The Tai Chi Diagram comprises two colors, white symbolizing yang, and black symbolizing yin. Surrounding each other, the two colors, each containing another, forms a whole.

The colors of black and white were the first impressions the ancients had of the universe. Observing alternate nights and days, sun rises and moon falls, the ancients felt familiar with the world of black and white and felt them mysterious. From the modern science perspective, the colors of black and white can be said to be “universal colors”, and between the darkest black and the purest white there are countless color graduations. like black holes in space, no light can enter black. Contrary to black, white encompasses all visible lights, which is also known as “full-color light”, formed by all lights evenly mixing together. In the color chromatogram, though opposite to each other, black and white contain almost all colors. In 1666, English noted scientist Newton conducted a famous dispersion experiment with a prism. He made the sunlight penetrate through a prism, producing on the screen a spectrum of colors such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple; he then blocked the spectrum with a baffle, and let it penetrate through a second prism, resulting in white light anew.

It is thus obvious that the Tai Chi Diagram, though only in black and white, encompasses all colors, from the darkest to the lightest.

The ancient Chinese called the Tai Chi diagram the “yin-yang fish” because the black and white areas of it appear as a pair of fishes nestling head to tail against each other. Inside the yin-yang fish, each fish has a round dot with an opposite color, called the “eye” of it, namely fish eye. The black fish has a white eye and the white fish a black eye, denoting that for all things in the universe there is yang within yin and vice versa, with both blending with and corresponding to each other.