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

2. Of the various terms used in missiology to capture the dynamic between the gospel and the “field” of mission, such as “indigenization,” “accommodation,” “acculturation,” “adaptation,” “incarnation,” “inculturation,” “contextualization,” and so on, three have been the subject of prolonged debates: “indigenization,” “inculturation,” and “contextualization” (Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002], pp. 26–27; Ruy O. Costa, “Introduction: Inculturation, Indigenization, and Contextualization,” in One Faith, Many Cultures: Inculturation, Indigenization, and Contextualization, ed. Ruy O. Costa [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books; Cambridge, Mass.: Boston Theological Institute, 1988], pp. ix–xvii; Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985], 5–6). Because of its connection with colonialism and imperialism (e.g., the British Empire’s policy of replacing British personnel in colonial government with local “indigenous” leadership), the word “indigenization” has come to be questioned (Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, p. 5). It is true that the European conquerors, settlers, missionaries, and capitalist entrepreneurs saw “the indigenous” in opposition to what they thought was their advanced and universal civilization. Nonetheless, the nineteenth-century missiologists Henry Venn, Rufus Anderson, and John L. Nevius advanced the mission method of establishing “indigenous” churches with the principle of three “selfs” (self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating) that emphasized local “indigenous” leadership. Later known as the “Nevius method,” this mission strategy assumed a symmetrical relation of the missionaries to the indigenous cultures (i.e., each culture was to be approached in its own terms) and rejected the mechanical replication model of mission. The Nevius method was, however, largely rejected in the age of imperialism and racism, most notably by the missionaries in China where Nevius had developed his method through much field experience, except in Korea where it was enthusiastically accepted with much positive result (Wilbert R. Shenk, “The Missionary Encounter with Culture since the Seventeenth Century,” in Appropriate Christianity, ed. Charles H. Kraft [Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2005], pp. 38–45). In the light of this more positive assessment of the category of indigeneity in regard to the power dynamic involved, I am going to use the terms “indigenization” and “inculturation” more or less synonymously, preferring “inculturation” as a broader category. Peter C. Phan also understands the category of inculturation to encompass indigenization (Peter C. Phan, In Our Own Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2003], pp. 4–9). For the twin tasks of cultural indigenization/inculturation and social liberation, see David M. Thompson, “Introduction: Mapping Asian Christianity in the Context of World Christianity,” in Christian Theology in Asia, ed. Sebastian C. H. Kim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 11–14. For the presence of similar tasks in Africa, see Emmanuel Martey, African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993).

3. Here I follow Schreiter’s preference for the phrase “local theology” over “contextual theology” (Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, p. 6).

4. Some examples are Kosuke Koyama, Water Buffalo Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1974); C. S. Song, Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979); K. P. Aleaz, Christian Thought through Advaita Vedanta (Delhi: ISPCK, 1996); M. Thomas Thangaraj, The Crucified Guru: An Experiment in Cross-Cultural Christology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); Yoon Sung-bum, Gidokgyowa hanguk sasang [Christianity and Korean thought] (Seoul: Daehan gidokgyo seohoe, 1964); Ryu Dong-sik, Hanguk sinhagui gwangmaek [The mineral vein of Korean theology] (Seoul: Dasan Geulbang, 2003); Jung Young Lee, The Trinity in Asian Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

5. Song, Third-Eye Theology, pp. 11–13.

6. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, pp. 6–12. In the view of Kim Kyoung-jae, one of the most prominent tochakhwa (indigenizing) theologians of Korea, the sowing model—championed by the fundamentalist Western missionaries—is more like Schreiter’s translation model, as it regards the soil as a barren and desolate wilderness full of weeds and thistles (i.e., traditional religions) that needed to be pulled out. Kyoung Jae Kim, Christianity and the Encounter of Asian Religions: Method of Correlation, Fusion of Horizons, and Paradigm Shifts in the Korean Grafting Process (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1994), p. 121.

7. The seed, when sprouted, uses the nutrients in the soil to grow. In another one of Kim Kyoung-jae’s model, that is, the “yeast” model, this sense of unilaterality is stronger, as yeast penetrates the dough and transforms it, akin to H. Richard Niebuhr’s model of “Christ the Transformer of Culture.” Kyoung-jae Kim, Christianity and the Encounter of Asian Religions, p. 131.

8. Ibid., pp. 135–41. Here Kim is relying on the ideas of Ryu Dong-sik, one of the pioneers of Korean tochakhwa theology.

9. Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), pp. 43–44. Peter Phan goes a step further to introduce the notion of “inter-multicultural” theology within the context of a multicultural society like the United States. Peter C. Phan, Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2003), p. 10.

10. Schreither, New Catholicity, pp. 65–68; Kim, Christianity and the Encounter of Asian Religions, pp. 140–41. Another model discussed by Kim, the “converging” model pioneered by the minjung theologian Suh Nam-dong, also resonates with the bilateral nature of Schreiter’s intercultural model, as its ruling metaphor depicts two streams (the gospel and the local culture) coming together to form a larger river. Nonetheless, Kim regards it as not as satisfactory as the grafting model, because it sees no qualitative difference between the two tributaries and in so doing fails to appreciate fully the ultimacy of the cross and resurrection events of Jesus Christ for Christians. Kim, Christianity and the Encounter of Asian Religions, pp. 132–35.

11. For the indigenization-contextualization debate, see Shoki Coe, “Contextualizing Theology,” in Third World Theologies: Mission Trend No. 3, ed. Gerald H. Anderson and T. F. Stansky (New York: Paulist Press; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 19–24. The concept of contextualization was introduced in 1972 by the World Council of Churches in response to the need of mission to address social issues, especially the struggles for justice and human rights in the Third World. Ministry in Context, published by the WCC Theological Education Fund (of which Coe was the director), states: “Indigenization tends to be used in the sense of responding to the Gospel in terms of a traditional culture. Contextualization, while not ignoring this, takes into account the process of secularism, technology and the struggle for human justice, which characterizes the historical moment of nations in the Third World [Ministry in Context, 20]” (quoted in Costa, “Introduction: Inculturation, Indigenization, and Contextualization,” xii). Whether or not the indigenization model was already doing much of what the new contextualizing model claimed to do, as Simon Kwan argues, the need for a genuine local theology to tackle the issue of social liberation was certainly highlighted by the debate. Simon Shui-Man Kwan, “From Indigenization to Contextualization: A Change in Discursive Practice Rather Than a Shift in Paradigm,” Studies in World Christianity 11, no. 2 (2005): 236–50.

12. Thompson, “Introduction: Mapping Asian Christianity,” pp. 11–12.

13. See the seminal essays in Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, ed. the Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983).

14. David Kwang-sun Suh, The Korean Minjung in Christ (Hong Kong: Christian Conference of Asia, 1991).

15. See the essays, formative of the movement, in A Reader in Dalit Theology, ed. Arvind P. Nirmal (Madras: Gurukul Theological Seminary, 1990). See also Sathianathan Clarke, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

16. Ruy O. Costa defines the concept of contextualization succinctly vis-à-vis indigenization and inculturation: “In summary: discussions on inculturation focus on the symbolic exchange between the faith being preached and the receiving culture. Debates over indigenization include this cultic agenda but go a step further with the inclusion of conscious power struggles between foreign missionaries and national leaders. Reflections on contextualization represent a third level of interpretation of the faith, in which, to the cultic aspects and the intrachurch power struggles is added a process of conscientization about power struggles in the world, in which the church participates either actively or passively” (Costa, “Introduction: Inculturation, Indigenization, and Contextualization,” pp. ix–xvii). The indigenization-contextualization debate of the 1970s and 1980s has highlighted the category of contextualization as a category capable of embracing both cultural indigenization/inculturation and social liberation. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, pp. 12–16.

17. Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (London: T & T Clark, 2005); Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, eds., Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004).

18. Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 11, 36.

19. Spivak understands postcoloniality as a heritage of imperialism that the postcolonial critic must inhabit intimately yet deconstructively: “Postcoloniality—the heritage of imperialism in the rest of the globe—is a deconstructive case. As follows: Those of us from formerly colonized countries are able to communicate with each other and with the metropolis, to exchange and to establish sociality and transnationality, because we have had access to the culture of imperialism. Shall we then assign to that culture, in the words of the ethical philosopher Bernard Williams, a measure of ‘moral luck’? I think there can be no question that the answer is ‘no.’ This impossible ‘no’ to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and the everyday here and now of ‘postcoloniality’ is a case of it. Further, the political claims that are most urgent in decolonized space are tacitly recognized as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism, even culturalism. Within the historical frame of exploration, colonization, and decolonization, what is being effectively reclaimed is a series of regulative political concepts, the supposedly authoritative narrative of whose production was written elsewhere, in the social formations of Western Europe. They are thus being reclaimed, indeed claimed as concept metaphors for which no historically adequate referent may be advanced from postcolonial space.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 280–81.

20. According to Spivak, the access to citizenship (i.e., to civil society) granted one when one becomes a voter represents one of the notable examples of the symbolic circuit of mobilizing subalternity into hegemony: “When a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony.” This, Spivak argues, is absolutely to be desired, against the illusion of “preserving subalternity championed by romantic purists or primitivists. The political activist encourages the effacement of the subalternity of the subaltern out of ‘moral love.’” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 310. Spivak’s usage of the term “responsibility”—like her dialogic understanding of “speaking”—signifies not only the act of response that completes the transaction of speaker and listener, but also the ethical stance of making discursive room for the Other to exist. What she means by “ethical singularity” or “secret encounter” is no other than this call to a relationship with the Other in nonessential terms. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface and Afterword to Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps,” in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 269–70.

