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How a Separate Chinese Tradition Reached Its Own Twofold Cosmology

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How a Separate Chinese Tradition Reached Its Own Twofold Cosmology

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Richard Smith's academic study of the Yijing traces how yin and yang, the receptive and active principles of classical Chinese cosmology, developed within their own documented intellectual tradition, rooted in the Yijing's system of broken and unbroken lines centuries before any contact with Hellenistic astrology's own, separately developed masculine and feminine sign polarity.

That independent documented origin matters for a polarity entry because the two systems are genuinely separate historical developments that happen to organize a comparable twofold distinction, active paired with passive, expansive paired with receptive, rather than one tradition borrowing from or descending from the other, and Smith's study traces yin and yang's own evolution through Han dynasty correlative cosmology and beyond on its own documented terms.

An entry therefore records a Western chart factor's polarity using the vocabulary its own tradition actually uses, while naming honestly, where the comparison is made at all, that yin and yang belongs to a separate and independently documented Chinese cosmological system that Smith's study is the source for, not an interchangeable synonym imported from it.

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Polarities, Categories
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