Whilst Lord Gautama, the Buddha, was busy deconstructing traditional Hindu civilization and causing political havoc in North India because so many Royal Heirs were ditching palace life in favor of wandering around as penniless mendicants preaching renunciation, mindfulness and the Four Aryan Truths, meanwhile in China a civilization of a very different sort had been steadily evolving based on similar insights but with different ‘Chinese characteristics’. Here the fleeting nature of things and experiences had been duly noted – as any intelligent person or culture inevitably does – but a special type of process theory had gradually emerged. Objects, for example, are not complete stand-alone entities, rather ongoing processes; indeed, everything is like a river which is recognizably there as such, but a closer look soon reveals that its constituent parts continuously change from moment to moment.
First there is a ‘river’ then there is no ‘river’ then there is….
To explain this eternal processing nature of reality a binary symbol emerged featuring a solid or broken line indicating that everything has two poles or main aspects such as beginning-growing vs ending-declining. We experience many such polarities, such as inner and outer experience – the thoughts and feelings ‘I’ feel inside versus the apparent world perceived by the senses outside. Or a mountain on a sunny day: the sunny side is warmer than the shady side but this continuously changes moment by moment as the sun moves across the sky. Similarly: up-down, front-back, inside-outside, fast-slow, warming–cooling, microcosm-macrocosm, center-fringe, growing-shrinking, virtue-vice, wise-foolish, loving-hating and so on ad infinitum.
In Figure 2 below we see this drawn at first as two lines making a teepee shape or then secondly as a circle, with two rising phases on the left being early and later phases of yang and two descending phases on the right being early and later phases of yin.
This is not an earth-shattering observation, of course, but building upon that as the foundation for philosophical, spiritual and even civilizational theory is deeply insightful as evidenced, for example, by how it engendered a remarkably precise medical science which in turn developed the world’s most sophisticated herbal medical tradition as well as, by applying these principles yogically, both acupuncture and medical qigong 1.
So this initial binary insight ends up producing another skandha, or bundle, of five called the Five Elemental Phases, Processes or Energies. Below in Figure 2 are two diagrams by Hua Ching Ni 2.
Note in the first Figure below how from starting with two principles, drawn as either a solid or broken line, you have four combinations of those lines and then, as shown in the lowest drawing on the page, by adding a third line to the Bigram to create a Trigram, there are eight possible combinations to which can now be attributed more complex phase values. Then by combining two Trigrams together into a six-line Hexagram there are eight times eight possible combinations making the sixty four Hexagrams of the I Ching. From simplicity comes complexity.
In a later chapter we will look at these eight Trigrams as part of analysing various different ‘layers & levels’ trinitarian formulations such as Mind-Body-Spirit and Heaven-Earth-Man, both to further explore Layers & Levels and also to build vocabulary with which to analyze a variety of natural and societal phenomena.
But before we get to eight we have five, which again is the four early and late phases mentioned above plus the zero line, or central, value.
To these phases are attributed various elemental properties relating to some found in nature, namely Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. And from those five are derived two dynamics, supporting and controlling. [See Figure 1 above]
Supporting:
Wood feeds Fire, Fire’s ash creates Earth, Earth’s minerals create Metal, Metal’s concentration and condensation produce Water, and Water nourishes Wood. This is often called the Mother-Child dynamic.
Controlling:
Water controls Fire, Wood pushes down on Earth, Fire melts Metal, Earth channels Water, and Metal cuts Wood. This is often called the Husband-Wife dynamic.
Organ Associations 3:
Each of the five major organs in the body is principally associated with each of these Elementary Phases namely:
- Fire with Heart
- Earth with Spleen
- Metal with Lungs
- Water with Kidneys
- Wood with Liver
And each major female (Yin) organ above has a male (Yang) brother organ namely:
- Heart with Small Intestine
- Spleen with Stomach
- Lungs with Large Intestine
- Kidneys with Urinary Bladder
- Liver with Gall Bladder
Each of these main and accompanying organs has a meridian line in the body with various points each with no end of inter-relationships creating a nexus of several hundred points each with major and minor correspondences with all other meridians and points, very much like a big city subway map, giving Chinese medical practitioners an extraordinarily precise yet infinitely variegated matrix of particulars to treat with needles, massage and herbal medicine.