21. For the notion of strategic essentialism, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in The Spivak Reader, pp. 214–21. She calls this strategic appropriation of essentializing metaphysical structures or metanarratives also by the name of “deconstructive embrace” (Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 427). Serene Jones has drawn attention to the fact that the poststructuralist theoretical assumptions about the always oppressive nature of binarisms do not necessarily hold up under the pressures of concrete political struggles, and that in order to strengthen the bond of solidarity for a coalition of diverse social and cultural identities, what is called for is some kind of grand narrative that clearly defines the powers to be resisted and dismantled. Serene Jones, “Cultural Labor and Theological Critique,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 166–68.

22. R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 175–243.

23. Pui-lan Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).

24. Namsoon Kang, “Who/What Is Asian?: A Postcolonial Theological Reading of Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism,” in Postcolonial Theologies, ed. Keller, Nausner, and Rivera, pp. 100–117.

25. Taken from Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995). See also Namsoon Kang, “Reconstructing Asian Feminist Theology: Toward a Glocal Feminist Theology in an Era of Neo-Empire(s),” in Christian Theology in Asia, ed. Kim, p. 222.

26. Joerg Rieger, “Liberating God-Talk: Postcolonialism and the Challenge of the Margins,” in Postcolonial Theologies, ed. Keller, Nausner, and Rivera, pp. 219–20.

27. See Namsoon Kang’s distinction between the Empire as the globally hegemonic metanarrative of the West and the empires as locally hegemonic—mostly religious (“kyriarchal”)—narratives. “Reconstructing Asian Feminist Theology,” p. 220. Richard McBride has shown that the customary distinction between elite, hegemonic, religion and popular, “subaltern,” religion is problematic, as seen in the case of the elite-led Maitreya cult of Silla Kingdom in Korea. Richard McBride, Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaŏm Synthesis in Silla Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

28. For an example of comparative theologies that claim to remain faithful to the symbolic framework of the Christian tradition while adopting the cultural-hermeneutical framework of another religious tradition (e.g., an attempt to reformulate the symbol of God with the categories of Buddhist ontology), see Joseph S. O’Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). It is, however, questionable whether a clear-cut distinction between religion or faith, on the one hand, and cultural framework of interpretation, on the other, can indeed be made. Claude Geffré argues that the encounter between Christianity and a non-Western culture is always an encounter between two cultures (“Double Belonging and the Originality of Christianity as a Religion,” in Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, ed. Catherine Cornille [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002], pp. 93–105); Geffré quotes Panikkar’s question, “Must one be spiritually a Semite and intellectually a Greek to be a Christian?” to argue that Christianity is Semite and Greek. Inculturation, he claims, does not mean Christianity ceasing to be Western in order to be African or Asian, for there is no original, pure Christianity beyond all the doctrinal and theological developments of the intervening centuries. Inculturation is, therefore, more a conversation between Asian and African theologies and European theology, in which the cultural and historical baggage of the Christian faith of the past centuries is relativized. By the same token, it is a myth to think of inculturation as an encounter between Christianity and a pagan culture while ignoring the religious traditions that have shaped the latter’s value systems and symbolic resources. Such an attitude, he claims, reflects the modern Western prejudice priding itself on the autonomy of a secular culture and forgets that the modern Western culture is a post-Christian culture, much of whose symbolic resources derive from Christianity. In the light of this, he calls for a more positive understanding of syncretism.

29. I am using the word “community” somewhat loosely for the larger human community or the international community—that is, without implying the communitarian notion of community formed around a definite notion of common good. The common economic, political, and cultural space, be it local or transnational, refers in that sense to a much more tangible, physical, reality of togetherness, namely, a common geopolitical space. In addition to the formerly colonizing Western nation-states, instances of religiously and ethnically plural nations born in the aftermath of political decolonization are numerous—India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan, South Africa, Northern Ireland, to name just a few—of which some have been secular (such as India and Indonesia) and some have not (such as Sudan). On the transnational level, there is a kind of global culture and institution emerging from the gradually forming consensus in the international community on what constitutes the minimum conditions of human well-being, such as the global culture of human rights undergirded by the International Criminal Court or the mandate for environmental stewardship stipulated by various global accords and treaties, all of which are goaded on and further challenged by a global coalitional politics of various nongovernmental organizations and social movements against the neocolonial, labor-exploitive, and environmentally destructive forces of global capitalism. For the emergence of the global culture of human rights and the challenges made against it in the name of religious and cultural identity, see Michael Singer, “Relativism, Culture, Religion, and Identity,” in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. Courtney W. Howland (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 45–54, and Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Different but Free: Cultural Relativism and Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” in the same book, pp. 79–90.

30. Alan Race first introduced the typology two decades ago in Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1982), p. 7. “Exclusivism” designates the theological position that salvation requires an explicit faith in Jesus Christ and that other religions are therefore of little or no value. “Inclusivism,” by contrast, refers to the position that other religions do have salvific significance, but only by virtue of the hidden and unrecognized redemptive work of Christ in them, requiring their fulfillment in Christianity. “Pluralism” is the view that non-Christian religions are legitimate ways of salvation apart from the way of Jesus Christ, the latter being merely one of many equally valid ways. Examples of exclusivism are Justin Martyr’s view of Greco-Roman pagan religions and Cyprian’s dictum extra ecclesia nulla salus (although originally directed against Christian heretics and schismatics rather than other religions). Inclusivist views can be seen in Justin Martyr’s view of pagan philosophers as implicit Christians (Apology 1.46, which argues that, just as Abraham had an implicit knowledge of the Word of God—the eternal Logos Spermatikos—a pagan such as Plato also had some inkling of the Word through his philosophic wisdom), Origen’s universalist view of salvation, and Aquinas’s notion of “baptism of desire.” In the modern era exclusivism has tended to be the view of evangelical Protestant Christians while inclusivism that of Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants. Thus, while exclusivism and inclusivism have been long-standing dominant theological options in the history of Christianity, with their foremost recent exponents being Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, respectively, pluralism is a relatively new theological model proposed and worked out from the 1970s on by theologians such as John Hick, Paul Knitter, W. C. Smith, and Raimundo Panikkar. See James L. Fredericks, Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 23. Paul Knitter has introduced a new classificatory scheme consisting of replacement model, fulfillment model, mutuality model, and acceptance model (to include postliberal theology, the “many salvations” approach of S. Mark Heim, and comparative theology). Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002).

31. The literature of comparative theology is sizable, but for a programmatic overview of comparative theology as a theological movement and method, see Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

32. James L. Fredericks, “A Universal Religious Experience? Comparative Theology as an Alternative to a Theology of Religions,” Horizons 22, no. 1 (1995): 83. See also Francis X. Clooney, Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 3.

33. James L. Fredericks, Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), pp. 139–61. He reads the story of Krishna and the Milkmaids from the Hindu tradition, which tells of Krishna’s love that cannot be exclusively possessed by one person, in comparison with the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son. Another comparative exercise in the book is his reading of the Pauline understanding of death and resurrection in the light his reading of the Zen master Dogen, who preaches the notion of the nonduality of life and death. Another leading comparative theologian, Francis X. Clooney, also advocates using the texts of other religious traditions as the context in which the texts of the Christian tradition are to be read: a “dialectical activity of reading and rereading the Bible and other Christian texts in the new context of non-Christian texts.” Francis X. Clooney, “Reading the World in Christ,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 64.

34. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 112–13, 135, n. 1. The “postliberal” designation is based on the view that pluralism is a continuation of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theology’s apology to the Enlightenment, which construed religious doctrines, symbols, rituals, and practices as historical and cultural expressions of a common, universal religious experience that was in itself ineffable yet paradoxically known to underlie all religions. See also Fredericks, “Universal Religious Experience?” pp. 67–72.

35. Asymmetrical cultural relations are implicit in Lindbeck’s notion of “a universe of discourse embracing others without itself being embraced.” See George A. Lindbeck, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability,” in The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), p. 232.

36. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, pp. 30–45; J. A. DiNoia, “Pluralist Theology of Religions: Pluralistic or Non-Pluralistic?” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, ed. D’Costa, pp. 122–28; Paul J. Griffiths, “The Uniqueness of Christian Doctrine Defended,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, ed. D’Costa, pp. 157–73, and Problems of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

37. See Fredericks, “Universal Religious Experience?” p. 82, for his critique of postliberal theology: “Christians end up being able to talk to no one but themselves.”

38. Clooney, Theology after Vedanta, p. 158: “The comparative reader sees not only how the Summa Theologiae presumes and entails a complete Christian worldview but also how that worldview reaches no farther than its margins, what it has been able to say in its vocabulary, rules of language, and accumulated set of reference.”

39. Clooney, Theology after Vedanta, p. 158.

40. Ibid., pp. 7, 159.

41. Francis X. Clooney, Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 27–28.

42. Clooney, Theology after Vedanta, pp. 5–6. Comparative theology involves the issue of truth, he argues, because it is a theological enterprise and not an exercise in comparative religion, which simply catalogues the views of different religious traditions on salvation and so on or merely attempts to understand and to interpret what certain texts mean to certain communities. Here he appeals to David Tracy’s notion of the religious classic.

