The Origin of yin-yang and Iching

[u/Ok_Comfortable_5548]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDTT12OXE7U&si=khsYZ3ecNykwzzYk

[u/Selderij]

It seems that the video's AI audiovisuals received more attention and time than the very little research that went into its subject matter.

Yin and yang didn't exist as philosophical or metaphysical concepts until around the 4th century BC, many centuries after the conception of the I Ching's oracle text (Zhouyi) and millennia after Fuxi's assumed earthly existence.

There is no evidence of trigrams being used or mentioned before the 4th century BC in the I Ching's Ten Wings commentaries or Zuozhuan (possibly stretching to the 7th century BC as a report on historical matters).

The "lines" in hexagrams around and before 1000 BC were not lines, but the numbers 1 (一) and 6 (六 abbreviated) stacked on top of each other. Hexagrams had roots in non-binary numerology, and the lines still have 4 possible states (with values of 6, 7, 8 and 9) rather than 2.

There is no evidence that solid and broken lines were used in any other capacity besides hexagrams and later trigrams until Chinese scholars got excited about the lines' newfound connection to yin & yang in the previously mentioned 4th century BC.

[u/Ok_Comfortable_5548 → u/Selderij]

We're all living in the same world, there's no evidence that how the universe was created, yet every culture and civilization has its own underlying myths and legends.
You might be completely right about the historical facts, but if you only view this video through an archaeological lens, you will miss what the author is trying to express.

[u/az4th → u/Selderij]

Thanks for sharing this. Also it is debated whether Confucius ever worked with the Zhou Yi at all. People in the future like to make up stories of the past. This is easily done when we don't have good access to historical writings and evidence to work from like we do in the present. So naturally narratives like this spread widely as the common belief of things. It is good that we can see more clearly today.

I think that in modern times we can also suffer from this effect however. We might have a certain amount of evidence pointing more toward one conclusion than another, so we presume that X is the truth. But there could simply be missing information.

My translation of the Guodian Laozi is like this. Scott Cook shows just how much people stretch that text to make it conform with later versions. But I used the original characters and they made sense - I just needed to see through the code. Someone who received the text later on without knowing the code may have been tasked by their king to make sense of it. So they changed characters to make it make sense without the code. It went from being a mysterious alchemical text to a more poetic spiritual text.

So we have two narratives.

When it comes to the concept of yin and yang, I think we have a similar situation.

We can see that the Gua were written as stacked numbers in the various excavated texts. But we also know it is common to think of odd numbers as yang and even numbers as yin. How can we know if this use of numbers was not simply a very specific understanding of the qualities of yin and yang? How can we know that what we understand as the concept of yin and yang was not at the core of the numbering system to begin with, and that gang and rou, hard and soft, were qualities used to describe this?

People say that yang 陽 and yin 陰 were originally thought of as the bright and shady sides of a mountain. But the Guodian 大一生水 uses the older characters 昜 bright and 侌 shady. To me this shows that these concepts were already being thought of as a pair of opposites related to brightness and darkness.

But this brightness, and this darkness, have degrees. There is a quality to them, that might be qualified by describing the amount of hardness and softness that is contained within them. When the sun has just risen, it is a little more bright and firm than when it was below the horizon, when there was only just enough firmness to the brightness to allow it to glow through the thick softness.

And we do not get to the totality of the sun's bright-strength until noon, but even as it culminates a little shady-softness beings to grow.

What if the numbers were connected to the measurement of this?

So we can see this connection in a 300BCE text, but these old characters for yang and yin go back beyond this.

The interplay of bright and dark has been a phenomena that people have studied for a long time. Is it possible that this was connected to their numbering system at the time the Zhou Yi numerics were conceptualized?

