Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democracy of Creation

For the classical Confucians, the Way (道 dao) was always the “way of,” such as the way of the human world or the way of Heaven, in contrast to the Daoist conception of the Way as the origin and supreme principle of all that is.¹ The classical Confucian tradition arose in what is now North China in response to the breakdown of the sociopolitical and moral order that had been claimed to be patterned after the way of Heaven, namely the order of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.).² The Zhou dynasty had replaced the high god of the preceding Shang dynasty, Lord on High, with Heaven (a semipersonal higher power), claiming that the Shang had forfeited the mandate of Heaven (天命 tianming). With the gradual deterioration of the Zhou feudal order, the sense that the way of the human order had become estranged from the way of Heaven became widespread. The founder of the Confucian tradition, Kongzi, or “Confucius” (孔子 551–479 B.C.E.), remembered the early Zhou era as the Golden Age in which the empire (天下 tianxia)—literally, “all under Heaven”—was united in harmony under the “Son of Heaven” (天子 tianzi), and aimed his program of governance at a renewal of that era’s institutions, rites, customs, and mores.³ What was innovative about his program, however, was the envisioned path through which the estranged way of the human order was to be brought back in alignment with the way of Heaven.

One of the earliest religiopolitical ideas in China, going all the way back to the Shang oracle bones and the Zhou bronze inscriptions, was the virtue (德 de) of the “superior man” (君子 junzi) as a charismatic power accruing to the ruler who was ritually correct and therefore in accord with the will of Lord on High or of Heaven.⁴ While the ruler was originally regarded as obtaining his virtue or charismatic, numinous power to govern from the highest spiritual power by means of correct rituals, above all sacrifices properly offered and divinations rightly performed, what was innovative about Kongzi was his emphasis on learning and self-cultivation rather than sacrifices and divinations as the primary and more direct means of aligning oneself to the way of Heaven.⁵ The notion of “superior man,” which had originally meant men of noble birth, was broadened by Kongzi to embrace, in principle, anyone who applied himself to learning and practically embodying the accumulated ritual tradition of the Zhou culture which he saw as having been instituted by the sage-rulers and civilizational heroes of old, such as Huangdi, Yao, Shun, King Wen, and the Duke of Zhou.⁶

Another crucial innovation of Kongzi’s involved a redefinition of what constituted the essence of the ritualistic Zhou culture allegedly patterned after the way of Heaven. For Kongzi, the way of Heaven at the heart of the Zhou culture was to be found in the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity permeating its rituals. Accordingly, when Kongzi declares that the way of human beings patterned after the way of Heaven consists in their becoming fully human, that is, becoming persons of “humanity” (仁 ren),⁷ he defines humanity as the integrity of a guileless self with a capacity for empathetic response to (or sympathetic understanding of) others.⁸ In other words, Kongzi puts at the heart of his understanding of the way of human beings an ideal of selfhood that is open, empathetic, relational, and all-embracing—ultimately embracing of the entire cosmos.⁹ He views such an ideal selfhood and its bodily enactment in rituals of divine-human and interhuman interactions as constituting the foundation of a harmonious social order.

This idea of a radically open, empathetic, and relational selfhood at the core of the way of human beings finds its concrete anthropocosmic mooring in Mengzi, or “Mencius” (孟子), arguably the second most important figure within the Confucian tradition, about a century removed from the revered founder. His idea of “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy [浩然之氣 haoran zhiqi]”¹⁰ anchors Kongzi’s concept of humanity as the way of humans firmly in the category of psychophysical energy and in so doing imbues what is understood to be the primordial energy of the universe with a moral teleology. According to Mengzi, humanity (仁 ren) is none other than the human nature with which everyone is born—“nature” (性 xing) here being the spontaneous course in which a life-form completes its development when nurtured and not obstructed¹¹—and which has a close connection to the way of Heaven to such an extent that it could be said to have been decreed or endowed by Heaven.¹² The way of the human order patterned after the way of Heaven means in this context the “seed” of a radically open, empathetic, and relational selfhood that is in all of us humans as the core human potential to be developed fully if we are to be genuinely human. Mengzi speaks of the “sprouts” of humanity within every human being, namely, the four good “heart-minds” (i.e., feelings) of sympathy and benevolence, shame and dislike, deference and compliance, and approval and disapproval, all of which are diverse relational articulations of human nature as empathy that culminate in the Four Virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom (仁義禮智).¹³ The crucial point is that he describes the growth of these so-called Four Sprouts (四端 siduan) in terms of the bodily cultivation of one’s “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy” that progressively expands the boundaries of one’s embodied self until it comes to encompass the entire universe in empathy, that is, until it becomes united and fully resonating with the cosmic psychophysical energy filling heaven and earth.¹⁴ One carries out the bodily self-cultivation by accumulating right—that is, empathetic and measured—moral responses to others in diverse relational contexts,¹⁵ relying on both the spontaneous issuing forth of the core human feelings of empathy, on the one hand, and the deliberative capacity (思 si) of one’s heart-mind as the faculty of reflecting on and judging the relative importance of our various feelings, appetites, and inclinations, on the other.¹⁶

