Yin Yang & I Ching Symbols

The symbol is called the taijitu, Chinese for "diagram of the supreme ultimate"; most people simply say yin yang or yin and yang. The black half is yin, the white half is yang, and each carries a dot of the other colour: nothing is wholly dark or wholly light, and each side holds the seed of its opposite. The curved border between them, rather than a straight line, says that the two flow into one another, the way day becomes night.

The words themselves are a landscape. In Chinese, 陰 yin is the shady north side of a hill and 陽 yang the sunny south side, which is why yin stands for dark, cool, moist, still and receptive things (night, the moon ㊊, water, winter, earth) and yang for bright, warm, dry, active ones (day, the sun ㊐, fire, summer, heaven). Neither is good or bad; the point of the picture is balance, which is why ☯️ is the first emoji people reach for when they mean harmony, calm or two things that complete each other. The idea is far older than the picture: pairs of yin and yang are discussed in Chinese texts of the fourth and third centuries BCE, and the Tao Te Ching says every living thing "carries yin and embraces yang". The two-dot swirl everyone recognises became the standard drawing only many centuries later.

Yin yang text symbol vs emoji: black and white copy and paste

There is one Unicode character for it, ☯ YIN YANG (U+262F), in the Miscellaneous Symbols block since Unicode 1.1 in 1993. In 2015 it joined the emoji list, so almost every phone now shows it in colour: Apple and Google draw a white glyph on a purple tile, like their other religion symbols. Many people want the plain black-and-white version instead, which is what the searches for "yin yang text symbol not emoji" are about.

To ask for the text look, add the invisible variation selector U+FE0E right after it: ☯︎ rather than ☯️. Browsers and most Android apps honour it; iPhone keyboards and some messengers still turn it into the emoji, so test on the device your reader uses. When the text look matters more than the exact shape, the half-black circles ◐ and ◑ and a plain pair of dots ⚫⚪ never become emoji and read as yin and yang at small sizes. Both kinds are on this page, so copy whichever one your bio, caption or design file needs.

The eight trigrams ☰ ☱ ☲ ☳ ☴ ☵ ☶ ☷ (bagua) and their meanings

Stack three lines, each either solid yang ⚊ or broken yin ⚋, and you get eight figures, the bagua or "eight symbols". Read from the bottom line up, they are ☰ 乾 Qián, Heaven (all yang, the creative, the father), ☱ 兌 Duì, Lake (joy, the youngest daughter), ☲ 離 Lí, Fire (clinging, light, the middle daughter), ☳ 震 Zhèn, Thunder (arousing, the eldest son), ☴ 巽 Xùn, Wind or Wood (gentle, the eldest daughter), ☵ 坎 Kǎn, Water (the abysmal, danger, the middle son), ☶ 艮 Gèn, Mountain (keeping still, the youngest son) and ☷ 坤 Kūn, Earth (all yin, the receptive, the mother). Unicode lists them in exactly this order at U+2630 to U+2637, added in version 4.0 in 2003.

The trigrams are arranged around the yin yang in two classic circles. The Earlier Heaven arrangement, credited to Fu Xi, sets opposites face to face: ☰ over ☷, ☲ opposite ☵. The Later Heaven arrangement, credited to King Wen, follows the cycle of the seasons and is the one feng shui uses for the bagua map of a home, and the one on the octagonal bagua mirrors hung over doorways. The flag of South Korea 🇰🇷 carries four of them, ☰ ☲ ☵ ☷, around a red and blue taegeuk, the Korean form of the yin yang.

I Ching hexagrams: all 64 in order, with names

Put one trigram on top of another and you have a hexagram; eight times eight makes the 64 figures of the I Ching (Yijing, the Book of Changes), the oldest of the Chinese classics, whose core text goes back to the Western Zhou period around the ninth century BCE. Unicode encodes every one of them at U+4DC0 to U+4DFF in the traditional King Wen sequence, so ䷀ is hexagram 1, ䷁ hexagram 2 and ䷿ hexagram 64, and the names Unicode gave them are the English ones from the Wilhelm–Baynes translation, the edition most readers know: ䷀ 1 The Creative (Heaven), ䷁ 2 The Receptive (Earth), ䷂ 3 Difficulty at the Beginning, ䷃ 4 Youthful Folly, ䷄ 5 Waiting, ䷅ 6 Conflict, ䷊ 11 Peace, ䷋ 12 Standstill, ䷗ 24 Return, ䷜ 29 The Abysmal (Water), ䷝ 30 The Clinging (Fire), ䷲ 51 The Arousing (Thunder), ䷾ 63 After Completion and ䷿ 64 Before Completion.

A hexagram's two halves tell its story. ䷊ Peace is Heaven below Earth, the light rising and the dark descending to meet it; turn it over and you get ䷋ Standstill, where the two pull apart. ䷾ After Completion has every line in its proper place (yang in the odd positions, yin in the even) and ䷿ Before Completion, the last in the book, has every line out of place, so the Changes end not with a finish but with a beginning. The grid above keeps the numbered order; the hexagram pages name each figure's lower and upper trigram.

To consult the oracle you build a hexagram from the bottom up, one line at a time, six times. The quick way is three coins 🪙🪙🪙: heads count 3 and tails 2, so each throw gives 6 (old yin, a changing line), 7 (young yang), 8 (young yin) or 9 (old yang, changing). The slow way, with fifty yarrow stalks, is the one the classical commentaries describe. Changing lines flip to their opposite and give a second hexagram, so a reading is usually written as two glyphs, for example ䷂ ➜ ䷇.

The five elements ㊍ ㊋ ㊏ ㊎ ㊌ and how to type all of this

Chinese thought pairs yin and yang with the five phases (wu xing): wood 木, fire 火, earth 土, metal 金 and water 水, in the order in which each feeds the next (wood feeds fire, fire leaves earth, earth bears metal, metal gathers water, water grows wood). Unicode has them as circled characters ㊍ ㊋ ㊏ ㊎ ㊌, together with ㊐ sun and ㊊ moon, because in Japan these seven are the abbreviations of the days of the week: 月 Monday, 火 Tuesday, 水 Wednesday, 木 Thursday, 金 Friday, 土 Saturday, 日 Sunday. They sit in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block and have been in Unicode since 1.1.

The four digrams ⚌ ⚍ ⚎ ⚏ (greater yang, lesser yin, lesser yang, greater yin) and the two monograms ⚊ ⚋ arrived in Unicode 4.1 in 2005, next to the trigrams. Every character here can be pasted anywhere, but the 64 hexagrams need a font that covers the Yijing Hexagram Symbols block: Windows has it in Segoe UI Symbol, Apple devices in Apple Symbols, and Noto Sans Symbols 2 fills the gap elsewhere; without one of them a hexagram shows as an empty box. ☯ and the eight trigrams are in far more fonts and display almost everywhere, and the circled characters show wherever a Japanese or Chinese font is present.