Yin Yang and Taoism - the outlook of a different culture and time

This article is about Taoism and about one of its fundamental concepts – the concept of Yin Yang. The culture in which we are brought up is such that we absorb certain concepts and accept them as true and never question them. It never occurs to us that there could be any other or different way of looking at life. One such assumption that most of us make in our modern, westernized culture is the assumption that we can enjoy the good things of life and avoid the bad. We wish to be happy all the time. We strive mightily to stay young, stay rich, and stay beautiful and healthy. We wish to avoid old age, poverty, ugliness, ill health and the like.

Yet this view is as absurd as wanting a coin to have only one side to it and not two sides. Just as electricity cannot flow without both a negative pole and a positive pole, so also there can be no life without death, no male without female, no good health without illness, without day without night and so on. This is a fundamental concept of Taoism – the concept of Yin Yang.

This seems to me to be a way in which the Chinese view of life is fundamentally different from our modern view. Our view of life that we can have the good without the bad seems to be derived from the Christian or Jewish faiths.

This – if we care to think about it – is an absolutely fruitless and frustrating pursuit. We will never succeed. And we can never be happy and content with our lot unless we accept this. We need to incorporate the principle of Yin Yang into our lives.

In the 4th century B.C Chuang Tzu wrote:"Thus those who say that they would have right, without its correlate, wrong, or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the Universe, nor the nature of all creation. One may as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of the negative principle without the positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet people keep on discussing it without stop. Such people must be either fools or knaves."

Another of the fundamental errors that is made clear by the concept of Yin Yang is the idea of progress. Both the ideas of progress in our personal lives and progress in the world at large – our community or nation or humanity as a whole.

As far as the world at large is concerned we are all too ready to believe in the possibility of a Utopia or an ideal world. Karl Marx – for example – believed in the ideal world that would result after the middle class were overthrown and the proletariat came to power. Yet the Utopia remains forever elusive and however hard we try the ideal world or circumstances never arise.

In our personal lives we wish to keep making progress. We wish to grow richer or wiser or more respected in the community and want this progress to be sustained. However things are never entirely to our satisfaction.

As opposed to this view that we must constantly be growing or progressing in some way, the Chinese view of Taoism and of Yin Yang is cyclical – like the seasons.

Think of the seasons. They come one after the other – like clockwork. Summer comes after spring and then autumn and then winter and then spring again. And so it continues.

When the spring comes this year it will not compare itself with the spring of earlier years. It will not berate itself if – in some way – it is inferior to the earlier spring. It comes, it stays for a while and then it goes.

This seems to me to be a more natural, realistic and relaxed way of living our lives than the constant striving for progress. It seems to be better than the constant planning, working, and worrying about making progress.

I need to understand and live this principle as much as anybody. I have been driven by this need to be better than I was before in many areas of my life. This may have its advantages – we may be more effective or more successful.

But life is passing us by. Only those people who worship success for its own sake will think that success is good regardless of what it is that is achieved. And will it make a difference? We have come to this Earth to live for a while and then pass away and that is all anybody can really do.

I hope this article makes you think. I hope you start taking your plans and ambitions less seriously and start to just live in the present. I hope you become more accepting of the bad that comes with everything good and learn to live in peace with yourself in any situation that you find yourself. This is what we can learn from Taoism and the concept of Yin Yang.

I hope you enjoyed this article and that it will be useful to you.

Stay tuned for more in this continuing series.

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