Although Mengzi’s interpretation of the Confucian Way thus affirms the critical role of psychophysical energy in the path of self-cultivation and thus reveals a significant overlap between the classical Confucian tradition and the classical Daoist tradition, neither he nor his revered hero, Kongzi, dwells on cosmological or metaphysical speculations, preoccupied as they are with the question of creating and sustaining a harmonious moral order. Although the classical Confucians of the later times, notably Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒 179–104 B.C.E.), contributed to the establishment of the widely influential cosmology of Primordial Psychophysical Energy (元氣 yuanqi), which integrated the cosmology of the receptive and active forces with the theory of the Five Processes (五行 wuxing),¹⁷ it was not until the rise of so-called Neo-Confucianism or the School of the Way (道學 daoxue) in the eleventh century C.E. that the Confucian tradition came to acquire a metaphysical and cosmological sophistication rivaling or surpassing that of the Daoist tradition. As the dominant school in the history of the Confucian tradition from the eleventh century to the nineteenth century C.E. in East Asia, Neo-Confucianism was highly critical of both Daoism and Buddhism while at the same time being influenced by them in one way or another, especially in the way it interpreted the classical duality of the Way and the vessel in terms of the dyad of pattern (理 li) and psychophysical energy.

Neo-Confucianism starts from a high regard of Mengzi as the one who began the “orthodox” line of transmission of the Confucian Way established by Kongzi, and embraces his affirmation of the intrinsically empathetic character—“goodness”—of human nature as evidenced by the Four Sprouts. Nonetheless, while acknowledging the pivotal role played by the bodily cultivation of one’s “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy” in growing the sprouts of humanity within, the dominant trends within Neo-Confucianism do not locate the origin of the sprouts in psychophysical energy, with the consequence that the latter’s creatively transformative power is deprived of an intrinsic moral teleology. Most notably, Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130–1200 C.E.) of the Chinese Southern Song Dynasty, who represents the historically most influential “orthodox” Cheng-Zhu School within Neo-Confucianism, places the creative-transformative power of psychophysical energy in the derivative and dependent position within a hierarchically structured binary relationship with pattern (理 li),¹⁸ resulting in what might be called a “qualified dualism” with a sense of metaphysical or metacosmic transcendence. For Zhu Xi, pattern—also called “Way”—is the metaphysical ultimate, which is logically, ontologically, and normatively prior to psychophysical energy and upon which the cosmic creativity of the latter is dependent. Following the Daoist bestowal of an ontological depth upon the Way, he interprets the classical duality of the Way and the vessel of the Appended Remarks in such a manner that the duality comes to resemble the Western distinction between the metaphysical and the physical, as can be seen from the following well-known remark: “Pattern is the Way above physical form [形而上之道] and the root from which all things are born. Psychophysical energy, by contrast, is the vessel with physical form [形而下之器] and the instrument by which all things are produced.”¹⁹

Nonetheless, in contrast to the substantialistic portrayals of the metaphysical ultimate as unchanging divine substance found in the dominant strains of classical Western theism and Hinduism, Zhu Xi explains pattern as a kind of dynamic ontological creativity—that is, as an incessant activity of patterning, structuring, and harmonizing at the very root of the cosmos, including the production and reproduction of psychophysical energy itself.²⁰ For him, pattern is the Change of which the Classic of Change speaks, but now located in a deeper ontological context than the one that the Classic itself may have envisioned. At the same time, over against the an-archic and chaophilic construals of the metaphysical ultimate as vacuity, emptiness, and nothing found in the Daoist tradition (and in certain strands of East Asian Buddhism), Zhu Xi assigns ultimate rational determinability and orderliness to the intrinsic being of pattern. In other words, while there is an “apophatic” aspect to the manner in which the Daoist tradition depicts the creatively harmonizing movement of the Way—its movement of reversal—as originating ultimately from the chaos of the indeterminate and unnameable Way, Zhu Xi construes the very being of pattern “kataphatically” as consisting in none other than the harmonizing “logic” of its creatively harmonizing movement.

Probably nothing is more indicative of Zhu Xi’s kataphatic conception of pattern than his use of the symbol of the Great Ultimate to illustrate pattern’s dynamically and rationally creative operations.²¹ As shown in chapter 1, the Great Ultimate is a cosmological symbol depicting the ever-shifting dynamic union of the constantly self-differentiating and mutually dependent opposites of the receptive and active psychophysical energies. One of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian predecessors, Zhou Dunyi (周敦頤1017–1073 C.E.), makes an innovative move ostensibly to make the Great Ultimate a symbol of the metaphysical ultimate in his enormously influential Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate (太極圖說 Taiji tushou).²² In that treatise, however, Zhou Dunyi places the term “the Non-Ultimate [無極 wuji],”²³ which originally appears in chapter 28 of the Laozi, alongside the word “Great Ultimate” in such as way that the Non-Ultimate appears to come before the Great Ultimate as the origin of all things: “The Non-Ultimate, therefore, the Great Ultimate [無極而太極 wuji er taiji].” Having been influenced by the Daoist tradition to a considerable degree, he probably intends a hierarchical relationship between the two Ultimates in which the structuring cosmic power of the Great Ultimate is rooted in the vacuity of the Non-Ultimate, just as the generative power of the Way named as the mother of the world is subordinated to the chaotic nothingness of the unnameable Way in the Laozi.²⁴ In other words, Zhou Dunyi’s Great Ultimate remains a cosmological symbol pointing to the creatively harmonizing movement of psychophysical energy and therefore does not represent a truly innovative advance beyond the triadic Daoist paradigm of the Way, psychophysical energy, and many vessels.²⁵

