Grandmaster Tse’s Tàijí Fist 271

Tài 太 means big. Jí 極 means limited. One is big, and one is limited, this means that there is something that makes things bigger and bigger, but there is something else that limits the big, contracting it. So, one out and one in – this is Tàijí 太極.

Tàijí originally comes from the Yìjīng 易經 – Book of Changing. It says there are two kinds of energy, one is expanding, and this is called Yáng 陽. We use the colour white to represent it, and it is like the daytime. The other energy is contacting and is called Yīn 陰, and it is represented by a dark colour, like night-time. The Tàijí Tú 太極圖 – Tàijí Symbol, is used to show the principle of Tàijí. It is a circle, with one side light and the other side dark. The circle means one; one person, one flower, one dog, one tree, one glass of water. One is anything, has two energies inside of it, Yīn and Yáng. The ancient Chinese realised that Yáng must have Yīn, and Yīn must have Yáng. So in the Tàijí Tú we see that the dark part has a small circle of white inside and the light part has a small circle of dark inside.