tional complementary forces recognized in Chinese metaphysics whose interaction gener-
that comprise the phenomenal world. From antiquity this symbiotic pairing has occupied a generative role in Chinese religion as an interpretive lens for explicating and structuring reality across a range of cultural discourses and practices. On the one hand, the yin-yang dyad provides a descriptive model for a reality, its instantiation as a male-female pair serving as metaphor and pattern for cosmogonic generation, change, and transformation. On the other hand, as seen in longevity, sexual, and alchemical practices, Yin and Yang provide a prescriptive model for self-cultivation, a starting point for a soteriological return to a state of wholeness before the generative “fall” into the phenomenal world.
Yin and Yang express aspects of the qi (M) (pneuma) that fills the universe and out of which all things are constituted. Etymologically, Yin and Yang were linked in ancient China to descriptions of the shady (yin) and sunny (yang) sides of a slope, expressing the flux of reality through the imagery of light and shadow. Over time, Yin came to be associated with phenomena such as earth, clouds, rain, moon, water, autumn, winter, and that which was dark, cold, moist, hidden, receptive, and feminine in nature. Yang became identified with phenomena such as heaven, sun, fire, spring and summer, and that which was bright, warm, active, and masculine in nature. Although those elements in the Yang chain were generally seen as hierarchically superior to their corresponding opposites in the Yin chain, the two were seen as fundamentally complementary rather than conflicting. Yin and Yang were also seen not as static essences but as animating patterns of change and transformation.
In the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) and the Qin-Han periods (221 BCE-220 CE), Yin and Yang were integrated into all-encompassing cosmological frameworks that knit together conceptions of the body, family, society, nature, and cosmos into a system of microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondences.
Yin, Yang, and animals of the Chinese zodiac. Daoist temple, China.
The first of these frameworks was that of the
as spatial and temporal processes corresponding to Wood, Fire, Metal, Water, and Earth. In correlative Han cosmology, particularly with
third century BCE, the schema became a comprehensive framework for organizing all phenomena into a single universal organism. The second of these frameworks was that of
of Changes), which presented a binary representation of the processes of change, graphically represented as configurations of broken or unbroken lines and assembled into series of three, to form eight trigrams, or series of six, to form sixty-four hexagrams. Early texts such
pendix), a commentary on the Yi jing, would explicitly link the binarism of the Yi jing to Yin and Yang, declaring, “One Yin and one Yang, this is Dao (way).” Any phenomena could be analyzed using the successive stages of development of the hexagrams, whose infinite play provided a way to read the signs and traces of an ever-changing reality.
jing provided a metaphysical basis for constructing visions of the moral order. The Confucian worldview nested the individual within familial, social, and cosmic networks characterized by hierarchy and mediated by ritual activity. Each element in the Yang sequence was seen as taking precedence over its counterpart in the Yin sequence. As gendered manifestations of the yin-yang pair, the position of female to male was seen in the context of the subordinate position of ministers to rulers, of children to parents, wives to husbands, and younger to elder siblings within the “five bonds” that characterize human relationships.
However, such a conventional prioritizing of Yang over Yin was by no means universally accepted. The Daode jing, familiarly, the Dao
polarity through a countercultural elevation of the feminine principle. The nature and activity of the Dao is suggested through metaphors such as water, valley, mother, and that which appears weak, pliant, tentative, and infantile—the pursuit of social hierarchies, virtues, and aspirations is rejected. Followers of the Dao are instead encouraged to abide in that which is incipient, unadorned, and spontaneous as a way to live out their years in a danger-filled world. It should be noted that in China, as in other cultures, a philosophical valorization of the feminine did not necessarily translate into concomitant transformations in women’s social status.
Yin and Yang were seen as the basis for generating all things. The forty-second chapter of the Laozi text expresses such a cosmogony of emanation: “The Dao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; and three gives birth to the ten thousand things.” The pairing of Yin and Yang, represented as the coupling of the hexagrams Qian and Kun, was understood as—and represented in—the language of sexual union. The union of heaven and earth was compared to the mating of male and female, their commingled essences manifested in such natural phenomena as the clouds and rain nourishing all things.
The small-scale universe of the human body was also seen as structured according to yin-yang interplay; its visceral systems and conduits served to house and circulate qi in its various manifestations. As a whole, the sexual functions were characterized as Yin in nature and identified with the lower of the three dant-various manifestations. As a whole, the sexual functions were characterized as Yin in nature and identified with the lower of the three dant-
was structured. The male and female reproductive fluids of semen and blood, often ex-
blood), were viewed as modalities of the yin-yang interplay.
In the aforementioned cosmogony, Yin and Yang represented basic aspects of the phenomenal world after its separation from the Dao. Efforts at self-cultivation, then, came to focus on ways to recover a prior and undiffer-entiated wholeness, expressed in the following line from the Daode jing: “Returning is the movement of the Dao.” This impulse may be characterized as a soteriology of return, and traced through a variety of manifestations in religious practice.
Regarding sexual practices which were not without controversy, already in the longevity practices of the Han period, one finds references to methods of coitus reservatus aimed at “making the seminal essence return to nourish the brain.” Early medieval Daoism initiatory
involved ritual intercourse as part of a liturgical return to the original unity of the Dao.
In alchemic practices, the sexual imagery of the Yin and Yang was adopted as an operative metaphor for the quest for immortality. In writings such as those in the tradition of the alchemical treatise Zhouyi cantong qi
chemist s crucible came to be seen as homo-logues of each other; hermetically-sealed microcosms in which processes of firing, smelting, and transmutation of elemental Yin and Yang—water and fire, mercury and lead— could lead to an acceleration and reversal of time, and result in the production of the elixir of immortality.
inner alchemy), which developed with particular vigor from the Tang period (618-907) and
the body in a reversal of the ordinary cosmo-gonic sequence. In a salvific counterpart to the gestative process, an immortal embryo would be produced within the mortal body of the adept.
The yin-yang pairing has proved to be one of the most durable features of the Chinese religious worldview, an orienting framework in which human beings have reflected upon the nature of the self, human relationships, nature, and the cosmos.
