음양, 시공의 표상에서 우주교향악으로

Abstract

This article is an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of yinyang which had been, in ancient China, a key-word explaining the principle of social order and universal order. There is a reason to penetrate again into this old theme to which many scholars have ever devoted their investigations. Today, in Europe and North America, a number of people pay special attention to Korean and/or Chinese traditional medicine appreciated as an alternative medicine. It is well known that the yinyang is an elementary concept of the system of this oriental medicine. As Marcel Granet insisted properly, the terms yin and yang indicated originally the two antithetic aspects of the site and the occasion. They have been, with time, used for symbols of two opposed classes, and came to be foundation of distributing all human activities and natural phenomena. I would like to retrace, in this article, this process of semantic extension of the word yinyang and to see how the thinking of yinyang have tried to keep human and nature in harmony. The immersion, in Europe and North America, of oriental medicine as an alternative for modem medicine, instead of considered as a superstitious art, tell us a crisis in rational mind which put the nature under the control of man. This work, I hope, will help us to reflect the position of man in nature.