Dons Notes In Red!
"Fishing in a Mountain Stream," detail of an ink drawing on silk , Don's notes in RED!
TaoismEarly eclectic contributions
The idea of Yin and Yang, melting of the flesh.Yin and Yang literally mean "dark side" and "sunny side" of a hill. They are mentioned for the first time in the Hsi tz'u, or "Appended Explanations" (c. 4th century BC), an appendix to the I Ching (Classic of Changes): "One [time] Yin, one [time] Yang, this is the Tao." Yin and Yang are two complementary, interdependent principles or phases alternating in space and time; they are emblems evoking the harmonious interplay of all pairs of opposites in the universe.
- Flesh, matter, light, atomic structures and the energies and powers within and/or
- Innate vs. Sentient-ness and/or (substance) vs.
- Zero, nothing, dark matter and/or (spirit).
All things spoken here are things of the flesh, either innate or sentient, and a example of how we know not ourselves.
First conceived by musicians, astronomers, or diviners and then propagated by a school that came to be named after them, Yin and Yang became the common stock of all Chinese philosophy. The Taoist treatise Huai-nan-tzu (book of "Master Huai-nan") describes how the one "Primordial Breath" (yüan ch'i) split into the light ethereal Yang breath, which formed Heaven; and the heavier, cruder Yin breath, which formed Earth. The diversifications and interactions of Yin and Yang produced the Ten Thousand Beings.
The warm breath of Yang accumulated to produce fire, the essence of which formed the sun. The cold breath of Yin accumulated to produce water, the essence of which became the moon.
Yin and Yang are often referred to as two "breaths" (ch'i). Ch'i means air, breath, or vapor--originally the vapor arising from cooking cereals. It also came to mean a cosmic energy. The Primordial Breath is a name of the chaos (state of Unity) in which the original life force is not yet diversified into the phases that the concepts Yin and Yang describe.
Every man has a portion of this primordial life force allotted to him at birth, and his task is not to dissipate it through the activity of his senses but to strengthen, control, and increase it in order to live out his full span of life.
First life came from Chaos as spontaneous interactions between powers within diverse energies, as they came together we have our creator. Chaos is only an illusion of our own creation, with creation of what we know, within God.
Another important set of notions associated with the same school of Yin-Yang are the "five agents" or "phases" (wu-hsing) or "powers" (wu-te): water, fire, wood, metal, earth. They are also "breaths" (i.e., active energies), the idea of which enabled the philosophers to construct a coherent system of correspondences and participations linking all phenomena of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Associated with spatial directions, seasons of the year, colors, musical notes, animals, and other aspects of nature, they also correspond, in the human body, to the five inner organs. The Taoist techniques of longevity are grounded in these correspondences. The idea behind such techniques was that of nourishing the inner organs with the essences corresponding to their respective phases and during the season dominated by the latter.
Wu-hsing, HOW Cute!!!
Article Found at: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
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