So here we have gone from noticing four phases of an oscillating wave or circle to creating a dynamic map of inter-related energies, some supportive, some restrictive, just as happens in our muscular systems, or electrical circuits or dynamic climate ecospheres, not to mention family and social dynamics involving both small and large groups.
If we look at a tree we can see that there are various fundamentals in play: the root systems spreading hither and thither in the earth intimately connected via rhizomes with the roots of other plants in its orbit; then the trunk growing majestically heavenward spreading into various major and minor branches which in turn support a multifarious canopy of countless multitudes of leaves dancing together in gentle breezes, absorbing sunlight, being cleaned and refreshed by rain, serving as shelter to birds and other small animals whilst also providing shade for various plants and creatures below. Root action varies greatly from trunk and branch action which varies greatly from leaf action; some support and others provide stress, yet all together comprise the living, ever-changing but always identifiable dynamic process we nominally call ‘a tree’.
This chapter’s mission is not to explain all the mysteries and methods of Yin and Yang and related Five Element theory but rather to showcase another example of non-materialist View revealing how reality comprises no end of inter-related Layers and Levels. It is non-materialist because, like Buddhism, its starting point is direct experience. Any conclusions therefrom may entail endless debates 4, but despite any such niggles we all share certain bedrock experiences, though perhaps it takes special insight to identify and describe them well.
Importantly, yin and yang are not external ‘objective’ measurables, or quanta, even though they are clearly recognizable experiential qualities, or qualia, manifesting no end of specific, detailed characteristics. We all know the difference between top and bottom, front and back, warm and cold, inner and outer, near and far, rising and falling, beginning and ending, connecting and alienating, harmony and discord, light and dark, smooth and rough and so on ad infinitum. Building a matrix of inter-related ways of examining such things in the light of the insight that such phenomena arise continuously in some sort of polar, or binary, dynamic is the initial insight; then compiling that insight into a symbolic language of solid and broken lines was another leap forward from which no end of further layers and levels of meaningful relationships can be explored. Indeed:
The language of symbol is a portal into insight about natural experience with thus observed nature displaying further layers and levels of insight into how to read such experience; indeed reality reveals itself as a living process of continuously self-expressing symbolic language.
In another chapters we might peer into a six line hexagram, exploring how to extrapolate from a visual symbol drawn of only six lines no end of layers and levels of meaning, much like how a large tree with only one trunk can produce a seemingly limitless number of individual leaves. This is the sort of internally consistent symbolic language that can be systematically formulated from non-materialist starting points and which, not coincidentally, always manifests no end of layers and levels, because that is the nature of the experiential continuum in which we all dwell as both passive and active participants. This non-materialist starting point, the norm in most cultures until modern times, being personal experience itself which comprises both inner and outer mandalas 5 , stands in stark contrast to the materialist worldview that believes in a separate outer observable reality independent from the inner experiential observing mandalas wherein consciousness is somehow believed to also separately and independently dwell.
This different starting premise opens the gaping divide between premodern and postmodern mentalities and which now supersedes earlier such divisions between civilizational worldviews like Christian or Jew, primitive versus civilized, East versus West; indeed, with increasingly few exceptions it can be said:
We are all modernist materialists now!
[Diagrams scanned from Hua Chin Yi’s ‘Book of Changes and the Unchanging Truth’ whose introduction is excellent.]
1 Medical Qigong: now generally outlawed in communist China
2 A Daoist teacher who lived for years in Los Angeles and was a descendant of the Duke of Zhou credited with having helped his elder brother King Wen of Zhou formulate the sequence of the Hexagrams in the I Ching used for the past twenty five hundred years or so, along with the now established commentary about the hexagrams and the changing lines.
3 Brains and sexual organs don’t make it into the Primary Five, both being regarded as additional special organs mainly associated with the generative force of Water-Kidneys.
4 As in the physical sciences which theoretically should be able to settle such differences with unequivocal facts if it were not for those pesky, virtually limitless, layers and levels of known & unknown ‘variables’.
5 Mandala: any identifiable phenomenon comprising a cluster of particular characteristics such as a person, place, zone such as: inner, outer, palace, national, bedroom, kitchen, personal, open and hidden mandalas. To be explained in more depth later.
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