43. Fredericks, Faith among Faiths, p. 163.

44. Ibid., pp. 171–77.

45. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 87–125; Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 20.

46. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 30–54.

47. Kathryn Tanner, Theory of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 38–58.

48. Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Tomoko Mazusawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999).

49. This is convincingly demonstrated by the widely acclaimed work of Tomoko Masuzawa. In it she shows how the universalizing and supersessionistic agenda of Anglo-European liberal Protestant Christianity of nineteenth-century comparative theology, encapsulated in the concept of world religion (especially the possession of a written sacred scripture), has been carried over and preserved today by the “scientific” comparative studies of religion, especially in their pluralistic and egalitarian emphasis on the rich diversity of “great” world religions founded upon a unity of religious experience. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, pp. 72–104, 259–328.

50. See Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, p. 222; King, Orientalism and Religion, pp. 59–60; Asad, Genealogies of Religion, pp. 53–54, 198–99.

51. I borrow Min’s helpful definition of religion as “concrete totalities”: “a system of symbols that comprises beliefs, rituals, and practices that embody the collective self-understanding of its adherents within a ‘plausibility structure’ (Peter Berger), i.e., those objective socio-historical conditions that render such self-understanding plausible.” Anselm Kyongsuk Min, “Dialectical Pluralism and Solidarity of Others: Towards a New Paradigm,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (1997): 590.

52. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “‘We Don’t See Color Here’: A Case Study in Ecclesial-Cultural Invention,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 140–57.

53. Hugh Nicholson, “Comparative Theology after Liberalism,” Modern Theology 23, no. 2 (2007): 238.

54. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 167.

55. Nicholson, “Comparative Theology,” pp. 238–39.

56. Ibid., pp. 239–40, 244–45. In essence Nicholson construes the practice of comparative theology as involving two steps: first, a political restoration of symmetry à la comparative study of religion; second, the practice of comparative theology proper via metaphorical redescription.

57. Ibid., pp. 236–37, 242–43.

58. Ibid., pp. 230–33, 243–44.

59. King, Orientalism and Religion, p. 215.

60. John J. Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology after ‘Religion,’” in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), pp. 241–45.

61. Echoing this thought is King, Orientalism and Religion, p. 215.

62. Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology,” pp. 253–57.

64. John J. Thatamanil, “God as Ground, Contingency, and Relation: Trinitarian Polydoxy and Religious Diversity,” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 238–57.

65. David Chidester, “Anchoring Religion in the World: A Southern African History of Comparative Religion,” Religion 26, no. 2 (1996): 155.

67. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). For the Orientalist debate initiated by Said, see King, Orientalism and Religion, pp. 82–85.

68. For example, when Hindu communities in India and the diaspora today advocate an idealized and monolithic representation of Hinduism devoid of internal complexity and diversity, put an undue emphasis on the sacred texts and their translation for missionary purposes, and construct the Other—usually Islam—to explain the past and present ills of Hinduism, one needs to question whether all these constitute a postcolonial nativist reaction to the history of humiliation and nonrecognition rather than an uninterrupted extension and expression of whatever they claim to be their traditional and “pure” identity (Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective [London: Routledge, 2003], pp. 133–43). The Islamists’ angry rejection of the “Western” and “Christian” discourses of women’s rights and pluralistic democracy in the name of the past golden age of a pure form of Islam could be understood in a similar vein, as a nativist oppositional politics which merely tries to turn the essentializing binary scheme of hierarchical evaluation around on Europe and America and in the course of doing so squelch the heterogeneous discourses welling up within itself. For instance, Mahnaz Afkhami points out the similarity between the Western Orientalists’ reports of traditional Islamic societies and contemporary Islamists’ descriptions of the supposedly homogeneous and harmonious Muslim societies before Western corruption that are used to bolster their claims of legitimacy. Mahnaz Afkhami, “Gender Apartheid and the Discourse of Relativity of Rights in Muslim Societies,” in Religious Fundamentalisms, ed. Howland, p. 70.

69. Originally coined by Patricia Hill Collins, quoted in Michelle Voss Roberts, “Gendering Comparative Theology,” in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, ed. Francis X. Clooney (London: T & T Clark, 2010), p. 115.

70. Kwok Pui-lan advocates the helpful notion of “multifaith hermeneutics,” which pays attention to both the “high” intellectual and hermeneutical tradition formed around the ancient scriptures and classical texts of a non-Christian tradition and its “popular” culture consisting of stories, fables, and legends. Kwok Pui-lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995), pp. 66–68.

71. For the multiculturalism debate around the curriculum of public education, see Paul Berman, ed., Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (New York: Laurel, published by Dell, 1992). See also Ward Churchill, “White Studies: The Intellectual Imperialism of U.S. Higher Education,” in Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, ed. Cynthia Willet (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 334–56.

72. Nancy Fraser, “Recognition without Ethics?” in Recognition and Difference, ed. Scott Lash and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 2002), p. 24. Anselm Min draws our attention to the fact that the ideal condition of dialogical reason is dependent on and either fostered or obstructed by material and sociohistorical conditions, such as inequalities in political and economic power (“Dialectical Pluralism,” pp. 598–99). I agree in the sense that the ideal condition of dialogue presupposes free agency, and as the inclusion of economic rights in addition to civil and political rights in the human rights discourse shows, free agency is either nurtured or hampered by the amount of material and cultural resources to which one has access, such as the level of income and education. Especially in situations where there is a gross inequality of power among religious communities and within each of them, mutual recognition of free participatory agency would have to involve recognition of the need for some degree of intercommunal and intracommunal redistribution of resources, on the one hand, and institutional measures against the tyranny of majority. on the other. Nancy Fraser makes a similar observation about the objective conditions of participatory parity (Fraser, “Recognition without Ethics?” in p. 29).

73. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, pp. 204–5.

74. See Fanon’s essay “The Negro and Recognition” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 210–22. I have been helped in my reading of Fanon by Alfred J. López, although in my view he does not clearly show that what is at stake for Fanon is recognition of identity and worth. Alfred J. López, Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 121–42.

75. I agree with Axel Honneth that in order for there to be a sense of social solidarity, social esteem conferred by recognition of worth (of one another’s abilities, skills, and ways of life) is necessary. Axel Honneth, “Recognition or Redistribution? Changing Perspectives on the Moral Order of Society,” in Recognition and Difference, pp. 49–50.

76. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 63–73.

77. Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, p. 204.

78. Thatamanil, “Comparative Theology,” p. 251.

79. Nicholson, “Comparative Theology,” p. 239. Nicholson is summarizing David Tracy’s well-known formulation of the transformative power of classics and the worldviews they express. See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 112–15.

80. Tracy Sayuki-Tiemeier, “Comparative Theology as a Theology of Liberation,” in The New Comparative Theology, ed. Clooney, pp. 129–49. Clooney has made a similar effort in Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), although, as he himself acknowledges, the texts on female divinity that he examines are all male-authored (p. 233).

81. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 384.

84. Ibid., pp. 382–83.

85. Arvind Mandair finds in the largely negative attitude of postcolonial theorists and critics toward religions a continuation of modern Western secular universalism. His contention is that postcolonial theorists, including Spivak, see non-Western cultural traditions as “religions” beholden to authoritative bodies of tradition that are believed to be ahistorical and unchanging (what Spivak calls “transcendental figurations”), and thereby at odds with true historicity, that is, transcendental self-consciousness and the accompanying sense of secular historical agency (“freedom”) touted by Western modernity. As a consequence, the West, now even more secular and “modern,” continues to be regarded by postcolonial critics as the sole locus of genuine (critical) thinking and theorizing (Arvind Mandair, “The Repetition of Past Imperialism: Hegel, Historical Difference, and the Theorizing of Indic Religions,” History of Religions 44, no. 4 [2005]: 278–99). This criticism is shared by Robert Young, who chastises his postcolonialist colleagues for being blind to prophetic and messianic religious movements—such as Mahdi movements in East Africa and South Asia—that assert traditional indigenous cultures in the name of a utopic decolonized future, providing althernative value systems: “Postcolonial theory, despite its espousal of subaltern resistance, scarcely values subaltern resistance that does not operate according to its own secular terms” (Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], p. 338). It is indeed a brilliant stroke on Mandair’s part to recognize, in postcolonial theory’s mostly or exclusively secular attempt to conceptualize speech-agency on behalf of subaltern groups against the religious nationalism of neocolonial elites, precisely the same kind of modern colonial heritage that infects the latter. It is certainly true that, as a result of the colonial legacy, non-Western religions have been infected by and inscribed within the Western metanarrative; for they exhibit tendencies to see themselves as “religions,” especially “world religions” possessing authoritative bodies of tradition encapsulated in written scriptures and pointing to the ahistorical and unchanging “religious” or “sacred” domain—i.e., the very sign of their capacity for universalization (i.e., for becoming “world religions”). That is why Spivak, even as she makes somewhat half-hearted positive assessment of the “ethno-philosophical” ideas of Tao, Zen, or Sunyvada, and the like (Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 429), ultimately takes the side of “animist liberation theologies” (or “original practical ecological philosophies”) of the Fourth World against the “transcendental figurations” of world religions (Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 382–83). Nonetheless, I agree with Richard King’s counter to Spivak that, even as there can be no return to a pure nativism—a search for some kind of pure “lost origin”—beyond the epistemic violence of colonialism, we should not concede defeat to colonialism and Western modernity: “Spivak is right in her refusal to endorse a nativist or atavistic nostalgia for lost origins. Colonialism may have inextricably transformed non-Western forms of knowledge. I refuse to believe, however, that it has wholeheartedly eradicated them. Moving forward, then, must also involve looking back with renewed vigour at the legacy of precolonial forms of indigenous knowledge. To fail to do so is to concede defeat to colonialism and to accept as unproblematic Western-derived notions of ‘modernity,’ thereby cutting ourselves off from our disparate pasts…. Accepting that the modern world is rooted in a variety of historical tributaries and that these traditions remain alive within and in spite of modernity is a first step in the displacement of this central post-Enlightenment dichotomy [of tradition and modernity]” (King, Orientalism and Religion, pp. 213–14). Hence, I wholeheartedly agree with Mandair’s call for both philosophy of religion and history of religion to recognize the contemporaneity and contemporary theoretical relevance of non-Western “religious” traditions. We are no longer to treat non-Western traditions as “religious” with the accompanying theoretical devaluation based on the spurious and imperial opposition between the secular/modern (self-critical, historically self-aware, and therefore theoretical) West and the “traditional” East (Mandair, “Repetition of Past Imperialism,” pp. 298–99).

86. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 71–72.

87. Schreiter, New Catholicity, pp. 29–30.

89. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

93. Raimon Panikkar, The Intrareligious Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 16.

94. Here I am following the insistence of Ahn Byung-mu, one of the pioneers of minjung theology, that Christian theology in East Asia needs to reflect on the nondualistic notion of psychophysical energy as corresponding to the notion of Spirit in Christianity. Byung-mu Ahn, Minjung sinhak yiyagi [Story of minjung theology], rev. ed. (Seoul: Hanguk sinhak yeon-guso, 2005), pp. 216–17.

95. The character 神 (sin/shen) is often translated as “spirit,” as seen in my translation of the phrase 氣化之神 (gihwa ji sin) into “the spirit of the harmonious becoming of psycho-physical energy.” The culturally codified meanings of 神, however, are already included in the wider range of meanings possessed by 氣 (gi/qi), which leads to the frequently found genitive construction “sin of gi (shen of qi)” in pretty much the same manner as the theological phrase “Spirit of God.” Hence, taking 神 as the dynamic equivalent of “spirit” does not suggest any alternative possibility of encoding the word “spirit” that has not already been offered by 氣.

1. “Material force” has been a conventional translation. Daniel K. Gardner has translated the term into “psychophysical stuff” (Chu Hsi, Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically, trans. with a commentary by Daniel K. Gardner [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], p. 49, n. 52). I will slightly modify his translation into “psychophysical energy,” although a more precise translation would be “psycho-bio-physical energy.”

2. Maebayashi Kiyokazu, Sato Koetsu, and Kobayashi Hiroshi, Giui bigyo munhwa [A comparative-cultural analysis of gi], trans. Park Mun-hyeon and Sekine Hideyuki (Seoul: Doseo chulpan hanul., 2006), pp. 16–21. See also Zhang Liwen, Giui cheorak [A philosophy of gi], trans. Kim Gyo-bin (Seoul: Yemun seowon, 2004), pp. 63–75.

3. The classical period in East Asia (1000 B.C.E.–500 C.E.) refers to the period ranging from the Chinese Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.), whose later years of long decline overlapped with the Spring and Autumn Period (770–403 B.C.E.) and the Warring States Period (403–221 B.C.E.), to the early imperial era covering the founding and consolidation of imperial China by the Qin Dynasty (221–206 B.C.E.) and the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) and the following interregnum of nomadic invasions and disunion (220–c. 500 C.E.).

4. See Yuasa Yasuo, Momgwa uju [The universe and the body], trans. Yi Jeong-bae and Yi Han-yeong (Seoul: Jisik saneopsa, 2004), pp. 72–109, 325;, Giui cheorak, pp. 37–44.

5. For the historical origin of the symbol, see Julia Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 32–37.

6. The complementary and mutually interpenetrating relationship between the receptive and active psychophysical energies is clearly theorized in the ancient text of Chinese medicine, Huangdi neijing [Yellow Emperor’s inner classic] Zhang, Giui cheorak, p. 116. For one of the classic explanations of the fractal structure of the receptive-active relation, see the sixteenth-century Korean Neo-Confucian Yi Hwang’s Cheonmyeong do seol [Explanation of the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate],” in Toegye Jeonseo [Complete works of Toegye], ed. Toegyehak chongseo pyeon-gan wiwonhoe (the Committee for Publication of the Study of Toegye Series) (Seoul: Toegyehak yeon-guwon, 1989–), XIII, sokjip [extended collection], 8.15b–16a, p. 93: “Pattern is pattern in such a way that its substance is originally vacuous, and being vacuous, without internal contrasts or opposites. Because it is without inner contrasts or opposites, when pattern is immanent in people and thing-events, it is one, truly without anything added to or taken away from it. When it comes to psychophysical energy, from its very beginning there appears the figure of the opposition of the receptive (eum) and the active (yang). The opposites function as the root of each other, so that the receptive inevitably has in its midst the active, while the active also inevitably has the receptive at its core. Further, it is impossible for the active within the receptive also not to have in its very middle the receptive, while it is also impossible for the receptive within the active not to have the active at its very center. In the myriad transformations of the receptive and active, each is never without its opposite. In general, therefore, when thing-events are endowed with pattern and psychophysical energy, there is no gap between them insofar as their respective natures are concerned, but their psychophysical constitutions cannot be without the distinctions of balanced and unbalanced.”

7. The constantly changing balance of the active and receptive forces is articulated further by the Theory of Five Phases (五行 o-haeng/wuxing), which names symbols for the five representative combinations of the active and receptive forces: water (greater eum/yin), metal (lesser eum/yin), earth (neutral), wood (lesser yang), and fire (greater yang). See Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, vol. 2, The Period of Classical Learning from the Second Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 11–22.

8. I will translate 物 (mul/wu) as “thing-event,” given the processual nature of any given “thing” as a dynamic and constantly changing coalescence of psychophysical energy in its binary modes.

9. The notion of psychophysical energy as the field and medium of interaction among all thing-events was based on the so-called correlative thinking articulated first by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104 B.C.E.). Correlative thinking assumes the idea of the universe as a moral cosmos (an orderly and harmonious moral pattern), which, together with its microcosm, i.e., the human political order, constituted a set of mutually resonant systems. See Nathan Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55, no. 1 (1995): 6–22. See also Yuasa, Momgwa uju, pp. 84–85.

10. The sixty-four hexagrams (卦 gua) of the Classic of Change (Yijing) symbolize such markers of time. Yuasa, Momgwa uju, pp. 92–93. There is no sense of space and time as empty vacuum within which entities are located (pp. 94–95).

11. Such a notion is already seen in as ancient a document as the Classic of Change (Juyeok [Classic of Change from Zhou Dynasty], trans. Choe Won-sik [Seoul: Hyewon chulpansa, 2000], p. 253; Geum Jang-tae, Gwisin-gwa jaesa [Spirits and the ritual of ancestor veneration] [Seoul, JNC, 2009], p. 44). See also J. A. Adler, “Varieties of Spiritual Experience: Shen in Neo-Confucian Discourse,” in Confucian Spirituality, ed. Tu Weiming and M. E. Tucker (New York: Crossroad, 2004), 2:120–43.

12. Haneunim (하느님), the Korean sky god, and Amaterasu-ōmikami (天照大神), the Japanese sun goddess, can be seen as variants of the common East Asian worship of Heaven (天), who was originally a sky god. Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), p. 1.

13. Geum, Gwisin-gwa jaesa, pp. 42–53. The ritual practices in preclassical China revolved around the worship of ancestors who were conceived as forming a hierarchy of spiritual powers in which the most distant ancestors were akin to powerful nature spirits (the spirit of earth, mountains, rivers, etc.), at the apex of which sat Lord on High or Heaven, exercising power over both the natural and human worlds. The point of sacrifices made to the ancestors was to persuade them to work on behalf of the living to obtain support from the more powerful nonancestral powers, and it was seen as supremely important especially for the rulers to have access to the highest power and to be a vehicle of its potency to order their realms in peace and harmony. See Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 18–21; Jordan Paper, The Spirits Are Drunk: Comparative Approaches to Chinese Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 268–69; Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2002), p. 26.

14. Geum, Gwisin-gwa jaesa, pp. 19–27.

15. Mary Evelyn Tucker, “The Philosophy of Ch’i as an Ecological Cosmology,” in Confucianism and Ecology, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1998), pp. 187–207.

