Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

are, as LuMing Mao explains in his article, “Returning to Yin
and Yang: From Terms of Opposites to Interdependence-in-
Difference,” “two major cosmological concepts in the history of
Chinese science and philosophy” (W46) and, as such, the
relationship between these polar opposites speaks of
“interdependence and interpenetration where one necessarily
depends on, but remains distinctly different from, the other”
(W49). It is a union of “contraries”: the deeply fundamental
need of those opposites for each other and the ever-changing,
dynamic, nature of that union. Because of this, while the yin
and the yang may appear “balanced,” this is not the case
because, although they do comprise a whole, there is no
“middling” between the yin and the yang. The former flourishes
and the latter lies fallow, but, because their marriage is
defined by the same “dynamic equilibrium” of which Weil wrote,
that situation is not static, not unchanging. There is ebb and
there is flow.
The swastika is no different. While it is not a symbol of
a thusly dynamic dualism because of its four arms, it is,
nevertheless, an ideogram speaking, across mountains and oceans
and across thousands upon thousands of years, of not simply the
universe and of existence but of the nature of these – the
nature of the “contraries” that constitute these. With those
four hooked arms of the swastika and sometimes in left-facing
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