not supposed to necessarily be in perfect balance all the time. At different parts of the day and in different seasons, you may have more yin, more yang, etc. So it's not quite as simple. But anyway, this could be why people in the West think that the symbol itself represents balance between opposing forces because the people promoting it come from a mind, body and spirit angle and are always talking about that, when actually the symbol in a general sense is more like harmony through a process of natural changes with sometimes certain states of perfect balance appearing at certain times through that process. It also doesn't focus on the hard opposition of yin and yang either, but how one rises and then falls and then the other rises and the other falls. The Tao Te Ching talks about a harmony achieved through the interactions between yin and yang, but not about them constantly being in balance. It's more like harmonious changes of the universe. Anyway, I love these kind of philosophical discussions and thank you to our friend on the Tang Sayings channel for starting the discussion. I'll put his video on screen now for you to check out. 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