16. Juyeok, p. 270.

17. Juyeok, p. 252.

18. The word 氣 (gi/qi) or 陰陽 (eum/yin yang) is mentioned rather sparsely in the Appended Remarks and virtually never in the Classic of Change itself. But the quoted phrase actually defines 道 (do/dao) in terms of the movement of the receptive and active psychophysical energies: “But in actuality we may not really know what yin and yang are or how these two words are used in the Yi text. In asserting that ‘the alternation of one yin and one yang is to be called the dao,’ we must notice the use of the term ‘zhi-wei’ (之謂 ‘is to be called’) as distinct from the term ‘wei-zhi’(謂之 ‘is called’). The former indicates a real definition which consists in an insight into the nature of things which leads to the definition of a thing in light of that insight, whereas the latter indicates a conventional definition which consists in identifying a use of descriptive language by convention.” Chung-ying Cheng, “The Yi-jing and the Yin-Yang Way of Thinking,” in History of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Bo Mou (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 72.

19. Juyeok, pp. 253, 268. The two modes are the two horizontal lines, one broken and the other unbroken, called 爻 (yao), symbolizing the receptive and the active. The four images consist of four different combinations of the lines, namely, 大陰 (greater yin), 小陰 (lesser yin), 小陽 (lesser yang), and 大陽 (greater yang). The eight trigrams consist of eight different combinations of the lines, each combination being made up of three stacked lines, and form the basis of the entire set of sixty-four hexagrams.

20. The word “laozi” literally means “old master” or “old child.” Daodejing means “the Classic of Way and Virtue (or Power).” The Laozi was compiled sometime between the early or mid-fourth and mid-third centuries B.C.E. as an anthology of units of verse-like sayings both earlier and then current, and edited into a “full-scale philosophical poem” (Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 214) attributed to a fictitious and mythological figure named Laozi. The text has served throughout Chinese history both as a scripture to be meditated on and ritually recited by the practitioners of the organized Daoist religion, on the one hand, and as a classic to be studied and commented on by the educated strata of Chinese society in general, on the other. See Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 214–34; Michael LaFargue, trans., The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 196–98; Max Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu and Taoism, trans. Roger Greaves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 13–15; D. C. Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching: A Bilingual Edition (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001), pp. 133–41.

21. I use the text of the received (Wang Bi) recension of the Laozi as found in the 2001 bilingual edition prepared by D. C. Lau. I use Lau’s translation throughout, but when it does not in my view fully do justice to the meaning of the text, I amend it myself or use alternative translations, particularly Philip Ivanhoe’s The Daodejing of Laozi (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002).

22. I have modified Lau’s translation of 强爲之名 (qiang wei zhi ming), which is “I give it the makeshift name of ‘the great.’”

23. I have modified Lau’s translation of 逝 (shi), which is “receding.”

24. The alternative translations of 微 (wei), 希 (xi), 夷 (yi) in chapter 14 as “invisible,” “inaudible,” and “imperceptible” are Richard Lynn’s. Richard J. Lynn, trans., The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 72. I have modified Lau’s translation of 無狀之狀, 無物之象 (wuzhuang zhi zhuang, wuwu zhi xiang) in the same chapter, because his use of “substance” for wu (“thing” or “entity”) introduces the Western metaphysical connotations associated with the term.

25. Found in chapters 22 and 28, respectively.

26. The word “dao” has two meanings, that of “way,” or “path,” and that of “speech”—thus the pun.

27. Various nonmetaphysical interpretations have been given to the notion of the Way as it is presented in the classical Daoism of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. It has been identified with nature (Wing-tsit Chan, Chen Guying, H. G. Creel, Joseph Needham), resulting in the characterization of the Laozi as “organic naturalism,” “naturalistic pantheism” (Needham), “simplistic naturalism” (Chen), “nature mysticism” (B. Morris), etc. Wingtsit Chan, trans., The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te ching) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 9; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 37–38; Chen Guying, Lao Tzu: Text Notes and Commentary, trans. Rhett Young and Roger T. Ames (Taibei: Chinese Materials Center, 1981), pp. 8–34; Herrlee G. Creel, What Is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 41–42; Brian Morris, “Taoism, Confucianism, and the Chinese Self,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 8, no. 3 (1993): 274–89. Hans-Georg Moeller, The Philosophy of the Daodejing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Michael LaFargue interprets the Way as a perspectival, radically pluralist, nonreferential, and “existentially foundational” (Tao of the Tao Te Ching, p. 208) ethico-religious ideal of organic harmony. See Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 269–93. Somewhat similarly, Roger Ames and David Hall present the Way as a radically perspectival, decentered, and aesthetically ordered “acosmotic cosmology” that is nonmetaphysical and nonreferential (Roger T. Ames, “The Local and Focal in Realizing a Daoist World,” in Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape, ed. N. J. Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan [Cambridge, Mass.: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2001], p. 273; see also David L. Hall, “From Reference to Deference: Daoism and the Natural World,” in Daoism and Ecology, pp. 246–61). The nonmetaphysical and nonreferential interpretation of the Way given by Ames and Hall construes the relationship of the things of the world and the Way as an interdependent, symmetrical relationship between “focus” and “field” (Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, trans., Daodejing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical Translation [New York: Ballantine Books, 2003], pp. 11–21). Chad Hansen has attempted to strip the term dao of metaphysical and religious significance chiefly by means of linguistic analysis (translating dao into socioconventionally generated “prescriptive discourse” [207] that guides behavior) (Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation [New York: Oxford University Press], 1992). In view of all these antimetaphysical interpretations, I would like note that, since Max Weber’s pioneering comparative study of China and the West on the basis of the notion of an evolutionary development of rationality (Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth [Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951]), the scholarship on early Chinese thought and religion has largely fallen into two camps. Those who follow the cultural-essentialist model (M. Granet, J. Needham, A. C. Graham, R. Ames, D. Hall) see in early China the cultural type or pole opposite of the West, dominated by intuitive, organic, and correlative thinking vis-à-vis rational, mechanical, and analytic thinking, and therefore lacking a genuine sense of transcendence (in the sense of a deeper ontological context unconditioned by the world that depends on it), even when they understand both types of thinking as universal modes of thought that are present in different measures of strength in different cultures (Graham, Ames, Hall). (See Marcel Granet, La pensée chinoise: La vie publique et la vie privée [Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1948]; Needham, Science and Civilization in China; Graham, Disputers of the Tao; Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998].) By contrast, those who adhere to the evolutionary model of Weber (Fung Yu-lan, B. Schwartz) locate early Chinese culture in a universal developmental path of cultures from mythos to logos, religion to philosophy, and immanence to transcendence, although they differ in their assessment of how early a sense of transcendence has emerged in China and what kind. (See Fung Yu-lan, History of Chinese Philosophy; Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985].) The strength of studies by Nathan Sivin, John Henderson, and Michael Puett, which avoid both cultural-essentialist and evolutionary models, is their thoroughly historical approach, tracing the rise and decline of Chinese correlative cosmology to show that what is usually regarded as a typically Chinese (or non-Chinese) mode of thought has its own historical vicissitudes within Chinese history. (See Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body”; John B. Henderson, The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], and Puett, To Become a God.) Their studies indicate that the real question is whether a sense of transcendence already existed in early China as a particular historical development within the Chinese culture. The scholarship on early Chinese religion demonstrates that a sense of transcendence did exist in early China, with far-reaching implications for the way we understand religious and philosophical concepts, such as the Dao, that originated in that context. My interpretation of the Dao as a normative religious-metaphysical order relies on the studies of early Chinese religion produced by Roth, Slingerland, Puett, Sivin, and others to reject the largely cultural-essentialist denial on the part of Ames and Hall of the notion of transcendence (in the sense of a deeper ontological context unconditioned by that which depends on it) to early China. For other religio-metaphysical readings of the Dao, see, among others, Mou Zhongjian, “Laozi’s Discourse on the Way and Its Significance Today,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 30, no. 1 (1998): 75–79; Chung-ying Cheng, “Chinese Metaphysics as Non-metaphysics: Confucian and Taoist Insights into the Nature of Reality,” in Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, ed. Robert E. Allinson (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 192–203; Robert C. Neville, “Daoist Relativism, Ethical Choice, and Normative Measure,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2002): 6–8; Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

28. I changed Lau’s translation of 先 (xian) as “forefather” to “ancestor.”

29. I use the present tense “is” instead of “was” as used by Lau in order to avoid the misunderstanding that the nameless was merely temporally prior and ancestral to heaven and earth rather than being their enduring condition of possibility.

30. “The myriad creatures in the world are born from something (有 you), and something from Nothing” (40.89). Norman Girardot has disclosed the creation-mythological theme of hundun (混沌 chaos) operating underneath the structure of thought in the Laozi and articulated with mythic symbols such as “mother,” “ancestor,” “water,” or “dark” (xuan) or more abstract terms such as “nothing” (wu) or “empty” (xu) (Norman J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos [hun-tun] [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], pp. 1–52). Attempts have been made to give voice to the ontologically indeterminate yet creative nature of wu—in opposition to the Western metaphysical notion of nothingness as negative negativity (i.e., negativity that is opposed to being)—in terms of a void that harbors all potentialities (Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu and Taoism, p. 34) or a “divine Matrix” that is active or creative potentiality (Joseph A. Bracken, The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books; Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 1995], pp. 133–35). A. T. Nuyen calls the Dao as wu “positive negativity” or nonbeing that is paradoxically being or reality, something similar to Heidegger’s Seyn, which conceals in revealing and leaves only its trace in nature and human language. A. T. Nuyen, “Naming the Unnameable: The Being of the Tao,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 22, no. 4 (1995): 487–97.