Although highly respectful of Zhou Dunyi’s pioneering attempt, Zhu Xi shows his originality in his rejection of a hierarchical reading of the relationship between the two Ultimates suggested by his predecessor. Reading the character 而 (er) as meaning juxtaposition (“and”) instead of sequence (“therefore”), Zhu Xi argues that the Non-Ultimate merely names the indeterminacy of the Great Ultimate abstracted from its actual, determinately harmonizing operations and imaginatively and logically inferred as existing “prior” to the latter. In other words, the Non-Ultimate is a symbol pointing to the transcendence of the Great Ultimate, being beyond ordinary conceptions characterized by dualities such as being and nothingness.²⁶ For him, therefore, there is literally nothing beyond and more ultimate than the Great Ultimate.²⁷ As the metaphysical and ontological symbol pointing to pattern, the Great Ultimate gives witness to the fact that, far from being utterly undifferentiated, chaos-like, and ineffable no-thing, pattern is essentially a repetitive series of creatively harmonizing movements of the interdependently self-differentiating binary principles of the receptive and the active, which captures the “logic” of the movements of psychophysical energy’s two modalities.²⁸ To put this another way, the Great Ultimate as the symbol of pattern points to the latter’s very being as the ground and “logic” of the movements of psychophysical energy, that is, that which makes psychophysical energy move the way it moves.²⁹ The claim that the Non-Ultimate is not more ultimate than the Great Ultimate means precisely that, underneath the determinable “logic” of the creatively harmonizing operations of psychophysical energy, there lies no arbitrary and irrational power or activity independent of and more ultimate than that “logic.”

Zhu Xi’s essentially kataphatic construal of the metaphysical ultimate, however, faces a problem. If pattern is none other than the creatively harmonizing logic of psychophysical energy’s movement, in what sense is it a creative activity of patterning, structuring, and harmonizing at the very root of the cosmos—namely, a kind of dynamic ontological creativity? How is the primordial ontological creativity of pattern to be differentiated, if at all, from the cosmic creativity of psychophysical energy supposedly dependent on and derived from the former? In resolving this problem, Zhu Xi utilizes one of the key concepts in East Asian thought, namely, the substance-function (體用 ti-yong) distinction, and applies it to the pattern–psychophysical energy relation. The substance-function distinction refers to the distinction made between the original state of a thing, that is, its nature or potential to act, and the state after it has been activated or put into use in response to another within a relational context.³⁰ An important point to note here is that, for Zhu Xi, substance and function are interrelated and interdependent concepts, inseparable from each other and, strictly speaking, without one having either logical or temporal priority over the other.³¹ For the sake of analysis they can be isolated from one another and examined as abstractions, but in concrete reality they are indivisible.

What is notable in relation to the substance-function distinction as applied to the relationship between pattern and psychophysical energy is that, although Zhu Xi posits pattern as the metaphysical ultimate in the sense of dynamic ontological creativity or ground, he denies pattern its own creative dynamism independent of that of psychophysical energy.³² Pattern is here allowed only an ontologically conceived abstract status of formal and final cause, to borrow Aristotelian terminology, which needs to be activated by the dynamism of psychophysical energy to be effective. That is how Zhu Xi structures the pattern-psychophysical energy relation in a thoroughly interdependent fashion: assign to pattern the status of substance, that is, the potential to act, minus the “potency” of that potential, and give that potency over to the other, that is, psychophysical energy, by whose power pattern becomes functional. In this interdependent relation pattern functions as the ultimate ideal horizon of becoming for the cosmic creativity of psychophysical energy without itself actually being an agency in its own right. Furthermore, it is even the case that pattern can be called dynamic ontological creativity only insofar as it is inseparably united with psychophysical energy in concrete reality.³³ Because of the interdependent substance-function construction of the pattern–psychophysical energy relation, pattern as the creative activity of “patterning,” “structuring,” or “harmonizing” at the root of the universe refers to pattern as function, not to pattern as substance. This implies that, while pattern is transcendent of the physical universe in the sense of being the latter’s creative ground, it remains in a sense dependent on the latter to be the creative ground in the concrete sense of the term. What this in turn means is that pattern’s incessant production and reproduction of psychophysical energy can even be construed as psychophysical energy’s self-generation, provided that the coming to be of psychophysical energy as raw dynamism is viewed as always already guided by the harmonizing mandate of pattern and thereby always already given a value-orientation toward order.³⁴ In sum, although Zhu Xi insists on the logical, ontological, and normative priority of pattern over psycho-physical energy and the need to distinguish the two from each other firmly, he also emphasizes their inseparability in concrete reality.³⁵

Zhu Xi’s nondualistic and nonreductionistic construal of the pattern–psychophysical energy relation on the basis of the substance-function distinction lies behind his affirmation of the Great Ultimate’s universal presence in every single being or process in the world to endow it with its individual nature (性 xing).³⁶ On the one hand, individual thing-events are what they are because they are each endowed with their patterns, that is to say, their individually unique patternings of the receptive and active forces in relation to one another, which enable them to be harmonies (和 he) and constitute their respective natures, more precisely their embodied and concretized “physical natures” (氣質之性 qizhi zhi xing). In this sense, each of them can be said to possess its own individual Great Ultimate, which is precisely pattern as function. On the other hand, the Great Ultimate represents the one Pattern or Harmony, namely, pattern as substance, which is no other than the share d “logic” of such diversely harmonious patternings of the receptive and active forces that give rise to the myriad thing-events of the world.³⁷ From the perspective of the individual thing-events, the one Pattern could be called their “original nature” (本然之性 benran zhi xing) in abstraction from its dynamic concretization into being their respective physical natures.³⁸ It is in that sense somewhat similar to Plato’s Idea of the Good, that is, the Idea of perfection in which all the individually perfect ideas participate, though without the dualistic separation of the ideal and the material.³⁹ Zhu Xi employs the Buddhist metaphor of the moon and its many reflections to make the point: Although there is only one moon in the sky, when its light is scattered on rivers and lakes, it can be seen in many places. That, however, does not mean the moon has been split, as what is seen on the surface of rivers and lakes is the moon in its entirety.⁴⁰

