Yin/Yang, later development?

[bruce_g]

I get a chuckle every time I hear that yin/yang was a later development in Yijing or Chinese philosophy, as it is the difference which is distinguished earliest in life.

Observe an Elementary School playground during recess. The youngest of the group intermingle together. The first distinguishable difference is noticed in those who are slightly older: that between boys and girls. Boys gather with boys and girls with girls.

By Middle School specialties are developed even more. The brainy nerds form groups, which subdivide into yet further specialties. Bullies form gangs based on ethnic background. Musicians split between formal/classical groups and rock bands. Jocks divide and gather based on their particular athletic interests.

By High School the difference between the sexes begin to reconcile, as social activities become more available to again intermingle on a one-on-one relational basis.

Perhaps the terms “yin/yang” didn’t evolve until later times in Yijing’s history, but the first words spoken in the delivery room, whether a person or farm animal is being born, is “It’s a boy!!” or “It’s a girl!!”

Sometimes I think we tend to over intellectualize the obvious.

 

[stevev]

Yeah, seems a bit odd to me ...

that you can start with the more complex structures and work back to the simpler ones. I've been seeing that theme in a couple of places too. Maybe we're just missing the unrecorded or lost history ?

 

[bruce_g]

that you can start with the more complex structures and work back to the simpler ones. I've been seeing that theme in a couple of places too. Maybe we're just missing the unrecorded or lost history ?

Or maybe it was so obvious that it wasn’t even written about. The Yin/Yang symbol came about from someone’s creative contemplation, but the fundamental dichotomy is just too obvious to miss or not consider as the building blocks of all the rest.

The same idea bugs me about the development of trigrams evolving only after hexagrams. That to me is entirely illogical. Just as is the idea of meaningful written words predating meaningful pictures. The academics' assertions seem backwards and unnatural to me.

 

[stevev]

That's the theme I'm seeing

The same idea bugs me about the development of trigrams evolving only after hexagrams.

A bit counter-intuitive, but why would this theme persist ?

It would seem obvious to work from the simple to the complex, but what do they say about obvious ?

Maybe it’s just those inscrutable Chinese minds again ?

 

[bruce_g]

Well, it isn’t the Chinese minds who are teaching these things necessarily.

About the obvious, perhaps they say nothing.

 

[Sparhawk]

The academics' assertions seem backwards and unnatural to me.

Bruce, you are a romantic fellow... There; go with your heart.



L

 

[heylise]

I have the same problem with "zero". Read somewhere that someone, or even a culture, had "found that out" sometime rather late in history. And it was not about using zero in a decimal system, it was the plain and simple symbol for 'nothing'. As if before that time nobody had any concept of 'nothing'. And no word for it.

Strange...

 

[bruce_g]

I have the same problem with "zero". Read somewhere that someone, or even a culture, had "found that out" sometime rather late in history. And it was not about using zero in a decimal system, it was the plain and simple symbol for 'nothing'. As if before that time nobody had any concept of 'nothing'. And no word for it.

Strange...

Exactly!

 

[Sparhawk]

-1 < 0 < 1

Regarding "Zero", I remember a math teacher who would drill into our brains that between "1" and "-1" there are infinite numbers. We would question him but, at the time, couldn't grasp the meaning of the statement. At some point between infinite decimal points on the natural numbers' side and the infinite decimal points on the negative side lies "zero"... BTW, it was the ancient Indian civilization came up first with the concept of zero.

L

 

[frank_r]

And its the same with the King wen sequence, the later heaven was before the Fu Shi early Heaven sequence, the same again, the most logical one was later in history.

I also thought about it today, and one of my thoughts was also maybe by finding the more simple solution we get more in contact with the essence of life and we can also go beyond old borders. How more we know about life how older we can get, without forgetting the essence.

 

[ewald]

I get a chuckle every time I hear that yin/yang was a later development in Yijing or Chinese philosophy, as it is the difference which is distinguished earliest in life.

Yet in Western culture, a yin/yang dichotomy did not develop.

 

[bruce_g]

Yet in Western culture, a yin/yang dichotomy did not develop.

I'd find that hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

 

[bruce_g]

I'm sure that before numbers were made into a sequential order, folks still knew when their cupboard was bare or their womb was empty. They knew zero; they perhaps just hadn't yet given it a name. Back then, they may have used used sign language, or grunts.

 

[bruce_g]

Jesus, little kids know this stuff.

 

[heylise]

My dog knows what zero is. He cannot use it to multiplicate, but he knows very well the difference full bowl and empty bowl, or yes-cookie no-cookie. Even light and dark, the essence of yin and yang, makes sense to him. Light-good or light-action, dark-mystery or dark-rest.

