Resources / Taoist cosmology
Taijitu Polarity Instrument
Yin and yang are not two things but two phases of one turning. Set the taijitu to a station of the day, the year or the breath and read which half is rising, which is full, and where the seed of its opposite already lies.
The figure is drawn south-up, as Chinese diagrams are. The Four Images and their doubling into the Eight Trigrams follow Shao Yong as Zhu Xi set him out; the phase beside each Image is one interpretive mapping among several.
Daily Cycle · station 1 of 4
Midnight
Greater Yin, maximum yin; seed of yang
太陰
- Image
- Greater Yin太陰 Tàiyīn
- Station
- MidnightNorth on the dial
- Tendency
- Maximum yin; seed of yang
- At this station
- Yang within yin
The night is deepest, yet the condition for return has begun.
Si xiang 四象
The Four Images
Lines are drawn bottom first. The two mixed figures are named as Shao Yong and Zhu Xi derive them, each Image the lower pair of lines of the trigrams that grow from it; some modern presentations name them the other way round. The dial sets the Images at their seasons by name, as the Han correlations do, not by their place on Shao Yong's circle: there the figure called Lesser Yang here falls in the west, beneath Xun and Kan, and Lesser Yin in the east, beneath Li and Zhen. The phase beside each Image (Wood, Fire, Metal, Water, with Earth at the centre) is one interpretive mapping, not a fixed doctrine.
Taiji to the Eight Trigrams
Each level doubles the one beneath it
Taiji太極
Yang陽
Yin陰
1乾Qián乾Heaven2兌Duì兌Lake3離Lí離Fire4震Zhèn震Thunder5巽Xùn巽Wind6坎Kǎn坎Water7艮Gèn艮Mountain8坤Kūn坤EarthEach cell is light where its newest line is yang and dark where it is yin. The trigrams open in the Bagua instrument.
The tradition
Yin and yang began as the shaded and the sunlit side of a hill. By the late Warring States they had become a pair of complementary tendencies, and the Xici commentary to the Yijing could say that one yin and one yang is called the Dao. Nothing is yin or yang in itself: a thing is yin in relation to something more yang, and any condition pressed to its fullness turns toward the other.
The Xici also gives a sequence: Taiji gives birth to the two modes, the two modes to the Four Images, the Four Images to the Eight Trigrams. Shao Yong (1011–1077) read it as a doubling of lines, and Zhu Xi set his reading out in diagrams; the Four Images on this dial are named as they name them. The curving figure with an eye in each half is later than the ideas it pictures: its earliest printed forms date from the late fourteenth century, and it took its familiar shape in the Ming. Zhou Dunyi's Song Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate is a different figure, a column of five tiers whose second is drawn in concentric half-rings of light and dark.
Reading the instrument
- South is at the top, as in Chinese diagrams, so east lies on the left. The light half rises up the eastern side from the foot to the crown; the dark half descends the western side.
- The four stations carry the Four Images. The daily, seasonal and breath cycles share them: changing cycle keeps the same Image, so midnight becomes winter and then the resting emptiness of the breath.
- Each Image is a pair of lines read from the bottom up, yang an unbroken stroke and yin a broken one. Greater Yang, two yang lines, stands at the crown; Greater Yin at the foot.
- At the two fullnesses the cycle is read in an eye: at noon the dark eye in the light head, yin already present within yang; at midnight the light eye in the dark head.
- Tap a half or an eye of the figure, or use the buttons beside it, to read that field. Turn steps round the cycle every few seconds until it is paused.
- Save reading keeps the station, field and pair in My Archive, with a link that reopens them; a written reflection is kept the same way.
Where it descends from
- Yijing, with the Xici zhuan (Great Commentary)
- One yin and one yang is called the Dao (part A, chapter 5); Taiji, the two modes, the Four Images and the Eight Trigrams (part A, chapter 11).
- Huangdi Neijing Suwen
- The medical classic's great treatise on yin and yang (chapter 5): their mutual rooting, and the turn of each into the other at its extreme.
- Shao Yong, Huangji jingshi
- The Song numerological cosmology behind the doubling of lines from Taiji to the trigrams.
- Zhu Xi, Zhouyi benyi and Yixue qimeng
- Zhu Xi's diagrams of the Earlier Heaven sequence, which name the Four Images as the dial does.
- François Louis, "The Genesis of an Icon: The Taiji Diagram's Early History" (2003)
- On the curving figure's late appearance and its early history.
What this does not claim
The instrument draws a symbol and arranges traditional readings of it; it measures nothing and predicts nothing. Yin and yang are relational, so the tendencies listed for each half are typical readings rather than definitions, and the three cycles are models for study. The naming of the two mixed Images follows Shao Yong and Zhu Xi; some modern sources reverse it. The dial sets the Images at their seasons by name, as the Han correlations do: on Shao Yong's own circle the figure named Lesser Yang here lies in the west, beneath Xun and Kan, not at dawn in the east. The pairing of the Images with Wood, Fire, Metal and Water is one interpretive scheme: the medical and cosmological texts set the phases against yin and yang in more than one way.
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