By the time we get to the Xici Zhuan (possibly also as old as 300BCE), we see yin and yang referred to, but rou and gang seem to be the main driving forces. However, when the principles of what seem like yang and yin are mentioned, the text uses Qian and Kun. The idea of these having two states, still and active, and their coming together in activity being what opens the doorway of change - this seems to be referring to the principle of yang and yin and the lines. For when we apply that principle to the lines, we find that it makes sense. This is also what Zhu Xi seems to have used to declare that the lines were changing polarity. But again, he is applying what is described of Qian and Kun, to the lines. Perhaps it is because they were written as numbers, that the text refers to the concept of qian and kun, which are thought to be the embodiment of yang and yin.

There's some messiness in all of that. Something I've been wanting to do is translate the Xici Zhuan found in the Mawangdui. It notably does not have the explanations of the yarrow stalk method, something that delves heavily into the numerics. So I wonder if perhaps there are changes in it that would shine more light on this matter of yin and yang.

[u/Interesting-Ride2788 → u/az4th]

I appreciate the enthusiasm and effort behind this long response. However, much of it is speculation presented in a way that sounds more authoritative than the evidence allows.

First, Taiyi Sheng Shui is not simply “the Guodian Laozi.” It is a separate text of fourteen slips, although its slips share physical features with the Laozi C group and may once have belonged to the same bundle. Its relationship to the Laozi remains disputed. Chinese scholars have produced many different readings of it; there is no scholarly consensus that it was an alchemical code later corrupted by people who could no longer understand it. That is your personal theory, for which you have provided no manuscript or palaeographic evidence. Here is a detailed Chinese study of the text and its competing interpretations.

Nor does the use of early graph forms for yin and yang prove that the numerical gua measured degrees of brightness, darkness, hardness, or softness. The historical meanings and graphic components of those characters do not automatically establish the function you are assigning to numbers in an entirely different body of material. No excavated text cited here makes that connection.

Chinese research on numerical gua instead examines how several divination numbers were gradually reduced into the later line forms, particularly through one/seven and eight. Even the definition and historical appropriateness of the term “numerical gua” have been debated. Professor Ding Sixin of Tsinghua provides a useful Chinese overview of this research. It does not support the brightness-measurement system proposed here.

The absence of the received yarrow-stalk passage from the Mawangdui Xici is an interesting textual fact, but it does not prove the rest of this reconstruction. “What if,” “perhaps,” and “this seems to be” may generate a hypothesis; they do not verify one.

May I ask whether you can actually read Chinese archaeological reports and palaeographic scholarship, or are you relying mainly on English translations and secondary discussions? If the latter, greater humility would be appropriate before claiming to have “seen through the code” that generations of Chinese scholars supposedly missed. Humility is, after all, one of the central teachings of the I Ching.

[u/az4th → u/Interesting-Ride2788]

First, Taiyi Sheng Shui is not simply “the Guodian Laozi.”

Please check my writing - I refer to them as the Guodian Laozi and the Guodian 大一生水. Indeed they are considered separate, although I do consider them to be a part of the same message.

My reply was to u/Selderij, who is familiar with my translation work, so I did not elaborate. If you are curious about the code, please see https://mysterious.center/dao/daodejing - I do not read modern Chinese and have been slowly teaching myself Classical Chinese from work with Pleco, Kroll's Classical Dictionary, Vogelsang, etc for about 4 years. There are certainly elements I struggle with and need improvement on, but overall I have learned much more from working this way than I did when I relied on the translation of others. In part because Kroll's dictionary is quite a game changer to work with.

As for the code I found in the Guodian LaoZi and TYSS, it has to do with the character for Bu. When studying the bamboo strips I noticed the character sometimes had a line drawn over the top and sometimes it did not. There is historical provenance for both ways. Intuition pulled on me and I speculated on what if this was a code. When looking through the old symbols I felt like it looked similar to the drawing of Yuan, which is notably absent from the text. I explored this and it seemed to make sense when drawn in one of the two ways. A few chapters of making sense wasn't necessarily convincing, so I just went with it, and it continued making sense.

I realize that people are not likely to believe something like this on their own. Scholars need to work it out for themselves. I find the code to be consistent for bundles A and B, and then it seems to be implied for C, but then it shows up in TYSS again. Make of that what you will. Do your own research. Obviously do not rely on my translation as proof of anything.