Nonetheless, a question remains regarding the precise relationship between the one substantial Pattern and many functional individual patterns. Although the images of the moon on the surfaces of rivers and lakes are identical to one another, reflecting the same moon in the sky, the individual patterns in the ten thousand thing-events of the world are not identical to one another, even though there may be degrees of similarity among them. The “original nature” of human beings may be one, but the “physical nature,” namely, its concrete embodiment in the diverse bodily coalescences of psychophysical energy found among humans, emerges as many. Precisely what happens when pattern is activated by the dynamism of psychophysical energy for the one Pattern as substance to become many individual patterns as function—that is, for the one abstract Harmony to become many concretely and creatively harmonizing acts? Zhu Xi answers this question in his highly consequential reading of the famous dictum of one of his Neo-Confucian precursors, Cheng Yi (程頤 1033–1107 C.E.): “Empty and tranquil, and without any sign, and yet all figures are already luxuriantly present [沖漠無朕, 萬象森然已具 chongmo wuzhen, wanxiang senran yiju].”⁴¹

The saying is meant by Cheng Yi to capture the gist of another famous saying of his, expressing the thorny ontological problem of one and many: “Pattern is one, but its manifestations are many [理一而分殊 liyi er fenshu].”⁴² Zhu Xi reads Cheng Yi’s sayings as referring to the Great Ultimate⁴³ and renders an original interpretation of the Great Ultimate in terms of substance and function:

The receptive psychophysical energy and the active psychophysical energy, [the relationship between] the ruler and the minister, the father and the son—these are all concrete things and affairs, what people do. They are with physical form, i.e., they constitute the differentiated assembly of the ten thousand figures of the world. All of these [things and affairs] have a pattern according to which they ought to be, the so-called “way” or path upon which they ought to travel. It [pattern] is what is above physical form; it is what is “empty and tranquil, and without any sign.” If we are to speak in terms of what exists above physical form, then that which is “empty and tranquil” is in essence substance; and its activation among concrete affairs and things is function. If we are to speak in terms of what exists with physical form, then concrete things and events constitute substance, and the manifestation of their patterns is function. (Italics mine)⁴⁴

According to Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the saying through the prism of the substance-function distinction, the phrase “empty and tranquil, and without any sign” points to the Great Ultimate as substance. When taken by itself totally in abstraction from its operation in the world, that is, as pattern without psychophysical energy, the Great Ultimate may be seen as the indeterminate and quiescent One, namely, the so-called Non-Ultimate (無極 wuji), interpreted by Zhu Xi not as pure emptiness or chaotic nothingness but as representing the transcendent and nonconcrete aspect of the one Pattern as pure potentiality for harmony. As activated “among concrete things and affairs,” that is, as function or united with psychophysical energy in concrete reality, however, the Great Ultimate is in the world, differentiated into and encompassing an infinite number of dynamically coalescing patterns of receptive and active psychophysical energies, as captured by the phrase, “All figures are already luxuriantly present.”⁴⁵ This means that it is none other than psychophysical energy that provides the concrete link between one and many, that is, between the one Pattern as substance and the many individual patterns as function. In other words, psychophysical energy is the very reason for there being multiplicity and difference in the world. With its bifurcated modalities of receptive and active forces that represent the primordial existence of difference in the world, psychophysical energy serves as the principle of concretization in accordance with which one indeterminate and abstract potential of dynamic patterning, which is the one Pattern (or the Great Ultimate as substance), becomes delimited into many actual creative patternings of psychophysical energy that constitute the ten thousand thing-events of the world.⁴⁶ Psychophysical energy is the one responsible for the concretization of the single “original nature” into the multiplicity of the “physical nature” unique to each human individual.

Thus accompanied by his answer to the problem of the relationship between the one abstract metaphysical Harmony and the many concrete physical harmonies of the world, Zhu Xi’s nondualistic and nonreductionistic account of the pattern–psychophysical energy relation lays the basis of his “moral metaphysics.”⁴⁷ His moral metaphysics takes the Neo-Confucian avowal of the Mencian affirmation of the intrinsically empathetic character of human nature and reconciles it with the Neo-Confucian denial of an intrinsic moral teleology to the “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy” so central to the Confucian project of becoming fully human. As mentioned before, because Zhu Xi identifies the Great Ultimate—or pattern—with the overarching structure or “logic” of everything that is and becomes, he affirms the Great Ultimate’s universal presence in every single being or process in the world to endow it with its individual nature. As it is present in human beings, the Great Ultimate is none other than the very humanity shared by all human beings as their inborn original nature, namely, the capacity for a radically open, empathetic, and relational selfhood that manifests itself in the Four Sprouts of creatively harmonizing feelings.⁴⁸ The moral agency that cultivates and nurtures that innate capacity resides in the human heart-mind (人心 renxin), which, as the most clear and responsive coalescence of psychophysical energy, possesses the marvelously “awakened” and therefore extraordinarily creative quality of “spirit” (神 shen) and which, as such, is the seat of consciousness and the somatic vessel of the Great Ultimate.⁴⁹