31. I translated fan as “overflows” instead of Lau’s “is broad” to highlight the Way’s waterlike quality (life-giving and all-reaching).

32. Other passages that affirm the constancy and strength of the way’s life-giving power are: “From the present back to antiquity, its name never deserted it” (21.49a); “The spirit of the valley never dies” (6.17); “The way is empty, yet use will not drain it. (4.11).

33. According to Tateno Masami, the ontological significance of de is that it is the phenomenal expression of the way in the realm of actual being, as the de of perfected self, of exquisite paintings and performances, etc. (Tateno Masami, “A Philosophical Analysis of the Laozi from an Ontological Perspective,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999], p. 182). See also Mou Zhongjian, “Laozi’s Discourse,” p. 82; Philip J. Ivanhoe, “The Concept of de (‘Virtue’) in the Laozi,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, pp. 239–57; Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, pp. 105–6. As Waley’s influential translation has pointed out, de originally had a premoral sense as “latent power” or “virtue inherent in something” (Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Tê Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought [London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1934], p. 32). De points to the potential or inner power of a given thing, which, like a fluid from the stream, was generated ultimately from di or tian and then transmitted hereditarily (associated with semen and female sexual fluids) in the form of jing (quintessence or innate vital energy) (Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, p. 105). With Confucius, the notion took on an ethical and moral connotation as cultivated virtue (Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, p. 106) that radiated moral charisma, “a kind of psychological power to attract and retain the support of others” (Ivanhoe, “The Concept of de,” p. 240). In the Laozi the notion is used in both senses, as the de of human sages models itself after that of nature (Ivanhoe, “Concept of de,” pp. 242–45).

34. For 物壯則老 (wu zhuang ze lao) I have used Philip Ivanhoe’s translation rather than Lau’s emendation of the text to wu zhuang zei lao (“a creature in its prime doing harm to the old”). As Lau himself admits (Tao Te Ching, p. 175), his emendation can no longer be supported after the discovery of the earlier Mawangdui text, which has 物壯而老 (wu zhuang er lao) (and 物壯卽老 wu zhuang ji lao in ch. 55). Although Lau translates the Mawangdui texts as “a creature old in its prime” for both chapters 30 and 55, in my view the temporally sequential sense of er is reinforced by its juxtaposition with ji, which lends support to my decision to use Ivanhoe’s translation (Daodejing, p. 16).

35. Arche means origin or principle; archos and archon mean leader, first, chief, etc. An-arche, an-archon, an-archos, etc. mean, therefore, without rule, principle, or origin. David L. Hall has highlighted this “un-principled” and “an-archic” character of the Way as chaos in The Uncertain Phoenix: Adventures toward a Post-Cultural Sensibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 53.

36. R. C. Neville locates the ontological causation of the Dao, as it manifests itself in the world of Something, in the spontaneous emergence of novelty: “When and wherever a situation is underdetermined by antecedent conditions, the decisive determining is spontaneous relative to the past, and is the locus of ontological causation” (Neville, “Daoist Relativism,” p. 9). In his reading of the “dialectical metaphysics” of classical Daoism, he distinguishes eternal ontological creativity (the eternal unnameable Dao) from its temporal manifestation (the nameable Mother Dao) and construes the latter in terms of an interplay between the existential achievement of structured and value-laden harmonies of internal forces (you) and the existential dislocation of those achieved harmonies in bursts of spontaneity (ziran) (pp. 9–11). It is the latter pole of the interplay, he argues, that enables human intervention that moves with rather than against the forces of creation (wuwei) (p. 13). Isabelle Robinet points out that many of the traditional Chinese commentators also saw the world as constantly re-creating itself by drawing on the omnipresent Dao, its source, and read the notion of ziran accordingly as self-creation. Isabelle Robinet, “The Diverse Interpretations of the Laozi,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 144.

37. Since 自然 (ziran) in its common classical usage is a modifier (adjective) indicating a mode or manner of being, not a noun (as is clear in 17.46), I amended Lau’s translation “that which is naturally so.” An alternative translation would be “being of itself what it is.” Chan translates it as “Nature” in accordance with his reading of the Laozi as a naturalistic philosophy (Chan, Way of Lao Tzu, p. 9). As a philosophical concept, though, ziran has been used in Chinese history as a noun to mean spontaneity or “naturalness,” but not “nature or “natural world,” which is a modern Chinese use of ziran invented under Western influence. In classical Chinese, nature in the modern Western sense corresponded to tian (heaven) or tiandi (heaven and earth) or wanwu (the myriad creatures or ten thousand things). Still, ziran can be translated as “nature” insofar as the latter word refers to the essential quality or fundamental character of something that is developed without external prompting and interruption. Liu Xiaogan, “Naturalness (Tzu-jan), the Core Value in Taoism: Its Ancient Meaning and Its Significance Today,” in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 212–13.

38. See the text in Rudolf G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 271–72 (translation mine): “It [great completion] achieves completion in deference to things, and does not become a single image; therefore, it ‘seems incomplete.’ Great fullness, being plentiful, gives in deference to things and does not show favoritism; therefore, it ‘seems empty.’ It [great straightness] straightens in deference to things, and not on the basis of a single standard; therefore it ‘seems bent.’ Great skill completes vessels in accordance with their spontaneous nature, and does not produce extraordinary features; therefore it ‘seems awkward.’ Great eloquence speaks in deference to things and does not contrive anything; therefore it ‘seems tongue-tied.’”

39. Jung H. Lee has highlighted the importance of the virtue of ying in early Daoist ethics (Jung H. Lee, “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: The Daoist Imperative,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 3 [2000]: 511–36). David Hall’s use of the term “deference” also underscores the meaning of ying as “yielding to the perspective of the things” and letting them be themselves. Hall, “From Reference to Deference,” p. 248.

40. This is Rudolf Wagner’s translation of bu zi sheng (Wagner, Chinese Reading of the Daodejing, 141). Ivanhoe’s translation is “do not live for themselves” (Daodejing of Laozi, p. 7), whereas Waley has “do not foster their own lives” (Way and Its Power, p. 150), both of which in my view are better translations than Lau’s “do not give themselves life” (Tao Te Ching, p. 11).

41. See Schwartz, “The Thought of the Tao-te-ching,” in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 200–2. In regard to what aspects of human life is “being so of itself” or not, Graham Parkes puts it best when he says: “It seems natural, for example, for humans to seek shelter in caves, and further—on the model of animals that build nests, hives, or dens—to construct houses to live in. But we might want to say of a life that is lived in hermetically sealed, air-conditioned apartments, cars, and office buildings, such that one rarely comes into contact with a molecule of unprocessed air, water, or earth, that it is a somewhat unnatural existence. The issue would then be to distinguish those forms or features of civilization that detract from naturalness, to the point where human flourishing is impaired, from those that are comparable with such flourishing.” (Graham Parkes, “The Place of the Human in Nature: Paradigms of Ecological Thinking, East and West,” in Is There a Human Nature? ed. Leroy S. Rowner [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997], pp. 152–53). According to Sarah Allan, in the early Confucian texts such as the Analects and the Mencius, the dao is more narrowly modeled on a channel or course of stream, i.e., a conduit guiding people in their actions or a condition in which everything follows its natural course, both in the natural and human worlds, and is therefore always with a modifier. Since without channels water flows in every direction, creating a flood, the image of flood control and irrigation is central to their understanding of civilization as 文 (wen) or identifiable patterns of proper behavior. Because channeled water, not water as such, is important, it is possible to say that either there is dao in the world (tian xia you dao) or there is not, depending on whether there is a ruler with Heaven’s mandate (tian ming). In the Laozi, by contrast, the dao is the Dao, i.e., a principle constantly manifested both in the movements of heaven and earth and in human beings (Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, pp. 66–74). Because the Dao is always present (zai) in the world, like water as such, it implies a loss of civilizational and moral imperatives (p. 138). What Allan confirms by highlighting the root metaphor of the notion of the Dao is that, for the Laozi, civilizational and moral imperatives that are considered ziran follow the qualities of (nonchanneled) water as such, namely, the “female” qualities of being quiet, still, weak, submissive, and resting in the lower position, that are identified with the virtue of nondiscriminating and self-effacing simplicity.

42. The question of why this deviation from the Dao happens in the case of human beings, when they cannot separate themselves from the Dao that is everywhere, is neither really answered by the Laozi nor by its Chinese commentators historically (Robinet, “Diverse Interpretations,” p. 147). For Schwartz and Ames, it is “mysterious” and “unexplained” (Schwartz, “Thought of the Tao-te-ching,” p. 200; Roger T. Ames, Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], p. 35). See also Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 172.

43. I use the translation by Schwartz (“Thought of the Tao-te-ching,” p. 200) instead of Lau’s “great hypocrisy” (Tao Te Ching, p. 27).

