What the hell are yin and yang?

In my Tai Chi practice room hangs a steelyard.

Although I’ve been practicing Tai Chi since 1993,
the steelyard tells me nothing about yin and yang.
I still don’t know what yin and yang are.

Bruce makes it clear that Tai Chi is not meditation;
to the originators Tai Chi was a martial art and neigong and morality.

My steelyard weighs emptiness.

Yin and yang are not understood in terms of human standards; they are not intellectual concepts.

What the hell are yin and yang?
There is no answer.
They point to a direction.

They do point to expansion.
They do point to condensation.

The function of a steelyard is to measure, compare and evaluate.
It measures yin and yang.
It compares yin and yang.
It evaluates yin and yang.
It points in the direction of emptiness.
Emptiness, the Tai Chi space (of which I know nothing), creates the expanding force and the condensing force.

“When the steelyard is in equilibrium, it is at rest, with no more swings of the beam to one side or the other.”
Kim, Hee-Jin, Dogen on Meditation and Thinking, State University of New York Press, 2007.

We are simply hanging/playing freely in empty space.

So, equilibrium is the essential physical operation of the steelyard.

But the core function of the steelyard is fairness.
The customer expects to pay a fair price for a bag of rice.
The unknown weight of the bag of rice can be found through the counterpoise’s known weight.

The originators of Tai Chi valued morality and fairness.
Despite Bruce’s knowledge of the intent of the originators of Tai Chi, their embrace of morality in the marital arts was meditation.

Tai Chi is Meditation.

Meditate on yin and yang.

Just my opinion.

Bob

On Facebook Bruce says that he’s going to take a year off after his 2017 summer retreats.
What are we going to do?

I didn’t really expect anyone to be able to adequately answer this question. If you listen to the “Strings of the Tao” commentaries, you’ll hear Bruce say that yin and yang are the basis of the trigrams. An understanding of them (not intellectual – experiential) is required to find the tai chi space. “Yang and yin give birth to tai chi”. The trigrams are symbolic representations of the movement or transformation of yin to yang and yangs to yin. Balance is initially the smooth movement of these two forces. Eventually you use this movement to find stillness and then emptiness and then compassion.

I’m not making this up. I’m paraphrasing Bruce’s commentaries. IMO, that CD has the best summary of Taoism that Bruce has ever presented. It outlines the entire Taoist arts. It doesn’t tell you how to train them. That’s what all of his seminars, classes, videos, and books have been trying to accomplish.

But, without an understanding of the yang and yin that Bruce is referring to, IMO, you can’t understand what Bruce has been teaching for the past four decades.

“The Tao that can be spoken
is not the true and eternal Tao.
Names that can be named
are not the true and eternal names.”

The answer to your question is in your question.

What is yin?
What is yang?
What is yin and yang?

Yin is “What?”
Yang is “What?”

What is “What?”?

Hui-neng once asked Nan-yueh Ta-hui:
“What is this that comes thus?

In asking the question we already know the answer.
“In asking the question “What is yin and yang?,”
we already know that the answer to “What”
is “yin and yang.”
To quest is to know because “What” is “yin and yang.”

Your question is not actually an interrogation,
because it transcends human understanding.

(see Kim, Dogen Kigen, the University of Arizona Press, 1987.)

Here’s my crack at the question:

Chi / interneal energy is a kind of enegry / wave. Just like light has different colours / frequencies, chi also has different frequencies. There are 2 fundamental and opposite frequencies – Yin and Yang. Yin is the most “calm” and Yang is the most “fiery”. Mixing these 2 frequencies in different ratios give you the 8 energies of the bagua. Further mixing with finer incriments gives you 64 … and eventually an infinately number of combinations. Experientially: Yin when you “create it” or fill your body with it has a sinking calming effect. Yang will have a rising effect that hits your head and rattles your brain.

To “create it” or at least experience it: Yin – you flow energy from above you into your body. Yang – you flow energy from below you into your body.

If you notice most of the finishing moves in bagua / taichi / hsing-i involve a “push down” move – this essentially is pulling the yin energy above you into your body and calming your system down so you don’t overload and blow a fuse.

Fun question!
Andrew

“Recently I found a way to define yang in two ways: 1) the super concentrated point or line that expansiveness can come out of. 2) a dispersed form of the same that can expand. “

This has always been a source of confusion for me and is one of the reasons why it is so hard to figure out what’s what. They finally make sense. I was simply finding the yin and yang aspects of yang. Bruce does a great job of clarifying in the Thunder palm material.

Cheers on the seeking/work on this issue- just to add something, which might have been noticed already by those reading this, in the meditation books
(I believe the first two, but specifically- somewhere- in the Taoist Sexual Meditation book) there is a comment made about the path of Taoism being to recognize what the actual Nature of Yin and Yang are.. as distinct first from any-type of manifestation (which I understand as being distinct from KaiHe, as that is a physical location based manifestation), and second as distinct from this context of the Universe. (as attainments- in stages before and between one is approaching but not yet discovered.. )

[I forget the words -I considered looking up, but if any interested each can search and find- but the idea being, ‘if’ one is reborn, one could be in a similar form, or in a highly dense, or completely spacious, even a non-physical, even non-local? form… if all the aspects of how we make sense of things are changed, then we’d see all manifestations we learned ‘here’ differently- let alone new manifestation wholly different… and in that context- can we see/understand Yin-Yang and Liang-I/Taiji…? (or did one’s Realizations become irrelevant? – and yet the underlying reality? -this being the BigGame so to speak)

(and that is beyond physical, to in energetic terms -non-physically- or in inner-space mentally/causal… – can one apply “expanding from, or to, a pt” without reference to a ‘location’? is that, perhaps not, but perhaps, is ‘seeing’ based upon a visualiztion of a pt in space mapped, and either appearing as a drawing and moving..? -is there a sense of distance, and linear-linkage in these other contexts? (maybe for some, I don’t quite find that) –that is all from “being human”

and to see that outside the perspective of a “human”? if we see as a being that is not-human as we are and that is different, then we don’t see a Real/absolute, but rather an interpretative form) -that all being application and prior to alchemical-realization..
So being reborn as a different kind of being, yet a similar context- same type of space-time.. may invalidate our grasping of? .. . what then if one is in a widely different type of “space-time” ? (then outside of that context? -just as the center still-pt is not a different kind of change.. nor is it a lack of change-gua… it is beyond all the changes, and yet what the changes arise/are constructed out of.. likewise what is the Stuff which is shaped different ways- however, and a fundamental aspect of that is the 4 corners?
___________
thus, as the section in the Taoist Sexual Meditation book references- the question of which level, and in which context, one can sense (let alone understand) Yin-Yang (in relation first, and then each distinct, on their own).. sort of like “realization of one’s nature” means something different on “which level” of being or level of one’s nature- etc.

Just wanted to try and put out there a view I’ve had, I hope it is approachable.. luck

(what is already occurring? what aspects of one’s self are acting/reacting, and already suppressing-countering other aspects of your self.. and I don’t mean thoughts or physical.. but this relates to “create”? the expansive force.. -one could see this as a thing appearing on an empty field, vs an eddy in the flux of the whorls.. is there already an expanding and absorbing? an allowing and a doing-to? not just “I create” but “I am creating/affecting by…” and where do they, already, arise from?)