In Zhu Xi’s picture of moral self-cultivation, the most fundamental and initial activity of the human heart-mind consists in feelings and desires that are activations of human nature by one’s bodily psychophysical energy in response to concrete relational contexts. Those initial, embodied affective responses to others may follow without deviation the “mandate” of the human nature within, retain as a consequence the heart-mind’s original state of “equilibrium” (中 zhong) that perfectly mirrors the harmonizing potential of the Great Ultimate as substance or as indeterminate and quiescent One, and thereby become fitting and harmonious (和 he) to the particular relational contexts (i.e., empathetic, other-oriented, and therefore conducive to harmonious relations). They may, however, deviate from the dictates of human nature, lose the original equilibrium of the heart-mind, and become inappropriate and discordant to the relational contexts (i.e., excessive or deficient, being self-oriented and unempathetic). The role of the heart-mind’s moral agency is to follow up on its initial affective responses to others in the form of intentional deliberation and judgment in order to nurture the relationally harmonious feelings while bringing under control the nonharmonious ones.⁵⁰ When the human heart-mind fulfills this role by following without deviation the promptings of the human nature within, it is identical to what is called “the heart-mind of the Way [道心 daoxin].”⁵¹ A continued exercise of the human heart-mind’s moral agency as the heart-mind of the Way over the long haul accumulates relationally correct psychosomatic responses and judgments to such an extent that one’s psychophysical energy is habitually conditioned to respond to others in proper measures spontaneously while one’s judgment is perfected always to favor such spontaneous responses. It is in this way that the human heart-mind progressively transforms one’s individual coalescence of psychophysical energy into a clearer, more open, balanced, and responsive condition and in so doing expands the boundaries of one’s psychophysical energy beyond the self-other distinction to encompass heaven and earth—that is, the condition Mencius has called “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy.” When such a condition is reached, the perfect equilibrium of psychophysical energy would make the human heart-mind completely resonant with the “pulsation” of human nature vibrating from within to harmonize the self creatively with the rest of the world, enabling one to join the ranks of the fulfilled human beings, namely, the “superior persons” (君子 junzi) and the sages (聖人 shengren), who have an enduring and unwavering possession of the heart-mind of the Way.

Hence, the Neo-Confucian project of becoming fully human as outlined by Zhu Xi has a cosmic dimension, since the full realization of the Great Ultimate as humanity (仁 ren) within the context of interhuman and social relations resonates with the creatively harmonizing operations of the Great Ultimate in the entire universe. Zhu Xi explicitly identifies humanity in the sense of generous and empathetic self-giving with the other pattern-endowed natures of the myriad thing-events of the world, which are understood to be no other than their ceaseless and harmonious creativity (literally “life-giving intention [生意 shengyi]”).⁵² Their harmonious creativity expresses itself in the heart-mind, which they are all seen to possess individually; and their heart-minds mirror the “fecund heart-mind of heaven and earth [天地生物之心 tiandi shengwu zhi xin],” which is the name for the creativity of the cosmos reflecting the universal presence of the Great Ultimate.⁵³ Given this cosmic context, the ultimate goal of human life, human fulfillment, can therefore be said to lie in achieving the heart-mind of the Way, which perfectly mirrors the fecund heart-mind of heaven and earth, and thereby participating fully in the universally and harmoniously transformative creativity of pattern that is found everywhere and represented by the symbol of the Great Ultimate.

Zhu Xi’s moral metaphysics, the outline of which is sketched in the preceding section, represents the dominant Neo-Confucian reading of the classical duality of the Way and the vessel. Similarly to the Daoist tradition, it confers an ontological depth to the Way and in so doing affirms the hierarchical interpretation of the classical duality expressed by the triad of the Way, psychophysical energy, and the myriad thing-events. It creates an ontological hierarchy between ultimate reality and the concrete thing-events of the world by subordinating psychophysical energy to the Way as pattern, or the Great Ultimate. As such, it shares part of the ambiguity that the Daoist tradition presents when it comes to offering an inspiring resource for the comparative task of employing the category of psychophysical energy to counter the subordinate construction of the Spirit’s place and role within the divine trinitarian hierarchy of classical Christian theology.

At the same time, however, Zhu Xi’s moral metaphysics construes the ontological depth of the Way differently from the Daoist tradition in rejecting the Daoist an-archic and chaophilic interpretation of the Way in favor of a more kataphatic rendition of it, in which there is nothing more ultimate than the discernible order and “logic” of the Way’s creatively harmonizing movement in union with psychophysical energy. The Way, as the pattern of the Great Ultimate, is not dependent on and subordinate to the Non-Ultimate as the chaotic and indeterminate nothingness of the unnameable Way. Accordingly, Zhu Xi’s conception of the Way as the ontological ultimate appears at least to be capable of laying to rest the concern about the seeming tendency of the Daoist paradigm to absorb the concrete ethical and social orders into a totalizing metaphysics of one indiscriminate emptiness, as pointed out in the previous chapter.

