Taijitu

Yin and yang (阴阳, yīnyáng) is the first pair of concepts in the Chinese arts of divination, medicine, and placement — and probably the most misread. Most introductions begin with a list of opposites: dark and light, cold and hot. This page begins where the two characters actually begin: with landscape. The sun in China tracks across the southern sky, so every hill has a bright face and a shaded one, and every east-flowing river has one bank that faces the sun and one that turns from it. From that geographic pair, Chinese thought built a system in which nothing is one-sided, everything contains its opposite, and balance is a movement rather than a compromise. Below: the words’ literal meaning, the classic line that defines the system, what the famous symbol is actually saying, how the sorting works, and where the model still does work in the I Ching, Bazi, and feng shui.