 

[martin]

Zero

I suppose that although people of course knew about zero (nothing, naught, empty, etcetera) in the past they didn't see it as a number like 1, 2, 3.
I guess it belonged to a different category for them. Not sure how to explain it, but 1 or 2 or 3 apples is fundamentally different from zero apples. It's the difference between the existence of apples and their nonexistence. To be or not to be ..

 

[bruce_g]

Martin, that sounds accurate. A system can be constructed along any point of development, but the system doesn’t “make” anything besides a system. In many cases, it’s doesn’t even create a greater awareness of the principles involved. In many cases, it actually moves awareness away from those underlying principles.

What started this going in my head this morning, was that I thought how often it is that we become so excited over coming to an understanding of a Gua or line, but if we communicate that revelation to most “simple folk”, they nod their head as though to say, “So?” Our enthusiasm toward our specialty creates the idea that our specialty is solely responsible for the inception of the idea; as though no-one could understand the fundaments of Yin/Yang without having first read Chinese philosophy. That’s pretty scary to think of. It means we live in our own sealed bubble, out of touch with the world at large.

It seems a thoughtful man spends half of his life stripping away all he has learned, so that when ripe with age he may return to what he knew as a newborn child.

The Yi would exist even if it was never written. These truths were never invented by anyone, and the only real discovery is that which is inherent in ones self.

 

[martin]

Discover and rediscover. The answers of yesterday are dead.
What is yin or yang? I don't know, look again ..

 

[stevev]

Does formal school teach anything of value ?

It seems a thoughtful man spends half of his life stripping away all he has learned, so that when ripe with age he may return to what he knew as a newborn child.

To me it's a matter of just unlearning the maths and science of how to butcher the earth for personal profit and gratification. Apparently our society regards this as the only important thing to learn, then you can just go to church and pray for the rest.

Apart from language, history, geography, law, medicine and physical education, just what has the education system given us ?

 

[ewald]

Everyone may have had an implicit concept of "zero" before the symbol was invented. But making that concept explicit, allowed for using zero in new ways. Everyone knew what "nothing" is, but writing the number "100" and making calculations with it, was a whole new thing back then.

Similarly, everyone knew and knows implicitly what a dichotomy is. But explicitly expressing that with the words "yin" and "yang," was a new thing back then, that allowed for handling and naming concepts in a new way.

Just as a modern day computer programmer handles dichotomies expressed by the binary numbers "0" and "1" without knowing about "yin" and "yang," were the composers of the Zhouyi able to express hexagrams with broken and unbroken lines without knowing about "yin/yang."

I see yin/yang as concepts that are pretty typical to Chinese language. They allow for easy naming of dichotomies. You can for instance speak about the yin and the yang acupuncture meridians of the body, and thus express their dichotomous relationship. That wouldn't have been expressed by talking about meridians at the inner side and outer side of the arms and legs, or, as in the Western names for the meridians, by naming them according to the organ they are related to.

So I see no reason that "yin/yang" couldn't have been invented after the composition of the Zhouyi and its hexagrams. It is very likely that the Zhouyi/Yijing was the very inspiration for "yin/yang," but "yin/yang" is more explicit than what's expressed regarding dichotomies in the Zhouyi.

 

[hilary]

Of course male/female has been around for a bit. The earthworm might have a bit of a problem with the concept, but that's about it. But who said male/female was equivalent to yang/yin?

Margaret Pearson - yes, an academic! (pause for boos and hisses) - taught me to get free of this assumption and see what was left. Quoting from the webinar transcript:
"The character for ‘female’ does not appear in the character, neither the ancient
character nor the modern character, it’s the one for topography. But I do think it’s
understandable that it got conflated with maternal imagery, because it can also
be a verb meaning to do good to someone, or there’s a line in the Classic of History
that says heaven yins the people, which Karlgren translates as ‘heaven shelters the
people’."

Hm - the section on yin is actually one of the free online excerpts you can watch here. Margaret sent me photographs of trees in sunlight by way of illustration. But I regretfully have to report that the trees were near Cambridge University, and may therefore be suspect, intellectual trees.

 

[denis_m]

...A system can be constructed along any point of development, but the system doesn’t “make” anything besides a system. In many cases, it’s doesn’t even create a greater awareness of the principles involved. In many cases, it actually moves awareness away from those underlying principles...often we become so excited over coming to an understanding of a Gua or line, but if we communicate that revelation to most “simple folk”, they nod their head as though to say, “So?” Our enthusiasm toward our specialty creates the idea that our specialty is solely responsible for the inception of the idea; as though no-one could understand the fundaments of Yin/Yang without having first read Chinese philosophy.

