Yin and Yang

From the Scholar Wen-Shan Huang

In an excellent pamphlet, reprinted from Chinese Culture of March 1969, the eminent teacher, Professor Wen-Shan Huang, says:

“We seem to realize that, in the universe, there is an ever-active ever-creative life, and an inexhaustible source of energy-life and energy, which are made available to mankind when a fitting stage of development is achieved. It is particularly significant that it has a great reverence for life.” So we discern a spiritual basis for this great “Chi” energy, which is not ours alone but belongs to the cosmos (we manifest it individually when we do the necessary disciplines to develop and focus this great power).

Professor Huang continues: “T’ai Chi (Supreme Ultimate) is originally circular in shape, and it is the combined entity of the Ying and Yang Principles.”

This circularity is the reason why, in all T’ai Chi disciplines, we move in a circular manner in order to activate this energy. A windmill follow the same principle.

“There is, behind the phenomenon of change, the changeless absolute, or Grand Ultimate (T’ai Chi)”. From this we come to realize that, in working with this great force, we are doing more than mere exercise – we are pursuing a way to truth, or enlightenment. Few realize that enlightenment is experienced in the body. Though this is what the Buddha and his successors have always taught and experience seems to prove.

“T’ai Chi is generated from “Wu Chi”, or Ultimate Nothingness. It is the moving power of the dynamic and static states, and the source of the “Yin” and “Yang” principles. When they are in motion, they separate, and when they remain static, they combine. We can understand that . . . all its movements are in the patterns of the circular T’ai Chi Diagram.

(Note: Huang Wen-Shan, in addition to being a T’ai Chi Master, is a world-renowned anthropologist, and one of the developers of the new science of Culturology. He has been National Professor of the Republic of China, Visiting Professor of the Hong Kong Chinese University, Dean of Chu Hai College, Former Dean of Universities in Shanghai and Peking, an Academician of the China Academy, a Corresponding Research member of the Academia Sinica, and Founder-President of the American Academy of Culture – formerly the American Academy of Chinese Culture.)

Source: T’ai Chi Chih! Joy Thru Movement, 1974, Sun Publishing Company, p. 113-14. Wen-Shan Huang was Justin Stone’s teacher and friend.

Yin Yang

The principle of polarity is at the heart of Taoist thought. Yet this emphasis on opposites must not be mistaken for a situation of conflict – everything implies its opposite and, indeed is only meaningful because the opposite is there. And so, death and life, light and darkness, good and evil, positive and negative, ebb and flow, male and female coexist as parts of one and the same system. The elimination of either one would also mean the disappearance of the other.

From: Sacred Symbols: Tao, Thames and Hudson, 1996