Yin and yang
Yin and Yang ( Chinese 陰陽 / 阴阳 , Pinyin yīn yáng ) are two terms used in Chinese philosophy , especially Daoism . They stand for polar opposing and yet related dual forces or principles that do not fight but complement one another . A widespread symbol of the cosmic principle is the Taijitu ☯, in which the white Yang (light, high, hard, hot, masculine, positive, active, moving) and the black Yin (dark, soft, moist, cold, feminine, negative , passive, calm) are shown opposite.
Word meaning and earliest evidence
The original meaning of the two characters is not certain. In Shuowen jiezi , 陰 (yīn) means "dark", "south bank of a river" or "south side of the valleys" and "north slope of a mountain" (the character is made up of the characters for "hill" and "shadow"); all uses point to the basic meaning "shady, shady place". 陽 (yáng) means "sunny hill", "south side of the mountains" or "north side of the valleys" (the character is made up of the characters for "hills" and "rays of the sun"). These meanings can also be applied to the oldest known occurrences of the signs yin and yang on oracle bones (around 16th – 11th centuries BC).
The signs can also be found in the Yijing ("Book of Changes"), which is dated to the time of the western Zhou dynasty (around 1045–770 BC). They only have everyday meaning there. The interpretation of the "Book of Changes" with the help of a trained Yin-Yang teaching is much younger than Yijing. In the Daoist Zhuangzi , the development of the two words can be read from everyday use through a more comprehensive understanding as polar natural forces to Yin and Yang as the origin of all things.
There are also attempts to understand the basic meaning of the signs as “the masculine” and “the feminine”. The Shijing (“Book of Songs”) provides evidence of the popular, non-philosophical use of symbols .
Philosophical meaning
Simple attempts at paraphrasing
Defining the two terms yin and yang exactly is difficult, as they are used for a wide variety of things in classical literature and there is no precise definition either.
A general definition is provided by Roger T. Ames.
"Yin and Yang are terms used to express a contrastive relationship that obtains between two or more things."
"Yin and Yang are terms used to express an opposing relationship between two or more things."
The simplest way of describing the two terms is when they were first mentioned in history, in the I Ching (Book of Changes). Yang and Yin are associated with the adjectives strong and weak, equal and unequal, as well as male and female. This later generalized to the idea that yin and yang were the terms for the feminine and masculine and then more generally for polarity per se.
To limit oneself to the aspect of meaning of femininity and masculinity alone does not go far enough, since Yin and Yang can be used for many more pairs of terms. Rather, both terms stand for a pair of opposites that correspond to the terms “giving” (also “productive” and “convex”) and “receiving” (also “concave”) or “active” and “passive”. Yin then stands for passive and Yang for active.
The relationship between yin and yang cannot be compared with the opposition of good and evil in the sense of a struggle of light against darkness: “It is rather a relative opposition of a rhythmic nature that exists between two rival but related groups that are like Gender associations are complementary and, like these, detach themselves at work and alternately come to the fore. "
Yin and Yang as principles of change and correlation
Yin and Yang describe "opposites" in their mutual relationship as a whole, an eternal cycle. Therefore they can be used to explain processes of change and to represent the mutual limitation and recurrence of things.
Yin and Yang rise and fall alternately. After a high phase of Yang, a decrease in Yang and an increase in Yin and vice versa follow
“The primal principle moves and creates Yang. When the movement comes to an end, it becomes still, and that stillness creates yin. When this silence reaches its end, it starts moving again. So we alternate now movement, now rest. Together they form the basis from which yin and yang arise through separation and on which the two modes rest. "
This idea is part of a popular ethics of average measure, or one intended for the people: So the people should not act excessively in good times and z. B. store a good harvest for bad times. In bad times hope should be awakened among the people that, according to the yin-yang doctrine, good times will necessarily follow again after these bad times.
In addition to these instructions according to ancient astronomers, the change in yin and yang also represents the reason why natural events happen the way they happen, but also why these natural events lead to certain social behavior. So yin and yang and their change are both the reason for the change of the seasons and for the behavior of people who align themselves with the change of the seasons.
Yin and Yang cannot rise or fall at the same time. As yang increases, yin decreases and vice versa.
Yin and Yang in Chinese Philosophy
In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang were known right from the start, but played no significant role. In the Confucian classics, the two characters are only found in Xunzi (Chapters 9 and 17). In later times they took on the central role of a universal pair of principles in individual philosophical schools , first in the 3rd century BC. BC with Zou Yan, who is considered to be the founder of the school of naturalists or the Yin-Yang school (Yinyangjia, 陰陽家), and then especially in Neoconfucianism .
Zou Yan
There is only a brief overview of the writings of Zou Yan (305–240 BC), who lived during the time of the Hundred Schools , in the Shiji (Historical Annals) of Sima Qian , the first great universal history of China. In it, Sima describes Zou Yan's influence on China's first emperor Qin Shihuangdi , who reunited the Warring States.
Zou Yan has linked the already existing but not yet fully elaborated ideas of yin and yang and the five elements and applied them to a wide variety of fields of knowledge such as astronomy, astrology, geography, history and politics.
In geography, Zou Yan tried to create a complete model of the world. According to his ideas, the world consists of nine continents surrounded by water, so that neither humans nor animals can move between the continents. These nine continents are in turn divided into nine smaller continents, one of which corresponds to the “Middle Kingdom”, China.
Dong Zhongshu
Dong Zhongshu is an important thinker of the early Han period who understood Yin and Yang as cosmological principles and tried to integrate them into his New Confucian system of thought. His work is much better documented than that of Zou Yan, as his book Chunqiu fanlu (Lush dew of the spring and autumn annals) has been preserved. This work represents both an interpretation of the spring and autumn annals and the accompanying Gongyang commentary, as well as a transcription of Dong Zhongshu's own theories.