44. The Laozi has two different uses of the term shengren—one to designate the proto-Confucian culture heroes who were the initiators of the “great artifice” (as in 19.43) and the other to refer to the true sage-rulers who can reverse the pathology of civilization thus begun, and whose authority is “as ‘natural’ as the presence of the dominant male in the group life of many higher mammals” (Schwartz, Thought of the Tao-te-ching,” p. 203). According to Graham, a constant assumption in early Chinese political thought was that government was by nature authoritarian and that the only alternative to absolutism was a severe reduction or even abolition of government, which was an ideal set in antiquity practically implying a minimalization of interference from above in the affairs of individuals, families, clans, and villages in accordance with local traditions and customs. In other words, antiauthoritarianism in early China was antipolitical, inclining not to democracy but to anarchism. Insofar as the necessity of government was acknowledged, therefore, no one conceived any limits to power except moral limits—which meant that good government was thought to depend on the moral goodness of those who governed (Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 299). The Confucian appeal to Zhou feudalism in opposition to the bureaucratic absolutism of the Legalist School (fajia) was in that sense a “hierarchical anarchism” that envisioned social order as the harmonizing of human beings’ spontaneously emerging moral inclinations, such as the attitude of deference found in patriarchal families; the Daoist emphasis on unlearning socioconventionally inculcated desires and patterns of behavior by means of the charismatic influence of the sages’ perfectly clear awareness was a “paternalistic anarchism” (pp. 302–3).

45. Hall, “From Reference to Deference,” p. 257. For Hall, the term denotes an action carried out in deference to the recognized excellence or de of particular things, seeing beneath the accreted layers of artifice that masks their naturalness. For Allan, wuwei is what water does, which moves spontaneously downward following the contours of the landscape (Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, p. 79). Although the term wuwei emerged relatively late in pre-imperial China, occurring first (and only once) in the Analects (Creel, What Is Taoism? pp. 57–59; Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, p. 79), according to Slingerland it represented, one of the central themes of the early Chinese religion, namely, the spiritual ideal of being in a state of “fitting” (yi) with the normative order of the cosmos (Heaven or the Way), which is found as early as in the Classic of Odes (shijing) and the Classic of History (shujing). For Confucians and Daoists of the Warring States period, it denoted an ability to move through the world and human society in a manner completely spontaneous and yet still fully in harmony with the Way as the normative order of the natural and human worlds. As an ideal of perfectly skilled action, not nonaction, it referred to “a state of personal harmony in which actions flow freely and instantly from one’s spontaneous inclinations—without the need for extended deliberation or inner struggle—and yet nonetheless perfectly accord with the dictates of the situation at hand, display an almost supernatural efficacy, and (in the Confucian context at least) harmonize with the demands of conventional morality” (Edward Slingerland, “Effortless Action: The Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-Wei,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 2 [2000]: 300). Wuwei was connected to the ideal of ordering the world through the power of one’s virtue (de), found in the two Classics (the Classic of Odes and the Classic of History) as the martial and social virtues of the aristocratic lord, and for the early Confucians in the ideal of the Confucian gentleman (junzi) which Confucius embodied and exemplified with the spontaneity and naturalness of his ritual mastery. Whereas the disagreement between the early Confucians Mencius and Xunzi was whether wuwei embodied the full realization of responses natural to humans or a virtue hard-won from the initially recalcitrant human nature after years of training and submission to cultural forms, the early Daoists put emphasis on the end state of wuwei to criticize what they perceived as the Confucian obsession with the means of achieving that state, such as an overelaborated and consciously sought set of (conventionally moral) goals and practices, which purportedly turned the end result into a forced behavior, a hypocrisy (Slingerland, “Effortless Action,” pp. 295–306). Hansen’s anachronistic reading, which treats wuwei as some kind of linguistically and pragmatically oriented anticonventionalism, ignores this religious context (Hansen, Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, pp. 213–14). Because the spontaneity evinced in wuwei does not represent subjectivity in the sense of individual autonomy as in the modern West but the highest degree of objectivity associated with the will of Heaven or the way of the Way, the effortless actions of the sages “are not so much their actions as they are the Dao acting through them” (Ivanhoe, “Concept of de,” p. 249). In that sense, wuwei could be translated as “nondual action,” i.e., the kind of action without a sense of agent/self apart from the action itself. David R. Loy, “Loving the World as Our Own Body: The Non-Dualist Ethics of Taoism, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology,” in Asian and Jungian View of Ethics, ed. Carl B. Becker (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 89–91.

46. Following David Hall, “no-knowledge” and “no desire” could be translated as “unprincipled knowing” and “objectless desire” in the sense that what they reject is both artificially principled knowledge of things and the supposedly lasting objects of desire provided by such knowledge. Hall, “From Reference to Deference,” pp. 253–55, 258–61.

47. For the Laozi, to know the myriad things just the way they are is to know them within the context of the Way’s constant flow, i.e., the constant an-archic movement between Nothing and Something: “To know harmony is called the constant; to know the constant is called ‘discernment (ming)’” (55.126). Because discernment as nonsubjective knowledge of things gives the most accurate picture of the world, it “penetrates the four quarters” (10.24), and as a result, “Without stirring abroad one can know the whole world; without looking out of the window, one can see the way of heaven” (47.106). The opposite of wuzhi is qian shi (“foreknowledge”)—“Foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way and the beginning of folly” (38.84)—which refers to the principled knowing of one who has already made up one’s mind before entering the situation, i.e., one who “knows” beforehand what is proper and right. The perfectly clear perception of the myriad things that is wuzhi is an end product of the mystical inner cultivation exercises, as Graham puts it: “The Taoist relaxes the body, calms the mind, loosens the grip of categories made habitual by naming, frees the current of thought for more fluid differentiations and assimilations, and instead of pondering choices lets his problems solve themselves as inclination spontaneously finds its own direction, which is the Way” (Disputers of the Tao, p. 235).

48. I have translated xin as “heart-mind.”

49. For tianxia I have used “the world” in place of Lau’s “the empire.”

50. Again, for tianxia I have used “the world.”

51. According to Graham, the Laozi’s preference for the female terms of the binaries is strategically deconstructive; it is designed to counter the already existing massive accumulation of the male pole in human civilization. It does not mean one should be fixated on the female as an enduring and independent absolute. Disputers of the Tao, pp. 228–30.

52. “If the sage who is free from desire ever desires anything, it is that he “desires not to desire [yuwuyu] … in order to help the myriad creatures to be so of themselves [ziran]” (translation modified from “to be natural”) (64.156).

53. Shang xian was one of the central tenets of the Confucian and Mohist doctrines of government (Lau, Tao Te Ching, p. xxix).

54. I have modified Lau’s translation (“It happened to us naturally”) in order to avoid the use of the word “natural” for ziran.

55. I have modified Lau’s translation, which merely phonetically reproduces 陰 and 陽 as yin and yang.

56. I have modified Lau’s translation of 沖氣以為和, which is “are the blending of the generative forces of the two.”

57. According to the ground-breaking studies produced by Harold Roth and others, early Daoism consisted of a shared tradition of “mystical” self-cultivation practices called “inner cultivation” (內業 neiye), which were practiced and passed on by different master-disciple lineages and were accompanied by metaphysical and cosmological speculations explaining the nature of the self-transformative mystical experiences attained by those practices. Inner cultivation may have originated from the trance-inducing practices of shamans. “Inner cultivation” is referred to in the Zhuangzi as the practice of “sitting and forgetting (zuowang)” (Harold D. Roth, “The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999], p. 69). The earliest extant statement of this practice, the Inward Training (內業), speaks of “cleaning out the lodging place of the numinous (shen),” strongly suggesting a shamanic purification ceremony that prepares one for the descent of some divinity (Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], pp. 189–90, and “Laozi,” pp. 61–62, 68–69). According to Graham’s reading of the Inward Training, the descent of shen was understood in terms of qi (wind/air/breath), the life-energy that circulates as the air, permeates everything, and vitalizes the body. At its purest and most vital, qi is jing, the “quintessential,” which is perfectly luminous as the heavenly bodies, circulates in the atmosphere as kuishen (“the ghostly and daimonic”), centered within each being as its essence, and descends into—or congeals within—human beings as the physiological substrate of their shen (“daimon”), rendering them shenming (“daimonic and clear seeing”), i.e., enabling them to perceive all things with perfect clarity. In order to achieve the descent of shen, which is called the obtainment of de (“virtue” or “power”), the practitioners must use xin (the heart as the organ of both thought and emotion, or, to quote Kirkland, “the ruling agency in the individual’s biospiritual nexus” [76]) to guide and concentrate qi as it courses through their body—a practice that involves moderation in diet, adjustment of posture, controlled breathing, and stilling of passions and senses. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 100–102; Russell Kirkland, “Varieties of Taoism in Ancient China: A Preliminary Comparison of Themes in the Nei Yeh and Other Taoist Classics,” Taoist Resources 7, no. 2 (1997): 74–77.

58. Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 4, ch. 22, Zhibeiyou), in Zhonghua daozang, ed. Zhang Jiyu, vol. 13 (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2004), p. 46.

59. Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 3, ch. 17, qiushui), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 33.

60. Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 3, ch. 18, zhile), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 37. Here I am using Paul Kjellberg’s translation, which seems to capture the sense of the passage perfectly (Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001], p. 247). For the Zhaungzi’s notion of the Way as a primal chaos, see the story of the emperor of the center, 混沌 (hundun) in chapter 7. Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 2, ch. 7, yingdiwang), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 17.

