Claim. In UT, man is a ‘yang substantial being’ (union of sungsang/hyungsang with yang characteristics) and woman a ‘yin substantial being,’ where the yang/yin difference is quantitative in the body but qualitative in the mind — making the man-woman relation that of subject and object.
Elaboration. Lee distinguishes UT’s man=yang, woman=yin claim from the Oriental tradition that simply identifies them. In UT, both man and woman possess yang protuberances and yin sunken parts in their bodies, but man has more pronounced yang elements (height, hip size differences). The Hyungsang difference is quantitative (Relationship between Yang and Yin, and Man and Woman).
The sungsang difference is qualitative: both possess clarity (yang) in intellect, but man’s clarity tends toward comprehensive thinking, woman’s toward attention to detail; man’s sorrow (yin emotion) tends to painful, woman’s to grieving; man’s activeness (yang will) gives an impression of hardness, woman’s of softness. Lee compares this to vocal music — tenor/soprano in the high range, bass/alto in the low — producing the concepts ‘masculine yang and yin’ and ‘feminine yang and yin.’
Why then is man yang and woman yin if the sungsang difference is merely characteristic, not quantitatively skewed? Lee’s answer: in both quantitative and qualitative cases, the difference is the difference between subject and object — active/passive, initiating/responding. Man’s comprehensiveness and woman’s attention-to-detail are in subject-object relation, etc.
This is a heavily contested claim in contemporary terms: the assignment of comprehensiveness to men and attention-to-detail to women, of activeness to men and tolerance to women (Table 1.1-1.2), encodes a normative gender complementarity that critics from sociology and feminist theology engage directly. Lee treats these as essential rather than socially constructed differences — they derive from the structure of the Original Image, not from culture. The doctrine is load-bearing for true-parents theology and blessing practice. Worth a thread once a sociology counter-atomic exists.
See also. yang-and-yin-are-attributes-not-substances, character-perfection-must-precede-marriage, conjugal-union-fourfold-significance