Ying and yang

            “The principle of Yin and Yang is a fundamental concept in Chinese philosophy and culture in general dating from the third century BCE or even earlier.”(Mark Cartwright, 2012) Ying-yang also called Tai-Chi symbol, which came from one of the oldest Chinese classic textbook I- Ching and the writer of this book was the first of the Three Sovereigns of ancient China who was Fu Xi or Fu Hsi. The book was mainly taking about a divination system that equal to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; it created the idea of balance and opposite things as well as the principle of change. The concept of yin and yang became popular based on the Chinese school of Yin-yang, which is the study of philosophy and cosmology in the 3rd century BCE. The principal proponent of the theory was the cosmologist Zou Yan or Tsou Yen who believed that life went through five phases (wuxing) - fire, water, metal, wood, earth - which continuously interchanged based on yin and yang. There are 64 symbolic hexagram represent Yin-Yang that are said to contain profound meanings applicable to daily life. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2013) Those hexagrams are formed by lines join together and on top of each other that combined into eight basic trigrams we call them Bagua. In China, people believe everything comes from nature and should be in balance such as the Ying-Yang symbol shows. In the universe, we have light and dark, sun and moon, woman and man…all of them are balance of each other
            “Yin is feminine, black, dark, north, water (transformation), passive, moon (weakness and the goddess Changxi), earth, cold, old, even numbers, valleys, poor, soft, and provides spirit to all things. Yin reaches its height of influence with the winter solstice. Yin may also represent by the tiger, the color orange and a broken line in the trigrams of the I Ching (or Book of Changes).   

Yang is masculine, white, light, south, fire (creativity), active, sun (strength and the god Xihe), heaven, warm, young, odd numbers, mountains, rich, hard, and provides form to all things. Yang reaches its height of influence with the summer solstice. Yang may also represent by the dragon, the color blue and a solid line trigram.” (Mark Cartwright, 2012)