But there is another, different risk lurking in the ontological hierarchy created by Zhu Xi’s metaphysical account. Because it lacks the kind of internal critical principle found in the Daoist apophatic account, it seems to have difficulty preventing any humanly discerned, determined, and instituted Way from claiming to have a lock on ultimacy. It assumes no invisible flow of chaotic Change underneath the existing visible and physical order of human society and the cosmos (“what is”) declared to be ultimate—in other words, the kind of ontological depth required to relativize the allegedly ultimate order of the present and to provide again and again openings of spontaneous freedom and novelty (“what could be”). The Way as pattern, the Great Ultimate, or the original human nature appears to be in danger of being ossified and even hypostatized into a preexisting ideal order that is imposed on or at the least presented as an arch-paradigm to the myriad emergent orders of the world to the extent that the latter are not freed to become “so of themselves.” The duality of the Way and the vessel seems here to be on the verge of turning into a dualism, despite Zhu Xi’s dynamic construction of the pattern–psychophysical energy relation in terms of the nondualistic and nonreductionistic substance-function relation.

Zhu Xi’s moral metaphysics, however, may be read in such a way that the logical and ontological ultimacy it assigns to the kataphatically conceived pattern could avoid being likened to the ontotheological grounding of a self-subsistent and immutable God in classical Western theism, harboring the chaophobic and imperialistic “logic of the One.” The Way, or pattern, as the ontological ultimate is symbolized by the Great Ultimate because the successive movement of the receptive and the active constitutes its very being as becoming. In other words, the ontological ultimate is conceived dynamically as a repetitive series of creatively harmonizing movements of the interdependently self-differentiating binary principles of the receptive and the active. This means that within the incessant creative activity of patterning, structuring, and harmonizing at the root of the cosmos, there is always a receptive moment, the phase of yin, in which the dynamic ontological creativity “contracts,” or pulls back into itself, after having “extended,” or pushed beyond itself, in the active moment or the yang phase.⁵⁴ Given the substance-function construction of the relationship between pattern and psychophysical energy, this dipolar movement of the ontological creativity of the one Pattern is not to be treated as other to the dipolar movement of the cosmic creativity of the individual patterns riding on the dynamic of psychophysical energy, but always to be seen as interpenetrated and “in concert with” the latter. In other words, the receptive moment in the creative harmonizing operation of the Great Ultimate can be conceived as the phase in which the myriad achieved patterns or harmonies of the world “wane” and “flow back” into the one abstract Pattern, and in so doing provide the factual basis of old spent orders in response to which the one Pattern embarks on a new stage of creative issuing forth into many novel emergent orders of the world.⁵⁵

Such a “spiral”—progressively cyclical—understanding of the Great Ultimate’s creative movement is reflected in Zhu Xi’s conception of the process of moral self-cultivation. Within this process, there is a kind of “feedback loop” between the moral agency of the heart-mind of the Way and that of the human heart-mind. It is only by following the mandate or “promptings” of the original nature or the Great Ultimate within, which can be named the moral agency of the heart-mind of the Way, that the human heart-mind can act on its initial affective responses to others in a manner that intentionally nurtures relationally harmonious feelings. At the same time, it is precisely the accumulated experience of relationally harmonious psychosomatic responses and judgments exercised by the human heart-mind over the long haul that enables the heart-mind of the Way to “come into being” in the fullest and most concrete sense of the term, as seen in the unimpeded realization of the mandate of the original nature achieved by the heart-minds of superior persons and sages whose bodily psychophysical energy has attained the perfect clarity and equilibrium of the “vast, flood-like psychophysical energy.” One could say that there is a receptive moment, the yin phase, within the “fecund heart-mind of heaven and earth”—that is, within the universal and cosmic operation of the heart-mind of the Way carried out in and through the myriad human or creaturely heart-minds. In this receptive phase, the relationally correct psychosomatic experience of the myriad human or creaturely heart-minds, which has enabled them to become more resonant bodies, “flow back” into the heart-mind of the Way to “inform,” “nurture,” and “develop” it further. As a consequence, in its active or yang phase, the heart-mind of the Way can better guide the myriad human or creaturely heart-minds with the harmonizing impulse of the original nature, for it is now capable of issuing forth into the Four Sprouts of creatively harmonizing feelings in them with less obstruction and distortion than previously, due to their now more resonant bodies. In sum, the human or creaturely heart-mind on the one hand and the heart-mind of the Way on the other, which are both “spiritual” (shen-like) embodiments of the metaphysical ultimate (the Way, pattern, or the Great Ultimate) in psychophysical energy, are related to each other in a nondualistic and nonreductionistic relationship of mutual influence even as the latter functions as the transcendently normative ground and immanent telos of the former.

Nevertheless, I find conceptual weakness in the way Zhu Xi structures the pattern–psychophysical energy relation as a hierarchically binary construction of unity over multiplicity, which lays a considerable roadblock to the spiral conception of the Great Ultimate’s creatively harmonizing movement just suggested as germane to his theory of self-cultivation. It undermines the nondualistic and nonreductionist intent of his overall thought and potentially poses a threat to the pivotal role of the heart-mind of the Way in the Neo-Confucian project of becoming fully human. The locus classicus of the problem is found in his well-known statement, “Pattern unites, [whereas] psychophysical energy differentiates [理同氣異 litong qiyi].”⁵⁶ Here the crux of the matter is that, although it is conceivable for Zhu Xi to attribute whatever unity found in the world to one psychophysical energy shared by all, he nonetheless denies psychophysical energy any unifying and harmonizing function of its own.⁵⁷ According to his account, the unavoidable excesses and deficiencies in psychophysical energy’s differentiating and coalescing movements continually give rise to the kinds of psychophysical energy that are opaque, impure, turbid, coarse, indolent, and therefore less open and communicative. Zhu Xi locates the source of evil, which is understood as selfishness, in these nonresonating and uncommunicative kinds of psychophysical energy—the kinds of psychophysical energy that would obstruct the full realization of humanity as empathy.⁵⁸ By contrast, he regards pattern as never losing its original condition as one abstract unifying potential (one Pattern) even in the midst of its concretizations into myriad actual patternings of psychophysical energy (many individual patterns). Zhu Xi’s statement, “Pattern unites; psychophysical energy differentiates,” captures this contrast in a succinct fashion.

