Origins & Meaning of Taiji

One finding is worth flagging in advance, because it is not widely known and it changes how the source sentence should be read. That sentence is not, in the first instance, a statement about the cosmos. It is a statement about a divination system.

The two characters

The first character is a common word meaning great, utmost, or extreme in the sense of the highest degree. It appears in many compounds where it functions much like a superlative prefix.

The second is more interesting. Its earliest attested sense is architectural: the ridgepole, the beam at the apex of a building from which the roof structure hangs. Early dictionaries gloss it exactly this way. From that concrete sense it extends to an extremity or endpoint, then to a pole in the geographical and later magnetic sense, and then to a limit or the furthest degree of anything.

Two consequences follow. First, the compound means the utmost limit, and it is a spatial and structural metaphor rather than a genealogical one. Second, the word does not carry any sense of making or begetting. A ridgepole does not produce a roof; it is the highest member of a structure. This is a better guide to the term than the English rendering Supreme Ultimate, which sounds like a title.

The source sentence

The word occurs in one of the essays appended to the Book of Changes, in a passage that runs: the Changes has a taiji; this generates the two modes; the two modes generate the four images; the four images generate the eight trigrams.

Read carefully, the subject of the sentence is the Changes — the divination system, the book, the set of figures. The two modes are the broken and unbroken lines. The four images are the four possible two-line combinations. The eight trigrams are the eight three-line figures. The passage is describing, in order, how the figures of the system are generated by successive doubling, and the taiji is whatever stands prior to the first division into two kinds of line.

That is a description of a formal system, not of the origin of the world. The cosmological reading, in which taiji is the primordial condition of the universe and the two modes are yin and yang as cosmic principles, is an extension of it — a natural extension, given that the same commentaries elsewhere treat the figures as a model of the cosmos, but an extension nonetheless.

Knowing this explains something otherwise puzzling: why the term is so undefined. The passage had no need to define it, because in its immediate context it means simply the undivided state of the system before the first distinction is drawn.

Earlier and neighbouring terms

The idea of a prior unity was not new, and several other terms did comparable work before taiji became dominant.

A term meaning the Great One appears in several early texts, including a summary of Laozi's teaching in one of them and a cosmological passage in another that has the Great One producing the two modes — a formulation strikingly close to the taiji sentence and possibly earlier. The same term was also the name of a deity and of a star, and it received imperial cult under the Han, so it carried religious weight that taiji never had.

A bamboo manuscript recovered from a fourth-century BC tomb contains an entirely different cosmogony in which the Great One generates water, and water then acts back upon it. This text was unknown before its excavation, and it shows that early Chinese cosmogony was more varied than the surviving canonical formulations suggest. Whatever else it establishes, it undermines any claim that there was a single ancient Chinese account of origins.

Two other terms should be kept in view. The word usually translated as the Way does much of the same work in Taoist texts and is used interchangeably with taiji by some later writers. And a term meaning primal breath or original vapour supplied the Han period with a material account of the undifferentiated condition, which is what many commentators identified taiji with.

The Han period: giving it content

Han scholars, who were building the great correlative systems described elsewhere on this site, needed the prior condition to be something specific, and they generally made it material.

The standard Han-derived gloss, which persisted for centuries and is still the commonest explanation in Chinese reference works, is that taiji is the condition before heaven and earth had separated, in which the primal vapour was mixed and undivided. On this reading it is a physical state, not a principle: a homogeneous plenum that later differentiates.

This reading has a clear advantage. It makes the generative sequence a description of a process, and it fits the general Han preference for accounts in which everything is made of one stuff in different states. It also has an obvious cost: it makes taiji a thing among things, which later philosophers found unacceptable.

The third-century turn

A very different reading appeared with the commentator whose work on the Book of Changes became standard. Concerned to avoid making the ultimate into an entity, he identified the taiji with what is not any particular thing — with absence, or nothing, understood not as sheer nullity but as the unqualified condition from which qualified things arise.

This move was influential out of all proportion to the space it occupies in his commentary. It set the terms for a debate that ran for the next thousand years, and it is the reason later Confucian philosophers were so anxious to deny that anything lies beyond the taiji: they were resisting a reading that seemed to place a nothing above the natural order.

The Song reactivation

The term became central to Chinese philosophy in the eleventh century, through a very short essay accompanying a diagram, which opened by relating the limitless to the taiji and then set out a sequence of generation running from that pairing through movement and stillness, yin and yang, the five phases, and the birth of things.

The dominant later interpretation, which became state orthodoxy, took the taiji to be pattern or coherent principle — not a stuff, not a state, and not a being, but the intelligible order that material force exhibits. On this account taiji is not before anything in time. It is what makes the process the kind of process it is, and it is fully present in each thing as well as in the whole.

This is a genuinely subtle position and it repays attention. It also produced the famous dispute over whether the term limitless should be prefixed at all, since a prior limitless seems to imply something outside the order of pattern, and one party held that the phrase was a Taoist import with no standing in the Confucian canon.

What the term does not mean

Four readings are common and none is supportable from the sources.

It is not a creator. Nothing in any of the classical or Song formulations describes it as intending, choosing or making. The relation between taiji and the things that follow is described with words for generation and division, not for craft.

It is not a substance or a form of energy. The Han material reading comes closest, but even there it is a state of vapour rather than a force, and the dominant later reading explicitly denies that it is a stuff.

It is not the diagram. The interlocking circle now called the taiji diagram appears far later, and nothing in the classical sentence describes a symbol.

And it is not a stage of practice in the classical sources. That usage is real but belongs to internal alchemy, where the term names a point in a physiological process. It is a later technical borrowing.

How to read a passage that uses it

Because the word carries several loads, a practical procedure helps.

Identify the literature. In a commentary on the Book of Changes it probably means the undivided state of the system or of the cosmos. In Song philosophy it probably means pattern. In an alchemical text it probably names a stage. In a martial arts manual it is probably being used for its associations rather than as a technical term.

Then ask whether the passage treats it as prior in time or prior in logic. This is the single question that most often distinguishes one school from another, and writers frequently do not say.

Finally, notice whether the limitless is mentioned. If it is, the passage is engaging with the Song debate, whether or not it says so.

Key points

• The characters mean utmost and ridgepole or pole, giving a structural metaphor of a limiting condition rather than a source or maker.
• The source sentence describes how the figures of a divination system are generated by doubling; the cosmological reading is a later extension.
• Other terms, notably one meaning the Great One, did similar work earlier and carried religious weight that taiji lacked.
• Han commentators made it a material state: undivided primal vapour before heaven and earth separated.
• A third-century reading identified it with the unqualified, setting up a millennium of debate about whether anything lies beyond it.
• The Song orthodoxy took it to be pattern rather than stuff, fully present in each thing and not prior in time.