Stevev really hit the nail on the head about the problem with expert knowledge not caring about the damage it does. Is expert knowledge on the I CHING also suspect? It revolves around itself, and is powerless to undo what is wrought by harmful expertise. At least it does no harm! And it's not in the business of self-congratulation. Its practitioners often question themselves.

I think the system of the I CHING does what the wise "simple folk" do---observe all the interlocking polarities and try to achieve a balance. There are many ways to fritter away one's mind wholesale. At least the I CHING has us reflecting about life situations as our hobby.

There are ways to go deeper into polarities, and hold bigger swaths of life-experience in the heart. Emotions are often pushing and pulling against each other, often at the cost of narrowing down our focus. Emotions are referential to the world, just as intellectual concepts are. In order for them to serve us and show us more, we have to navigate the polarities.

Now I'm jumping to the question of "yin and yang coming later":
As categories, "yin and yang" did come later than Qian and Kun. You can associate Kun with "fabric" or "multitude" or "land." But those associations don't really fit with yin. Kun gives more of an earth-mother feeling than yin does.
Yin can be described as coalescing or clumping together. [2.1, Wenyan: "Yin is first beginning to congeal."] It would sound strange to say Kun is beginning to congeal.
Yin is a more generalized and abstract category than Kun.
(All of yin's basic characteristics are also implied in the original text.)
Yin falls on the side of concreteness, yang on the side of potentiality.
When matter and mind are contrasted, yin falls on the side of matter.
However, when you walk past a graveyard at night, that's a yin feeling. That's because yin is associated with the underworld and its disembodied beings, while yang is associated with the daylight world, with its living breathing beings. So sometimes the yin we thought was concrete turns out to be less concrete than yang. What's going on here?
Despite such quirkish characteristics of yin and yang, they seem to hang together fairly well as general concepts. They point to something we can sink our teeth into. There are often intriguing reasons why something belongs with yin or yang---reasons having to do with the life-force of a thing.
Helmut Wilhelm in HEAVEN, EARTH AND MAN IN THE BOOK OF CHANGES says that there are dualities in the I CHING to which yin and yang are not applicable. For instance, image vs. number. So evidently the concepts of yin and yang are fastidious as to what kind of polarities they will cover. And it's not always about sex!

 

[bruce_g]

You can contemplate Yin to infinity. You can stretch, add, philosophize and elaborate upon it. But, Hilary, you (or Margaret) can not tell me Yin is not female at its core. Whether you illustrate it with sun/shade in the trees or the grounding of an electrical circuit, it doesn’t move the fundamental idea away from female. The female anatomy says more about Yin than all the words you can find to explain it.

Denis says it more poetically:
“There are ways to go deeper into polarities, and hold bigger swaths of life-experience in the heart. Emotions are often pushing and pulling against each other, often at the cost of narrowing down our focus. Emotions are referential to the world, just as intellectual concepts are. In order for them to serve us and show us more, we have to navigate the polarities.”

Mind/body, day/night, positive/negative, intellect/emotion, these were not conceived by man, intellectual or otherwise. They were observed as phenomenon, and then ‘metaphor-ized’ to be used as images to understand our being. But if our being never existed, the laws of nature with Yin/Yang would go on as though nothing at all were missing. And if nothing existed but our being, we’d find it equally there.

Mind you, I’ve never said these things are worthless to contemplate or elaborate upon to mine a sense of meaning from. I said: “I get a chuckle every time I hear that yin/yang was a later development in Yijing or Chinese philosophy.” I qualified that by referring to its essential qualities, which are obvious even to common folks.

 

[bruce_g]

I’ve decided to take a short but needed break. Need to decompress and chill a bit, find back my own Yin and stop talking about it so much.

 

[stevev]

As categories, "yin and yang" did come later than Qian and Kun.

Yin is a more generalized and abstract category than Kun.

Whether Yin and Yang did come later than Qian and Kun doesn’t really matter to me anymore, the system as a whole works beautifully, they were destined to be together, here and now.

As far as I’m concerned the IChing is first a categorisation system, then a system of divining, or identifying the ‘correct‘ element of the set, in the context of some thought.

Either

The ancient sages made the Book of Changes thus:

Or

The modern sages changed the Book of Changes thus:

“To classify the myriad things and to give aid to the intelligent agencies working secretly.”

Again it doesn’t matter to me which one is true.

The Bits represent abstract and more logical categories, and the Hexagrams represent specific, obviously not infinite, and more mystical categories.

Nobody seems to argue that the Yin and Yang category elements are either opposites or complements depending on the context in which they are used.

But there does seems to be a fair bit of opposition to the idea that both Yin and Yang represent generalised associations, although there is nearly unanimous support for Yin being associated with Zero and Yang being associated with One. Logically Zero is associated with False, and One is an Odd number.