Dong Zhongshu also uses the yin-yang teaching as a cosmological explanatory principle. In Chunqiu fanlu he works out his doctrine of the relationship between heaven, earth and man. His endeavor to unite as many elements of the philosophical directions as possible in his teaching is evident in his statement that the universe is based on ten components: heaven, earth, yin, yang, the five elements and man.
In Dong Zhongshu's mind man is a partner of heaven and reacts to it, just as heaven in turn reacts to good and bad deeds of man. In particular, the respective ruler of the Chinese empire has a strong influence on the reactions of heaven. These can express themselves as catastrophes and storms if the ruler does not behave properly, but also positively z. B. in the form of a good harvest, if he makes the right decisions.
Yin and Yang in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Yin and Yang also play an important role in traditional Chinese medicine ( TCM ). The term bagang ( 八 綱 / 八 纲 , bā gāng - "eight guiding criteria") describes eight diagnostic categories, which also include yin and yang.
| Yin | Yang |
| Empty | Abundance |
| Inside | Outside |
| cold | heat |
Yin Yang symbol
The Yin-Yang symbol, in Chinese Taijitu ( 太極 圖 / 太极 图 , Tàijítú - "literal symbol of the very great extreme / highest"), has only been attested in China since the 11th century. In the first centuries of its use it took various forms; often they were concentric circles. The form ( ) that is common today did not emerge until the Ming Dynasty . In the two characters of yin and yang, a clustering cloud and a rising sun can be seen.
Outwardly similar symbols were used in Europe in late antiquity in the Roman army, but there is no historical or content-related connection with the Chinese symbol and its meaning and use.
In the Unicode character encoding standard , the Yin and Yang symbol is assigned the code U+262F(decimal 9775, UTF 8 e298af ) in the Unicode block Various symbols . In HTML it is ☯coded with . The character appears as ☯.
See also
- Wuji
- Taiji
- Pangu
- Qi
- Taijiquan
- Yab-yum
- dialectic
- Ommyōdō (Japanese Yin-Yang teaching)
- Chang'e (Chang'e and Houyi represent the Yin and Yang)
literature
- Marcel Granet : Chinese thinking. Content - form - character . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1980, pp. 86-109, ISBN 3-423-04362-8 (classic illustration, first published in 1934)
- Fung Yu-Lan : History of Chinese Philosophy. Volume 1: The Period of the Philosophers (from the Beginnings to Circa 100 BC) . Princeton Univ. Pr., Princeton, NJ, 1983, pp. 159-169. (to the Yin-Yang school)
- Wing-Tsit Chan: Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy . Princeton Univ. Pr., Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 244-250.
- Gudula Linck : Yin and Yang: The search for wholeness in Chinese thinking . CH Beck, 3rd edition February 21, 2006
Web links
- Robin R. Wang: Entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Remarks
- ↑ Hans Steininger : The Far Eastern understanding of education and its decline in modern times. In: Winfried Böhm , Martin Lindauer (ed.): “Not much knowledge saturates the soul”. Knowledge, recognition, education, training today (= 3rd symposium of the University of Würzburg. ) Ernst Klett, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-12-984580-1 , pp. 107–128, here: p. 108.
- ↑ Shuowen, 15, ? 部 : 陰 ： 闇 也。 水 之 南 、 山 之 北 也。 從 ? 侌 聲。
- ↑ Zhuangzi, III, 26,1: 陰陽 錯 行 ， 則 天地 大 絯 ("When Yin and Yang mix, heaven and earth panic."); I, 21,4: 至陰 肅 肅 ， 至 陽 赫赫 ； 肅 肅 出乎 天 ， 赫赫 發 乎 地 ； 兩者 交通 成 和 而 物 物 生 焉 ， 或 為之 紀 而 莫 見其 形 (“The highest Yin is cold, the highest yang is hot. / Cold arises from heaven, heat flows from the earth. / If both penetrate each other and achieve harmony, / then all things arise from it. ") Cf. Tsung-Tung Chang : Metaphysics, Knowledge and Practical Philosophy in Chung-Tzu . Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 78-83.
- ↑ Roger T. Ames: Yin and Yang . In: Antonio S. Cua, (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, New York 2003, p. 846.
- ↑ Köster, Hermann (1958), Symbolik des Chinesischen Universismus, Stuttgart, p. 29.
- ↑ Hans Steininger (1988).
- ↑ Granet, Marcel (1971), Chinese Thinking, 2nd ed., Munich, p. 107.
- ↑ Alfred Forke: The world of thought of the Chinese culture . Munich 1927, p. 113.
- ↑ Marcel Granet: The Chinese Thinking , 2nd edition, Munich 1971, p. 101.
- ^ Fung Yu-Lan: A Short History of Chinese Philosophy , New York 1966, p. 25.
- ↑ Wing-Tsit Chan Source Book in Chinese Philosophy . Princeton Univ. Pr., Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 244f.
- ^ Fung Yu-Lan: A Short History of Chinese Philosophy , New York 1966, p. 160.
- ↑ Jacques Gernet: The Chinese World . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 140.
- ↑ Wolfgang Bauer: History of Chinese Philosophy - Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism . Munich 2001, p. 123.
- ↑ Isabelle Robinet: Taiji do . In: The Encyclopedia of Taoism , Fabrizio Pregadio (Ed.), Abingdon 2008, pp. 934-936.
- ↑ Forke, Alfred (1927), The Thoughts of the Chinese Culture Circle, Munich, p. 106.