A Thought Experiment - VIII:

Handles are to grasp things by

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Having learned that hexagrams, trigrams and single lines all possess names it should come as little surprise that bigrams, the 2-line figures of Taoist notation, have names by which the mind can grasp them as well.

The names given the bigrams are young yin, old yin, young yang and old yang. These entities are thought of both in cyclical fashion and in complementary (sometimes adversarial) fashion similar to the manner in which their single dimension components, yin and yang, are conceived.

For purposes of mandalic geometry the bigrams can be considered analogous to the four quadrants* of 2-dimensional Cartesian geometry except that they correspond not to infinite regions but to the four finite regions of the unit square and, more specifically, to the four vertices of the unit square.

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Photo: Tripod vessel with handles from Ancient China (6th century BCE) Walters Art Museum [Public domain, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

*A quadrant is a quarter of a plane. The x-axis and y-axis divide the   x-y plane into four quadrants. The axes themselves are not part of the quadrants.

© 2014 Martin Hauser