Claim. Yang and Yin are God’s indirect attributes — the attributes of Sungsang and Hyungsang — rather than primary substances on the same level as Sungsang and Hyungsang, which means UT’s Yang/Yin doctrine is structurally different from the I Ching’s.
Elaboration. Sungsang and Hyungsang are God’s direct attributes constituting substance; Yang and Yin are the attributes of those attributes (2. Yang and Yin). Both Sungsang and Hyungsang each have Yang and Yin aspects — in the human Sungsang as qualities like clarity/vagueness and activeness/passiveness, in the human Hyungsang as convex/concave form. Crucially, yang and yin exist for harmony and beauty: per Unification ontology (B. Yang and Yin), ‘God made yang and yin as the attributes of Sungsang and Hyungsang in order to express harmony and beauty,’ grounding aesthetics in ontology. Lee cites Divine Principle: ‘God, as the Subject partner, has dual characteristics of Yang and Yin in perfect harmony [Chung-hwa]’ (DP, 18-19).
Lee distinguishes UT from the I Ching. The I Ching’s T’aichi ‘generates the two primary elements of yin and yang’ — making them primary. But in the Oriental concept, yang means light/sun/mountain/heaven/hard/hot, while yin means shade/moon/valley/earth/soft/cold — mixing substantial and attributive uses. In UT, the sun (substance, Sungsang+Hyungsang united) has brightness (yang as attribute); the moon (substance) has paleness (yin as attribute).
The substance/attribute precedence has heavy practical implications. ‘Without sungsang and Hyungsang, yang and yin have no meaning.’ Applied to humans: the sungsang-hyungsang task is mind-body unity (perfection of character); the yang-yin task is uniting man and woman (perfection of family). Therefore character-perfection must precede marriage. Lee links this to the Three Great Blessings: perfection of individuality is placed prior to perfection of the family precisely because yang and yin are attributes of sungsang and hyungsang. He cites Confucius’s Eight Articles of the Great Learning (‘Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated…’) as having grasped the same pattern unconsciously.
This is the metaphysical grounding for the Blessing-readiness norm: degradation of sexual morality, family destruction, and divorce trace to violating the substance-precedes-attribute order. The argument has the form: if you get the metaphysics wrong (treating yang/yin as primary), you get the practical ordering wrong (marriage before character). Critics engage on whether the metaphysical move actually does the practical work or merely retrofits it.
See also. man-yang-substantial-woman-yin-substantial, sungsang-and-hyungsang-as-dual-characteristics-of-god, ut-three-kinds-of-subject-object-relations