The Rhythm of the Cosmos

Yin and yang give Taoism (and Chinese thought more broadly) a way of understanding change as the ceaseless, cyclical interaction of paired forces flowing from the Tao. The concept underlies Taoist cosmology, medicine, alchemy, and self-cultivation, and it is shared across the Taoist schools, including the Zhengyi, Quanzhen, and Shangqing traditions. Its vision of a world made of complementary rather than warring opposites contrasts with dualisms of good against evil, and it connects to the Taoist ideal of harmony and to the practice of wu wei, action attuned to the balance of forces.

The now-ubiquitous circular black-and-white taijitu symbol is considerably later than the concept itself: its familiar form is generally traced by scholars to Song dynasty Neo-Confucian diagrams, particularly Zhou Dunyi's eleventh-century Taijitu Shuo, an explanatory treatise on a cosmological diagram illustrating the generation of yin and yang from the Supreme Ultimate (taiji), rather than to any ancient Taoist or Zhou-era source. The popular assumption that the graphic symbol itself is of great antiquity is a common misconception historians of Chinese philosophy have worked to correct, even though the underlying paired concept of yin and yang it depicts is genuinely ancient.