Hey folks at r/ChineseMedicine!

I am doing a training in Chinese medicine for around 1,5 years now (1,5 years more to go) beside my usual job in software.

We invested around a year in laying the foundations before engaging into the more practical aspects of Chinese medicine. We dove into the historical background of China (especially in the 19th century) and also the philosophical concepts that justify the practice of Chinese medicine. This was invaluable to me and my whole life. The concepts around yin/yang, daoism in general and conditional thinking broadened my perspective of reality a whole lot.

Though we discuss these theoretical things within our class between students and also with the teacher I'd like to bring this to a wider community. By talking about yin and yang here I want to deepen my own understanding by getting your perspective and insights. This should be an open discussion and training field for all of us so I am happy for every contribution. As a disclaimer I want to mention that my following definition does not claim to be perfect by any means and is open for discussion as already mentioned. Now lets get to it.

Yin and Yang

I want to open with a little controversial statement in saying that yin and yang are NOT bipolar entities that come together to unify and produce a perfect equilibrium. This is what I read a lot in the literature. The problem with that statement is that its genuinely coming from a western binary way of thinking be applied to the old eastern philosophical concepts.

But lets start at the beginning. If we'd explain yin and yang without using those terms itself we could call the qualities "separated" and "non-separated". Yin being the separateness and Yang being the non-separateness. Every phenomenon in this world (imagined or physically existing) has these two qualities. Why? Lets take an example.

Looking at an apple we find that we can talk about that apple. To be able to do so it needs some kind of form. It needs have a boundary where it stops to be the apple and the surrounding begins. The is the separateness of the apple. Lets imagine it would not have any boundary for a second. What would happen? We could not talk about the apple at all because we couldn't differentiate it. At the same time we need to be non-separated from the apple. This is because if we would be absolutely separate from the apple we could not interact with it at all because we wouldn't have a common layer that allows us to interact.

Alright now we have defined these two qualities that every phenomenon in the world needs to have at the same time. These two qualities already have one thing in common. They only work when we are talking in relationships. Only via relationships we can talk about being separate from something or being non-separate from something. Things brings about a very fundamental thing of Chinese medicine. Relationships.

We have one major ingredient now. But we need a second one. Which is change. Change is a direct consequence of the separateness/non-separateness of things because the phenomena are transforming into one another. Where is the exact boundary of the apple? The "environment" has its own separateness and comes together with the apple so they are having a relationship and together create something new.

These are the two major parts of Chinese medicine in my opinion. Relationships and change. Brilliantly describe by Yin and Yang thousands of years ago. Its such a wide reaching concept within so few words. Based on the definition above I want to come back to the first paragraph. Yin and Yang are not two things that are independent of one another and have qualities on their own but rather they are qualities everything we can think about does incorporate. So it wouldn't make sense to say something like "Yin is always the dark". This is because its relative. Dark can be Yang to an even darker thing. Whereas it can act Yin to a brighter thing. This has direct consequence on reading tongue for example. We cannot read a tongue by itself but we need to do it in context of the person we are examining. If the person has more Yang signs (compared to other people) a more reddish tongue might be ok. Context matters a lot.

Conclusion

Alright I don't want to make this too long. The above explanations now can be further advanced by looking into wu xing or the understanding of the ba gua/yi ging but thats maybe something for another post.

Thanks to everyone reaching until this point. I am happy to get your comments and further discuss the foundational concepts of Chinese medicine!