Zhou's key terms Wuji and Taiji appear in the opening line 無極而太極, which Adler notes could also be translated "The Supreme Polarity that is Non-Polar". His brief text synthesized aspects of Chinese Buddhism and Taoism with metaphysical discussions in the Yijing. The original description of a taijitu is due to Song era philosopher Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), author of the Taijitu shuo 太極圖說 "Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate", which became the cornerstone of Neo-Confucianist cosmology.
The interest in "diagrams" (圖 tú) is an intellectual fashion of Neo-Confucianism during the Song period (11th century), and it declined again While the concept of yin and yang dates to Chinese antiquity, The term taijitu in modern Chinese is commonly used to mean the simple "divided circle" form ( ), but it may refer to any of several schematic diagrams that contain at least one circle with an inner pattern of symmetry representing yin and yang. See also: Taiji (philosophy) and Yin and yang
The final circle represents the state of multiplicity, glossed "The ten thousand things are born by transformation" (萬物化生 modern 化生万物).This stage is also represented by the Eight Trigrams ( Bagua). The circle below the Five Agents represents the conjunction of Heaven and Earth, which in turn gives rise to the "ten thousand things".The Five Agents are connected by lines indicating their proper sequence, Wood (木) → Fire (火) → Earth (土) → Metal (金) → Water (水). Below this second circle is a five-part diagram representing the Five Agents ( Wuxing), representing a further stage in the differentiation of Unity into Multiplicity.In some diagrams, there is a smaller empty circle at the center of this, representing Emptiness as the foundation of duality. A second circle represents the Taiji as harboring Dualism, yin and yang, represented by filling the circle in a black-and-white pattern.At the top, an empty circle depicts the absolute ( Wuji).Strictly speaking, the "yin and yang symbol", itself popularly called taijitu, represents the second of these five parts of the diagram. Ornamental patterns with visual similarity to the "yin-yang symbol" are found in archaeological artefacts of European prehistory such designs are sometimes descriptively dubbed "yin yang symbols" in archaeological literature by modern scholars. The contemporary Chinese term for the modern symbol is 太极兩儀图 "two-part Taiji diagram".
This version was reported in Western literature of the late 19th century as the "Great Monad", and has been widely popularised in Western popular culture as the "yin-yang symbol" since the 1960s. In the Ming era, the combination of the two interlocking spirals of the taijitu with two black-and-white dots superimposed on them became identified with the He tu or "Yellow River diagram" (河圖). Ming period author Lai Zhide (1525–1604) simplified the taijitu to a design of two interlocking spirals. The two most similar are the "Taiji Primal Heaven" (太極先天圖 tàijí xiāntiān tú) and the " wuji" (無極圖 wújí tú) diagrams, both of which have been extensively studied during the Qing period for their possible connection with Zhou Dunyi's taijitu. The modern Taoist canon, compiled during the Ming era, has at least half a dozen variants of such taijitu. Such a diagram was first introduced by Song Dynasty philosopher Zhou Dunyi (周敦頤 1017–1073) in his Taijitu shuo 太極圖說. A taijitu ( simplified Chinese: 太极图 traditional Chinese: 太極圖 pinyin: tàijítú Wade–Giles: t'ai⁴chi²t'u²) is a symbol or diagram ( 图 tú) in Chinese philosophy representing Taiji ( 太极 tàijí "utmost extreme") in both its monist ( wuji) and its dualist ( yin and yang) aspects.
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