, there is enlightenment and understanding. This balance that exists within all things can provide an understanding of how the world works and mans place in it. In further accepting that there needs to be a balance between man and nature, there can be a harmonious co-existence as well.The Yin Yang school works in correspondence with the Five Agents. The theory is that there is a natural co-existence of man and nature, and all that is a flow or harmony that exists within nature. It is an elemental theory that proposes that all “things and events are products of two elements, forces or principles: yin, which is negative, passive, weak, and destructive, and yang, which is positive, active, strong, and constructive”2. The influences of the yin yang school are vast. What is interesting though, is that despite its importance, there is very little written in it. Tsou Yen’s work has been destroyed, and all that remains is a brief overview of his life in the Book of Changes. The Yin Yang school emerged at roughly the same time that the theory of the Five Agents arose. By Tsou Yen’s time, the “two concepts, which [have] much in common, were thought of together … he is usually credited as the one who combined the two independent currents into one”3. The influence of the Yin Yang school is seen throughout various Chinese classics has a major impact on Taoist thought. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu make reference to the idea of a natural balance throughout their texts. This theory of yin and yang is also seen in military texts. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War uses theories of balance, and uses Taoist thought in its pages.The origin of the symbol of the yin yang has a number of different theories surrounding it. The two sides of yin and yang are thought to have originally “designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and gradually came to suggest the way in which one thing ‘oversha...
