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Taoist Cosmology Map
The Daodejing, the Yijing's Great Commentary and Zhou Dunyi each describe how the many come from the one, and each names different stages. Walk the ladder from the Dao to the ten thousand things, or back up it, and see which text names which rung, in its own words.
The nine-rung ladder is a study model of the site's own; the three texts are quoted beside it and are not made to agree.
Rung 2 of 9 · read as unfolding
Wuji
Non-polarity / Non-differentiation · Wújí
無極
Choose a text to set its own words beside the ladder:
- Not named at DaoNot named at Dao
- Not named at WujiNot named at Wuji
- Not named at Four ImagesNot named at Four Images
- Not named at Five PhasesNot named at Five Phases
- Not named at Eight TrigramsNot named at Eight Trigrams
- Not named at Three Powers
- Not named at Multiplicity
Read from the top down: the unfolding · faint rungs go unnamed by the framework chosen
Taijitu, Zhou Dunyi
The Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate
- 4Qian and Kun乾道成男 · 坤道成女The way of Qian becomes the male, the way of Kun the female.
The tradition
Chinese thought has no single creation story, and the traditions that speak of the world's unfolding do so in different terms. The Daodejing says that the Dao gives birth to the One, the One to the Two, the Two to the Three, and the Three to the ten thousand things (chapter 42), and calls reversal the movement of the Dao (chapter 40). The Xici commentary to the Yijing gives a sequence of figures: Taiji, the two modes, the Four Images, the Eight Trigrams.
In the Song, Zhou Dunyi's Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Taijitu shuo) drew these together: non-polar, and yet Supreme Polarity; its movement and rest give rise to yang and yin, their changes to the Five Phases, the ways of Qian and Kun to the male and the female, by whose interaction the ten thousand things are born. Zhu Xi made the text a cornerstone of Neo-Confucian metaphysics. The word wuji is older: it is the limitless to which the Daodejing (chapter 28) says one returns.
Reading the instrument
- The map is a ladder read from the top down, from the Dao to the ten thousand things. Return reads it from the foot up, the movement the Daodejing calls the Dao's own.
- Each framework lights the steps it names, in its own words and order: the Daodejing's One, Two and Three; the Xici's Taiji, two modes, Four Images and Eight Trigrams; Zhou Dunyi's Wuji and Taiji, yin and yang, Five Phases, Qian and Kun, the ten thousand things and, after them, the ultimate of humanity. The study model shows all nine. Walk it steps through the chosen framework in that order.
- Where a framework's step is often matched with a rung of the ladder, the map says so as a reading: what the Daodejing's One, Two and Three refer to is disputed, and Zhou Dunyi's ultimate of humanity stands on the Three Powers rung only because his text then quotes the ways of Heaven, Earth and humanity.
- Rungs with their own instrument open it: the taijitu, the Five Phases wheel and the Bagua.
Where it descends from
- Daodejing
- The Dao, the One, Two and Three (chapter 42); reversal as the Dao's movement (chapter 40); the return to the limitless, wuji (chapter 28).
- Xici zhuan (Great Commentary)
- Taiji, the two modes, the Four Images and the Eight Trigrams (part A, chapter 11); Heaven, Earth and humanity as the three powers (part B).
- Zhou Dunyi, Taijitu shuo
- The Song text and diagram: Wuji and Taiji, yin and yang, the Five Phases, Qian and Kun, the ten thousand things.
- Zhu Xi, commentary on the Taijitu shuo
- The reading that made the diagram central to Neo-Confucian thought.
- Joseph A. Adler, Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi's Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi (2014)
- A study and translation; the source of the rendering Supreme Polarity used here.
What this does not claim
The map sets side by side named stages from three different texts and a modern composite. It does not claim they describe one process, or that the Daodejing's One, Two and Three are the Xici's figures. The study model is a teaching sequence of the site's own. Heaven, Earth and humanity, the three powers, come from the Yijing commentaries rather than from any of the sequences, and stand here as the frame in which the ten thousand things are ordered.
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