Yin and Yang in Dynamic Balance
Traces how Taoist cosmology derives the multiplicity of the world from the Tao through a sequence of numbered stages, ending in the interplay of yin and yang within every created thing.
Chapter 42 gives the Tao Te Ching's closest thing to a cosmogony: "The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced the ten thousand things." Commentators read One as undifferentiated unity, Two as the split into yin and yang, and Three as their combination with a generative third force that actually births the plurality of things. The chapter then states that "the ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang in their arms," meaning every existing thing is a live mixture of both polarities, not a pure instance of one or the other. Notably, yin and yang aren't named as an independent doctrine anywhere else this explicitly in the text — chapter 42 is the load-bearing passage for what later became the whole yin-yang cosmological system in Chinese thought. The chapter closes with a political application: rulers who call themselves "orphaned" or "unworthy" succeed precisely because loss and gain, like yin and yang, are two faces of one process.
The ten thousand things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang in their arms.
Chapter 42 is the single most-cited textual root for the later, far more elaborated yin-yang cosmology that pervades Chinese medicine, divination, and philosophy.
Tao Te Ching