The Empty Circle Above It

In the oldest diagram, a blank circle sits above the one divided into light and dark.

A single empty circle drawn in one stroke of grey ink on bare cream paper, like an enso, with nothing inside it and nothing around it

The symbol on the pendant is the second circle. Most people have never seen the first.

About a thousand years ago a philosopher named Zhou Dunyi drew a diagram of how the world unfolds, and the yin yang was only one step in it. At the very top, above the circle divided into light and dark, he drew another circle, and left it empty. He called it wuji: without poles, without a this side or a that side. The divided circle underneath he called taiji, the great polarity. The first line of his commentary is four characters long: wuji er taiji. Without poles, and yet with the greatest poles of all. Scholars have been arguing about that and yet for nine hundred years.

Whatever the argument settles on, the picture is plain. Before the light and the dark, there is a circle with nothing sorted in it.

Watercolor in the manner of an old Chinese diagram: an empty circle at the top, beneath it a circle softly divided into dark and light, joined by a thin line — Zhou Dunyi's two circles. The symbol we wear is the lower one.

Now think about your first ten minutes awake

Set the diagram aside and think about how a morning actually goes.

Before you are fully awake, there is a second, sometimes two, when you do not yet remember what day it is or what is waiting. Then it arrives. The meeting. The text you have not answered. The person you are not speaking to. The money. By the time you have found your phone you have sorted the whole day into the parts you want and the parts you dread, the people who are for you and the people who are not, the good news and the bad. Most of us have the day divided before our feet touch the floor.

The yin yang is a true picture of that. Light and dark, each with a seed of the other, turning. It is the circle we live in, and there is nothing wrong with it.

But it is the second circle. Above it, the old diagram insists, there is a moment before the dividing. The day before it has been sorted into good and bad. The person before you have decided what they are. The hour before you have told yourself what kind of hour it is. You were there this morning, for two seconds, before your phone.

Before the light and the dark, a circle with nothing sorted in it.

Watercolor of a still lake at first light before sunrise, no reflections, pale grey water and sky barely distinguished — Before the sun has picked a side.

The blank is not nothing

It is easy to hear empty circle and think of a void, a nothing, some blank state you are supposed to prefer to your actual life. That is not what the diagram draws. The empty circle is the same size as the divided one. It is drawn in the same ink. It is not less than the yin yang. It is the paper the yin yang is painted on.

Which means you can go there, and it is closer than it sounds. Not to escape the light and the dark, which will be waiting for you. Just to stand, for one breath, in the place where they have not yet been handed out. The breath before the thought. The pause before you answer. The first second of waking, before you remember. People who teach sitting still have been pointing at this circle for a very long time without always naming it.

There is a yin yang made as a small silver locket, light and dark on the outside and, when you open it, an empty space. That is the diagram, in the right order, worn close.

Watercolor of a sheet of untouched cream paper with a single pale wash of light across it and one small brush resting at the edge — The paper under every painting.

One breath, unsorted

A practice. Before the day, before a conversation you are bracing for, before you open the message you have been avoiding, take one breath in the empty circle. Do not decide anything during it. Do not call the day good or hard, the person a friend or a problem, the news welcome or not. Just the breath, with nothing sorted. Then step down into the second circle and get on with it. The sorting will be a little truer for having waited.

The one place the old Daodejing names yin and yang, it does not describe a balance. It describes a way of standing: carry one, embrace the other. This is one of a series of short essays on the yin yang. The rest are gathered here.

Somewhere a lake is lying perfectly still in the grey before sunrise, and for a few more minutes nothing in it has a side.