Taoist symbols

Symbols of Taoism (Daoism), the Chinese tradition of the Dao, and what they mean to those who use them.

Taoism, or Daoism, is the Chinese tradition of the Dao, and it is practised today. This section begins with its best-known emblem, the yin yang: a circle of a dark and a light half curling into each other, each holding a dot of the other colour, called the taiji tu, the diagram of the taiji. The page gives what the circle means in Daoist teaching, how much older yin and yang are than the drawing, and what is known of when the drawing was first made.

Yin yang (taijitu)A circle divided into a dark and a light half that curl into each other, each holding a dot of the other colour. It pictures yin and yang, the two complementary forces of Chinese thought, and in Daoism the taiji, the “great ultimate” from which they come.

Yin and yang in Daoist teaching

In the Daoist view, as Fabrizio Pregadio describes it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dao is both wuji, the “ultimateless”, and taiji, the “great ultimate”. Yin and yang are the two complementary forces, one “positive” and the other “negative”: by joining they generate things, and by alternating they regulate the cosmos. Neither ranks above the other. Robin R. Wang, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, finds no conception of yinyang in Chinese philosophy in which yin or yang is superior. The Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism quotes its founder, Master Moy Lin Shin: “The Yin and Yang Tai Chi symbol contains the Universe and explains its functioning.”

Older words, a younger circle

The characters for yin and yang are on oracle bones used in divination at least as early as the 14th century BC, where they describe the weather and the movement of the sun, and Chapter 42 of the Laozi says that everything “is embedded in yin and embraces yang”. When the swirl was first drawn is not settled. Wang writes that there is no clear way to date it or to name its maker, and credits Zhao Huiqian (1351–1395) with the first yinyang symbol. François Louis, in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, finds it in neither the standard Ming compilation of 1415 nor the Daoist Canon of 1444–45. Its earliest appearance is in Zhao’s Liushu benyi, whose own preface is dated 1378, though no edition older than 1517 survives. The book claimed that its chart dated from the twelfth century, and Louis traces circles split into two curved halves, as decoration, back to a reliquary made for the Tang emperor between 871 and 874. The taiji diagram of Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) is a different drawing: a circle split into the trigrams li and kan.

Sources

Religious Daoism, Fabrizio Pregadio, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4. Dao and Cosmos
Yinyang (Yin-yang), Robin R. Wang, Loyola Marymount University, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Introduction; 1. Origins of the Terms Yin and Yang; 3. Yinyang as Qi; 5. The Yinyang Symbol
The Genesis of an Icon: The Taiji Diagram’s Early History, François Louis; Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 1 (June 2003), pp. 145–196 (JSTOR 25066694), Harvard-Yenching Institute, pp. 145, 169, 175–181, 195–196
Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism (home page), quoting its founder, Master Moy Lin Shin, Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism

Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research