Such an asymmetrical treatment of pattern vis-à-vis psychophysical energy in regard to their respective unifying and harmonizing power gives rise to two thorny issues, one ontological and the other ethical. First, as shown in the earlier quote and in line with his inordinate emphasis on pattern’s unity, Zhu Xi construes pattern “by itself” (i.e., the Great Ultimate as substance) as the indeterminate and quiescent One standing for the transcendent and nonconcrete aspect of the pure potentiality for harmony. It is only when pattern becomes functional, that is, as it is united with and activated by psychophysical energy, that he depicts pattern as being multiple. If multiplicity is introduced into pattern only insofar as pattern is united with and activated by psychophysical energy, for which manyness is intrinsic, then is that not a testament to the fact that pattern is originarily and primarily one, and only derivatively and dependently many? There is an added force to this question, as long as Zhu Xi posits pattern as the metaphysical ultimate in the sense of dynamic ontological creativity or ground that has logical, ontological, and normative priority over psychophysical energy. Despite his use of the symmetrically construed substance-function relation, an undercurrent of ontological asymmetry is undeniable. Although Zhu Xi argues firmly against speaking of pattern alone in abstraction, insofar as pattern is the metaphysical ultimate, it is hard to dispel the suspicion that multiplicity belongs to pattern only penultimately and derivatively, only by virtue of its inevitable association with psychophysical energy. Given the presence of ontological asymmetry that makes psychophysical energy—and its inherent delimiting dynamic—depend for its being on pattern, the possibility that pattern’s multiplicity may not be ultimate threatens the ontological ultimacy and primordiality of multiplicity as such.

This in turn puts into question the spiral conception of the Great Ultimate’s creatively harmonizing movement, which Zhu Xi appears to offer. The ontologically penultimate and derivative multiplicity of the concretely achieved orders of the world are here in danger of being “brought in line with” and, for all intents and purposes, disappearing into the one ultimate Order or Harmony of their ontological ground when they “flow back” into the one abstract Pattern in its receptive phase, notwithstanding Zhu Xi’s dynamic and nonsubstantialistic conception of the latter. If the multiply achieved patterns of the world—the ten thousand thing-events—are assimilated into the one overarching primordial Pattern, with no internal differences or contrasts between the factual old and the hypothetical new remaining in it to generate creative tensions, then there would be no novelty introduced in the one Pattern’s active or extensive stage of creative unfolding into many concrete patterns. The process of generation and regeneration would be purely cyclical, tantamount to an “eternal return of the Same” that dynamically completes the logic of the One.

It needs to be said at this juncture that Zhu Xi does make allusions that seem to draw a picture of the Great Ultimate as multiple in and of itself, referring to it sometimes as the sum or totality of all the individual patterns rather than the one Pattern.⁵⁹ The most prominent reference of this kind goes as follows:

In general, the Great Ultimate is the unfathomable wonder of the original state; and activity and tranquility constitute the mechanism of its riding [psychophysical energy]. The Great Ultimate is the Way above physical form; and the receptive and active psychophysical energies are the vessels with physical form. When looked at from the perspective of its [the Great Ultimate’s] manifestation, therefore, activity and tranquility are not co-present at the same time, and the receptive and the active do not occupy the same place, yet the Great Ultimate itself is present everywhere. When looked at from the perspective of its concealment, it is “empty and tranquil, and without any sign,” but the patterns of activity and tranquility, of receptive and active, are all already furnished within it. (Italics mine)⁶⁰

In other words, from the perspective of the Great Ultimate in its “manifestation” in the world (i.e., as function), while each concrete thing-event has its own individual pattern that cannot be mixed or confused with another, the Great Ultimate as the one Pattern is always copresent with each individual pattern in each thing-event, because it transcends the determinate concreteness of individual patterns. At the same time, however, from the perspective of its “concealment” (i.e., as substance), the Great Ultimate is undifferentiated and without movement, yet it nonetheless contains within itself the sum or totality of all individual patterns. In essence, what Zhu Xi seems to be saying is that the Great Ultimate is plurisingular, that is, both one indeterminate Pattern and the totality of individually differentiated patterns, even when it is taken in abstraction from its concrete existence in union with psychophysical energy. This provocative statement, which seems to contradict his valorizing emphasis on the unifying role of pattern over against psychophysical energy as the exclusive principle of differentiation, is however not really explained in any further detail. Although Zhu Xi makes quite a few references to the plurisingular nature of the Great Ultimate as it is present to the concrete thing-events of the world, no clarification is given as to how the Great Ultimate can be primordially and ultimately multiple in any way different from its derivative and penultimate multiplicity among the ten thousand thing-events.⁶¹ The above quote, therefore, sits in uneasy tension with the statement, “Pattern unites, whereas psychophysical energy differentiates,” and fails to provide a sufficient ground to dismiss the question about the ontological ultimacy of multiplicity in Zhu Xi’s thought.

