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The earliest recordings of Yin and Yang are said to stem from the I Ching, which is believed to have come into existence sometime after 1000BCE. With a little knowledge and imagination, you can follow the path of excess of one side turning slowly into its polar opposite. Something bad in the end turns out to be a force of good By containing this seed, Yin and Yang have the ability to turn into one another when taken to an excess: These opposites create a whole, which is indivisible.Įach half of the circle, contains the seed of its opposing side, usually featured as a small round dot.

We can only appreciate light if dark exists, the same with male and female, love and hate, up and down, heat and cold, heaven and earth, near and far, hard and soft, active and passive… and so on. The ubiquitous black (Yin) and white (Yang) symbol shows us that the universe and everything in it consists of two polarities, a duality which defines all phenomena. This week, I will explore the concepts of Yin and Yang. Last week I briefly explained the concept of Wuji in a blog post. Those lines kind of blew my young and impressionable mind, as they now blow my middle aged and ever-so-slightly less impressionable mind today.īehind everything we perceive is something eternal, unfathomable, unnameable, hidden from us, yet always present. I remember reading the opening lines, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

I still have that copy of the Tao Te Ching, slightly bent corner and all… the Stephen Mitchell translation (the best one, in my opinion). (… that’s the case for my defence anyway!)

If books were damaged, we were allowed to have them – for free! I can’t tell you how many books I bent corners of, tore slightly, or defaced in some way so that I could have them (it was the beginning of my avid reading phase!) – hopefully I have paid for some of that bad Karma from stealing by the mere fact that taking home my first copy of the Tai Te Ching was potentially the embryonic cell which multiplied and developed to become the tai chi teacher you have before you today! My interest in Taoism sprang from a summer job I had when I was about 18 and worked in a book warehouse. The symbol is a familiar one, even to us in the West, I remember trying to draw it as I graffitied my school books as a child! Even though I had no clue what it meant… ‘something to do with peace!?’ was my best guess. Yin and Yang are fundamental to Chinese cosmology.