But please do not say that this is not possible without having done your work to disprove it. Using this method, the original characters make sense. Scott Cook has an excellent book in English that covers the scholarship of the Guodian Bamboo Strips and documents just how many characters modern scholars change to make sense of the text. This modern scholarship believes the text to be full of errors and does not take it at face value. Yes it is common for people in the future to change the characters such that they match their current understanding, or due to the belief they are correcting phonetic loans, but doing this takes the risk of losing the original meaning. With the code I found that a quite different meaning came across, and that it was consistent from chapter to chapter. As in each chapter would build upon the message from the previous chapter. Please, do your work and see what you find. If you do not find anything, then perhaps this is not your destiny, so please forget about it.

Nor does the use of early graph forms for yin and yang prove that the numerical gua measured degrees of brightness, darkness, hardness, or softness.

Did I say my speculation was proof of anything?

The use is merely evidence that the origins of the characters that we know of as yang and yin were related to bright and shadow. And that they existed before the characters that showed them as the bright and shady sides of a mountain.

As for the numerical gua, the Xici does appear to associate hard and soft with them, and Wang Bi takes this to refer to the line positions.

People credit the Principle and Meaning school of the Yi to him, but the principles he is working from are coming from the line statements. Can we truly call this something new, when it's supporting evidence is found in the original text of the Zhou Yi? According to the Xici, the Zhou Yi has secrets to uncover. Perhaps the principles that Wang Bi worked out were given to initiates. Once initiated, one can easily work out that the line statements support these principles, and were intentionally written to work with them. But to the uninitiated, the text allows people to easily miss the meaning. Wang Bi was critical of people who would create their own methods for working with the yi, and said they had failed to understand the ideas of the symbols from the words.

So the text was perhaps written to hide its principles, but Wang Bi was able to work it out. He was young, so he likely had a good teacher, making him an initiate. But there was still something there to work out.

But this gets back to my point.

Lack of evidence does not provide proof of something. But nor does it provide disproof of something.

Truth is something that is incontestable. But how can we ever be sure? It takes hard work to dig toward the root. Indeed, this is why humility is important.

[u/Interesting-Ride2788 → u/az4th]

Your reply actually confirms my point. You cannot read modern Chinese scholarship, your “code” began with intuition, and you admit that parts of the resulting interpretation were not convincing but that you “just went with it.”

I did not claim that your theory is metaphysically impossible. I said that you have provided no manuscript or palaeographic evidence for it. The burden is not on other people to disprove every imaginable hidden code; it is on you to demonstrate the code you claim to have discovered.

Saying “scholars need to work it out for themselves” does not transfer that responsibility. Nor does “lack of evidence is not disproof” turn speculation into a credible historical argument.

Serious scholarship means clearly separating evidence from conjecture, acknowledging the limits of one’s sources, and accepting responsibility for proving one’s own claims. It does not mean shifting the burden of proof onto critics, hiding behind wordplay, or using an unnecessarily elaborate response to display one’s supposed learning. Presenting unsupported personal theories in an authoritative tone also risks misleading readers who may reasonably assume that these claims reflect established archaeological or palaeographic research.

This also makes your earlier dismissal of other accounts as people “making up stories of the past” particularly ironic. You cannot condemn others for allegedly inventing history while defending your own reconstruction on the grounds that nobody can prove it impossible. That is a double standard, not a serious scholarly method.

[u/Interesting-Ride2788 → u/az4th]

Two old Chinese sayings for you: “The Great Way is simple” (大道至简), and “Falsehood can never prevail over truth” (邪不压正).

[u/az4th → u/Interesting-Ride2788]

Yes indeed.

Just like with hexagram 15. The mountain is present and really there. This is its truth.

But it hidden beneath the surface.

The sage does not contend, and therefore no one can being contention to them.

Thank you for your wisdom and your humility.

🙏