How did “Tai Chi” get its name?

Well, you may have heard the terms “yin” and “yang”, or even seen the yin/yang symbol like the one at right. Well Tai Chi takes its name from the concepts of yin and yang.

The terms “yin” and “yang” originally came from the observation of sunlight and shadows. The ancient Chinese noticed how the sun would shine on one side of an object illuminating it, and how the opposite side would be darkened by shadows.

They also noticed that there wasn’t a clear demarcation between the “sunny” side and the “dark” side, but variations of light changing to darkness as you walked around the object. They also noticed that as the sun moved across the sky, the patterns of sunlight and shadow would change, demonstrating an “ebb-and-flow” nature to the experience.

From this initial “visual” experience of light and dark, the Chinese eventually noticed similar ebb-and-flow in other sensory experiences – sound (with degrees from loud to soft), touch (from hard to soft), sensation (warm to cold), and kinesthesia (motion to rest). They also began detecting ebb-and-flow patterns in other experiences, such as time, weather, seasonal changes, cycles in nature, our health, cycles of birth and death, cycles of work, and many more.

ALL OF THESE EXPERIENCES THAT STRONGLY EXCITED or stimulated the senses, such as sunlight, loudness, and motion, the ancient Chinese called yang. When the senses were stimulated weakly or not at all, such as in darkness, quietness, and rest, they called it yin. However, the ancient Chinese realized the yin and yang are not “absolutes”, but descriptions of the ebb-and-flow in sensory experiences.

How do yin and yang apply to Tai Chi? Well first of all, the term “Tai Chi” originally did not refer to movement exercises or martial arts. Instead the term was first used to refer to this relative mapping of “yin” and “yang”. Yes, the term “Tai Chi” for many, many centuries referred to the ebb-and-flow of yin and yang. Though the exercises you now know as “Tai Chi” have been around for three or four centuries, it is only within the last half of that time period that they’ve been called “Tai Chi”.

How did these movements acquire this name? A Chinese scholar by the name of Ong Tong, after watching a demonstration of the movement art in the 1800′s, said that the movements seemed to be a physical manifestation of “Tai Chi”, the ebb-and-flow principle of yin and yang. Since the movements are derived from martial arts (called ch’uan or quan in Chinese), the movement art eventually came to be called Tai Chi Ch’uan (taijiquan), which literally means “yin/yang fist”.