Divinity Atlas
The Yin-Yang Symbol Is Three Centuries Younger Than Its Own Older Chart
The Taijitu, the familiar black-and-white swirl marking yin and yang, carries a debunked fact in this atlas's own record: the diagram is routinely presented as an ancient Chinese symbol, and it is not.
An Old Idea, a Late Picture
Yin and yang as complementary and alternating principles are argued in Warring States texts and in the commentaries attached to the Book of Changes, centuries before any diagram existed for them. Zhou Dunyi's eleventh-century Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Polarity gave the concept a famous chart, but the atlas records that his figure is a stack of concentric bands and does not look like the familiar swirl at all. The interlocking teardrop diagram, each half carrying a dot of its opposite, first appears, by the atlas's own record, in Zhao Huiqian's Liushu benyi in the 1370s, and its use as a general emblem of Taoism, and its later career on flags and album covers, is more recent still.
The Idea Is Ancient. The Picture Is Late Medieval.
The atlas states the finding plainly: the swirling black-and-white diagram is routinely presented as an ancient Chinese symbol, and it is not. The idea it draws is far older than the picture; the picture itself is late medieval, arriving a full three centuries after Zhou Dunyi's own, quite different, chart of the same concept.
Where To Read More
- TaijituDiagramThe symbol itself, debunked as an ancient artifact; the idea predates the picture by centuries