Taoism
Symbol · Symbols of the Religions
Yin-Yang
Taijitu
The ancient Chinese concept of dualism, showing how seemingly opposite forces are interconnected and balance each other.
What it meansThe dots are the doctrine. Each half carries a seed of its opposite, so neither is ever pure and neither can win — and the dividing line is a curve, not a straight edge, because the two are always in the act of becoming each other rather than meeting at a border.
Book · around 300 BCE
The Daodejing
A Book Older Than Its Title
A discipline of restraint — water, the uncarved block, doing less — open enough to mirror its reader.
SignificanceIts images all argue one thing: water wears away rock by yielding, the uncarved block is worth more than anything carved from it, the usefulness of a pot is the emptiness inside it. Power in this book belongs to whatever has not yet been made definite.
The FindingThe Daodejing's title, its Dao-before-De order and its eighty-one chapters are Han-era and later conventions — the earliest near-complete copies, buried by 168 BCE at Mawangdui, put De first, and the earliest witness of all, Guodian around 300 BCE, holds only about two-fifths of the text.
Practice · 8th century
Neidan
The Furnace Is the Body
Chinese internal alchemy: the elixir compounded inside the body, in the borrowed language of the laboratory.
What it isIt takes the whole vocabulary of the outer laboratory — furnace, crucible, cinnabar, firing times — and relocates it in the body. The elixir is compounded from jing, qi and shen, refined upward and returned to emptiness. Nothing is ingested; the adept is the apparatus.
The FindingThe story that elixir deaths drove Chinese alchemy indoors is the account of waidan's own specialists, and Fabrizio Pregadio rejects it — it would have alchemists needing several centuries to notice their ingredients were fatal — tracing neidan instead to Daoist meditation on the inner gods.