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It’s important to remember, though, that the yin-yang is an important and very meaningful concept in Chinese philosophy, medicine, and religion. The Origin Story: Where Does the Yin-Yang Symbol Come from Like many other ancient symbols, the earliest origin of the yin-yang symbol is not 100 certain.
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They may also simply use it as a shorthand for the symbol taijitu itself, from tattoos to cocktails to cat pictures. Westerners may use yin-yang in discussing concepts of balance and harmony in their practice-or the hippy-ish, New-Age-y, and yoga-mom appropriation of-Eastern philosophical or medicinal traditions such as Tai Chi, feng shui, or acupuncture. We are ying and yang standing two different generationsĮverything in life is a yin-yang. But what does it actually mean Modern people believe it represents the union of opposites, or even more specifically the sexual union between male and female. In contemporary English, yin-yang (or yin and yang) is casually used to describe any two opposites seen to balance each other out or to characterize life’s ups and downs.Īlways takes a toll on me talking to my uncle especially when he goes “Sometimes I feel like you’re my only friend” because honestly he is mine too. What about the Yin-Yang symbol Again, examining Chinas ancient books, one finds that the symbol of Yin-Yang is indeed an important cultural symbol. Like other religious and astrological emoji such the om symbol, the yin-yang emoji appears as white on a purple square ☯. Unicode 1.0 approved the yin-yang symbol for computers in 1993 and added it to its Emoji 1.0 set in 2015. The term yin-yang is first found in English in the 1850s, and it spread in the 20th century especially thanks to interest in Eastern philosophy, non-Western medicine, and martial arts. In the symbol, yin is represented by the color black and yang, white. their interrelationship came to be depicted in the taijitu, or “Diagram of the Great Ultimate”-better known by Westerns as the yin-yang symbol, first appearing in the 1000s CE and attributed to the philosopher Zhou Dunyi. (Do we detect some sexism, Zou Yan?) The balance of yin and yang were seen to influence health and order within an individual, society, and the entire universe.Īnd. It is present in even numbers, in valleys and streams, and is represented by the. Yang (“sun” or “male”) represents light, masculinity, activity, and the heavens. Yin is a symbol of earth, femaleness, darkness, passivity, and absorption. Yin, Chinese for “female” or “moon,” represents darkness, femininity, passivity, and the earth. The school focused around the idea that all life revolved around five basic elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), governed by the forces of yin and yang, part of the qi, or vital life force, of the cosmos. Sometime between roughly 700–400 BCE, Y in-yang was the name of a school of teaching, with chief thinker: alchemist named Zou Yan. One of the first mentions of yin-yang for the concept of cosmic harmony comes from a verse in the Shih Ching, a 6th-century BCE collection of poems compiled by Confucius. The concepts of yin and yang have been around since at least the 1300s BCE, when they were found referenced in inscriptions related to Chinese divination of the weather.
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