Second, Zhu Xi’s denial of an independent unifying power to psycho-physical energy, when coupled with his relegation of multiplicity to penultimacy, presents a challenge to the moral agency of the heart-mind required for the project of self-cultivation. The problem lies in the fact that the heart-mind itself is a coalescence of psychophysical energy, albeit the clearest and most responsive—“spiritual”—kind. The human nature or pattern within the heart-mind cannot be activated without the dynamism provided by the very thing that it is supposed to guide and control, namely, the spontaneous dynamism of psychophysical energy. Since pattern is only the a priori, abstract, and general value of “unity” and “harmony” made determinate in diverse ways by the differentiating dynamism of psychophysical energy, and not an independent agency with its own dynamism to shape harmonious patternings of relations, human moral agency is in fact completely dependent on the power of psychophysical energy in order to be active. But since Zhu Xi takes psychophysical energy solely to be the principle of difference and denies it any spontaneously unifying and harmonizing function, it raises a critical question about the effectiveness and reliability of human moral agency. If the moral agency of the human subject is supposed to be driven solely by a morally neutral dynamism of ever-proliferating random differentiation, having only a passive map or guide that merely prescribes possible forms of order and their ultimate harmony,⁶² it is then definitely conceivable that the human heart-mind more often than not caves in to its own relentlessly differentiating dynamism and creates forms of self-other opposition consisting in self-centered, relationally indifferent, and nonharmonious psychosomatic responses to others. Especially strengthening the doubt is the common Neo-Confucian observation that the vast majority of people are born with opaque, turbid, and indolent—that is, unbalanced, nonresonating, uncommunicative, and therefore involuted—kinds of psychophysical energy to begin with, which makes the guiding beacon of pattern in them all the dimmer.⁶³ When this observation is coupled with Zhu Xi’s assignment of ontological penultimacy to the multiplicity of local patterns derived from the delimitation of the one abstract Pattern by the morally ambiguous, relationally indifferent differentiating dynamism of psychophysical energy, then a devaluation of the moral agency of the vast majority of people becomes inexorable. Their heart-minds are seen to fall largely under the sway of their spontaneously self-centered psychosomatic responses and to fail to achieve the self-transcendent, empathetic, relational, and harmonizing moral agency, namely, the heart-mind of the Way, that is characteristic of fulfilled human beings.

Such doubt about the effectiveness and reliability of human moral agency results in a tendency to distrust spontaneously emerging human feelings and desires. The so-called Seven Feelings (七情 qiqing)⁶⁴—pleasure, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred, and desire—representing ordinary, everyday feelings come under a cloud of suspicion, because they are perceived as prone to lose the middle and to become either excessive or deficient, unbefitting particular relational contexts, and therefore not capable of readily serving as the vehicle of the Four Sprouts of creatively harmonizing feelings and of facilitating an effective presence of the heart-mind of the Way. This wariness is abundantly evident in the Neo-Confucian opposition of “Heavenly Pattern” (天理 tianli), which is “public” (公 gong), to “human desire” (人欲 renyu), which is “private” (私 si), and the hierarchical social ordering in which the ruling class of cultured male gentry, who are versed in the classics and thus trained in the way of the sages to exercise public leadership, stand as “superior persons” (君子 junzi) over women, the working mass of commoners, and nomadic “barbarians” as “inferior persons” (小人 xiaoren) unfit to participate fully in the work of creatively harmonizing the world.⁶⁵ What is thereby considerably weakened is the thought that the heart-mind of the Way as human-transhuman moral agency may be understood as emerging “in concert with”—in a mutually constitutive spiral dialectic with—many self-creative practices of somatic cultivation in various relationally embodied (racialized, gendered, sexualized, class-located, etc.) contexts. The heart-mind of the Way is here in danger of turning into an abstract, blank tablet upon which a dominant group can inscribe its own parochial patterns and claim for itself the false universality of representing the Heavenly Pattern allegedly discovered by the ancient sages and preserved in the classics.⁶⁶ The vast multitude of human and creaturely heart-minds are to submit themselves to the concretely—for example, ritually—patterned inscriptions of the Heavenly Pattern found in the classics and taught by their guardians, namely, the ruling class of male literati and ritual masters.

The consequences of Zhu Xi’s failure to provide a sympathetic carrier or vehicle of pattern’s creatively harmonizing mandate, which is called for by his interdependent construction of the pattern–psychophysical energy relationship, makes one search for an alternative conception of the ontological status of the multiplicity of patterns accompanied by a different way of envisioning the dynamism of psychophysical energy. Before I move on to some of the options that have emerged within the Confucian tradition, I think it is an opportune time to engage in a comparative reflection involving the critique of Western theism, both classical and modern, launched by Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947 C.E.) and his “philosophy of organism,” propounding a dipolar process conception of God. His philosophy, which assigns categorial ultimacy to both one and many, envisages within God a primordial presence of infinite multiplicity of “forms of definiteness” as pure potentialities, and in so doing presents a challenging counterexample to the derivative multiplicity of patterns in Zhu Xi’s thought. What is more, precisely due to the primordiality of the multiplicity of pure potentialities within God, Whitehead’s dipolar process conception of God coupled with its linear trajectory provides helpful conceptual remedies to the deficiencies in Zhu Xi’s construal of the spiral movement of the Great Ultimate as reflected in the workings of the heart-mind of the Way in self-cultivation. Last and not least, Whitehead’s notion of creativity, to which he also assigns categorial ultimacy, points to a fruitful way of reconceiving the dynamism of psychophysical energy so that it would be equipped with a creatively unifying and harmonizing function of its own.