The problems start when you try to align gender, morality & rank. But the truth is that in general Christians & Muslims do think Men are Superior and Good, and Feminists do think Women are Superior and Good, and to some degree we are all biased. Now is either correct, I don’t know, it is imperfect thought but we all suffer from it. One of the beauties of the IChing is that it gives us poor imperfect fools a space on which to play with our delusions and change.

Oh no, what is the bloody topic ?

11.1.2.6 -> 52 (Peace and Meditation)

 

[Sparhawk]

The female anatomy says more about Yin than all the words you can find to explain it.

Hmmm, perhaps by its beauty and capacity to procreate and hold a distinct, other than self, life inside. But if the imagery for Yin/Female is based upon the concept of "concave", the female body can be seen as more "convex" than not. Furthermore, the image of a near term pregnancy can be interpreted as the most "convex" state a human body can be in (other than Butch and his huge beer belly, that is...)

Other than the parentesis above, I'm serious. Judgements and preconceptions are tricky, shapeshifting animals. That is the essence of the Yi, after all. People that know me for a while will appreciate the disclaimer...

L

 

[heylise]

Nothing wrong with science or scientists, but they have a tendency to see a partial truth as the whole truth. In that respect they can shake hands with religion. And that is where some people want to 'boo and hiss'.

We are not talking about truth versus not-true, but about a system versus life. Yin and yang have become a system, but they have their roots in life. The characters are the bright and shady side of a mountain or river. That is as old as humanity. Making very simple categories is also as old as humanity, works even in animals. Good for me - bad for me. Good to eat - bad for stomach. Warm - cold. Or: sun - shade.

Of course it did not start as a system which included everything, like yin and yang seems to do for many. It is possible to give everything a label, either yin or yang, or a bit yinny.. or "good yang", "bad yang". Then it has become a true system. But still it gets its life and its real meaning from the living world. With sunshine and shade and clarity and mystery.

That is why some fight for those roots, without them the system loses its base. Even when they are very "unscientific".

LiSe

 

[hilary]

the female body can be seen as more "convex" than not

ROFL!!!

(With emphasis on the rolling part, you understand.)

Margaret didn't try to tell anyone yin didn't naturally connect with the feminine - see that excerpt I mentioned. Just that the idea doesn't come from and isn't limited to femininity. The point is, that we can either assert that things are just plain obvious, or we can explore and question. I think there is plenty of room and need for both approaches.

Academia is a place for exploring and questioning, with (at its best) a complete refusal to accept 'obvious' and 'goes without saying' and 'everyone knows'. Instead, there is an endless appetite for truth, and a deep honesty that goes with it. You have a pet theory, or you have something that seems utterly intuitively obvious to you, or something that maybe seems obvious to everyone except you - and unlike the religious type, this is not where you stop; this is your starting point for research. If yin turns out to be something heaven can do, then your yin = female = earth vv yang = male = heaven dichotomy has just been blown out of the water.

So you keep exploring and questioning and just plain working hard to find a deeper and more complete understanding. (And you know that the next person to come along and work on this can take what you did and use it to do something better.) And this, for Margaret, means looking at trees in sunlight, discovering how cranes shelter their young, and spending a long time in libraries with dauntingly large books. She uses that photo to show yin/yang in their original conception as part of the natural world, something subtler and more colourful than than a neat black-and-white diagrammed system. 'Roots in life'. Exactly.

Yes, I know I am presenting an idealised picture of academia. (I did spend some years there.) But I really think someone has got to. Academics - not least scientists - are people who take our assumptions about what is 'obvious', ask awkward questions, break the consensus, and do a lot of hard work. Their labours, and their constant pursuit of truth,give us things like clean water, and the internet, and translations into modern languages of an oracle 3,000 years old.

 

[heylise]

Yes, you are right about 'real' science. The same goes for 'real' religion. Both have great value, and many people bring beautiful things to humanity and to themselves through them.

My only point was, that it happens very often, that people who state facts, both in science as in religion, do that by excluding facts which do not align with their way of thinking. Something "is" like this or that, and very often they are not wrong at all. Just too narrow. And the part they exclude is sometimes the best part.

But the real scientist does not exclude it, neither does the really religious person.

LiSe

 

[Sparhawk]

both in science as in religion, do that by excluding facts which do not align with their way of thinking.

I would use the umbrella of "sentient beings" so we won't miss anybody or anything elaborated by them, be it science, religion, politics, etc., ... The moment one has an opinion, that is the moment one is invalidating another's. That we are able to reach consensus on anything is a gift of averaging and balancing a given set of opinions and concepts, but, as long as an individual has a thinking neuron left, he/she will find a way to disagree if so inclined (and methinks that is more often than not...)

L