61. For the notion of the “fasting of the heart-mind (心齋),” Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 1, ch. 4 renjianshi), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 8. See also Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 2, ch. 7, yingdiwang), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 17. For the notion of “sitting and forgetting [坐忘]” and “great communication [大通],” Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 2, ch. 6, dazongshi), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 16. The “great communication” means to nourish one’s psychophysical energy until one connects to “that by which all things were created [物之所造],” i.e., the Way. See Nanhua zhenjing (bk. 4, ch. 19, dasheng), in Zhonghua daozang, p. 38.

62. Zhang, Gi ui cheorak, pp. 94–95.

63. For Huainanzi, see Zhang, Gi ui cheorak, pp. 124, 132. For Liezi, see Maebayashi, Sato, and Kobayashi, Giui bigyo munhwa, p. 28.

64. Being the oldest complete commentary on the Laozi, the Heshang Gong commentary was produced in the second century C.E. by an anonymous author and is considered part of the so-called Huang-Lao tradition that flourished during the Han dynasty era (Alan K. L. Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and the Ho-shang Kung Commentaries on the Lao-Tzu [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990], p. 118). See also Yi Seok-myeong, trans., Noja dodeokgyeong hasang-gong jang-gu [The Heshang Gong commentary to Laozi’s Daodejing] (Seoul: Somyeong chulpansa, 2005), pp. 11–12. For the Heshang Gong commentary’s development of the triadic structure of the Way, psychophysical energy, and the myriad thing-events, see pp. 14–15.

65. Yi, Noja dodeokgyeong, p. 92 (ch. 10); p. 269 (ch. 42). The commentary even identifies the Primordial Psychophysical Energy with the Way itself, though only once in ch. 2 (p. 58).

66. Yi, Noja dodeokgyeong, pp. 266–68 (ch. 42).

67. In the words of Alan Chan, the One as One Psychophysical Energy represents the ideal order in contrast to the ideal chaos of the Way (Two Visions of the Way, p. 132).

68. Yi, Noja dodeokgyeong, p. 117 (ch. 14); p. 51 (ch. 1). For the notion of Great Peace, p. 139 (ch. 18), p. 228 (ch. 35), p. 322 (ch. 55). For the translator’s excellent introduction to the notion, pp. 19–22.

69. Iain Thomson, “Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics,” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 3 (2009): 297–327.

70. Hall, Uncertain Phoenix, p. 59.

71. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 103–23.

72. Hall, Uncertain Phoenix, pp. 53–60, 77–85.

73. Guo Xiang, the most famous editor and commentator of Zhuangzi, whose commentaries accompanied the traditional editions of the text, is one such case. Brook Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

74. “The democracy of creation” is taken from Catherine Keller’s God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 135. It is a slightly modified version of Whitehead’s original coinage: “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 50.

75. Hall, Uncertain Phoenix, p. 216.

77. Hall’s own formulation (coined in homage to Zhuangzi’s perspectivalism) is “the non-coherent sum of all orders.” Hall, “From Reference to Deference,” p. 247.

78. Used to mean “culture” or “civilization,” wen originally meant decorations carved into wood. Sandra A. Wawrytko, “The Problem of the Problem of Evil: A Taoist Response,” in The Problem of Evil: An Intercultural Exploration, ed. Sandra A. Wawrytko (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 24.

79. Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 40–50.

80. As in the text of the Laozi, chapter 18: “When the great way falls into disuse, there are benevolence and rectitude; when cleverness emerges, there is great hypocrisy; when the six relations are at variance, there are filial children; when the state is benighted, there are loyal ministers” (18.42). Here the Laozi attacks the Confucian emphasis on rites/propriety (li), which refers to “correct behavior and fulfillment of obligations within existing hierarchies” (Livia Kohn, “Chinese Religion,” in The Human Condition, ed. Robert C. Neville [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001], p. 26). See also chapter 38: “The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith and the beginning of disorder” (38.84). Also, “Exterminate sageliness, discard wisdom, and the people will benefit a hundredfold; exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude, and the people will again be filial; exterminate ingenuity, discard profit, and there will be no more thieves and bandits. These three, being false adornments (wei wen), are not enough. And the people must have something to which they can attach themselves; exhibit the unadorned and embrace the uncarved block. Have little thought of self and as few desires as possible” (19.43–43a).

81. Against the early Chinese religious tradition of exhorting the human world to pattern itself after Heaven as the ultimate deity (sky god) turned spiritual principle and power of the universe, the Laozi substitutes the Way for Heaven as such a principle and power, now much more “apophaticized,” and turns Heaven into a subordinate principle: “Man models himself on earth, Earth on heaven, Heaven on the Way, And the Way on that which is naturally so” (25). See Schwartz, “Thought of the Tao-te-ching, pp. 190–92; Allan, Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, pp. 22, 66–75; Roth, Original Tao, p. 181. In chapter 5, with an almost shocking rhetorical use of hyperbole, the Laozi distances itself from preachers of morality: “Heaven and earth are not humane, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is not humane, and treats the people as straw dogs” (5.14). (Instead of Lau’s “ruthless,” which implies a disposition diametrically opposed to benevolence, I have used “not humane” for buren.) The point here is not that heaven and earth or human beings who are one with the Way are ruthless and callous—which would merely be the moral binary opposite of being humane and thus part of the same evaluative hierarchy—but that the Way is impartial because it is accommodating of all, and therefore does not favor one or another according to some preset criteria of evaluation such as benevolence, to the extent that it appears almost indifferent (see also 16.38). Although the Way as the generous Mother may sound similar to the plenitude of Divine Goodness praised and glorified by apophatic or negative theology, the Way is not benign or humane.

82. Girardot, Myth and Meaning, p. 2.

84. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

85. Ames, Art of Rulership, p. 46.

86. The most famous of which were the Celestial Masters, the earliest Daoist sect that presented an independent political and religious social structure, and the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the first of many Daoist-inspired rebellions, both at the end of the Han dynasty. See Terry F. Kleeman, Great Perfection: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998); Barbara Hendrischke, The Scripture on Great Peace: The Taiping jing and the Beginnings of Daoism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Stephen Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

87. Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 184–211.

88. This is similar to Laurel Schneider’s critique of the totalizing Buddhist metaphysics of emptiness, which evacuates the One (singularity) into emptiness on the basis of the claim that each object is in an excess of totality and therefore empty of its own being. Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 143–44.

1. For early Daoism’s striking departure from the centrality of Heaven and the more limited usage of the word “dao” in other early Chinese religio-philosophical traditions, Benjamin Schwartz, “The Thought of the Tao-te-ching,” in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 190–92; Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 22, 66–75; Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 181.

2. Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), p. 3.

3. Ibid., pp. 9–21, 33–50, 111–32, 235–66. See also Roger T. Ames, Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 28–35; Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 40–78.

4. Edward Slingerland, “Effortless Action: The Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-Wei.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 68, no. 2 (2000): 311–12. See also his Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

5. This innovation was shared by the itinerant shi (士) class, originally the retainers (“knights”) of hereditary ministers (公卿大夫) of small states but now itinerant office seekers, but Kongzi was probably the earliest. For the notion of shi idealists, see Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 192–94, and Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 292–93. Yet despite their anticonventional stance, the shi idealist fully accepted the contemporary sociopolitical structure and their officially assigned place in it, their goal being to “rule from the middle” as advisers to the rulers. For the different ways the shi idealist such as Kongzi, Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, and others conceived the way of Heaven, see Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 9–21, 33–50, 111–32, 235–66. See also Ames, Art of Rulership, pp. 28–35, and Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation, 40–78. For the different ways in which the shi such as Kongzi, Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, and others understood self-cultivation as the way of obtaining virtue, see Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2002), pp. 26, 98–104, 122–40, 318–19. On the whole Kongzi did not necessarily assume the ability of those divine or spiritual beings to accept the performance of the rituals and to take pleasure in the offerings. The rituals were seen as efficacious in creating social and cosmic harmony primarily on the basis of the right spirit and attitude of the people performing the rituals. Kongzi’s attitude was an “agnostic,” “rationalistic,” and “practical” attitude toward beings transcendent but not really “supernatural.” See Zhu Xi, Non-eo jipju [Collected commentaries on Analects], trans. with commentary by Seong Baek-hyo, rev. and exp. ed. (Seoul: Jeontong munhwa yeon-guhoe, 2006), p. 90 (3.12); p. 117 (6.20); p. 205 (7.20); p. 303 (11.11).

6. The notion of “superior man” embraced, in principle, both men and women, as the Confucian tradition always left open a limited access to learning (and virtue thereby acquired) by women. Nonetheless, because of the formal confinement of women to the realm of nei (內)—the realm of domestic skills and household management and their exclusion from the realm of wai (外), the realm of literary learning and public service, women could realize the ideal of “superior man” in a only very limited fashion. See Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 69–94.

7. Ren (仁) is also translated as “humaneness,” or “benevolence.”

8. See Zhu Xi, Non-eo jipju, p. 118 (4.15), where ren (仁) is construed in terms of integrity (忠 zhong) and sympathetic understanding (恕 shu).

9. Tu Wei-ming defines the Neo-Confucian notion of transcendence as such. See “A Confucian Perspective on Learning to Be Human,” in Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 51–65.

10. See Zhu Xi, Maengja jipju [Collected commentaries on Mencius], trans. with commentary by Seong Baek-hyo (Seoul: Jeontong munhwa yeon-guhoe, 1991), p. 88 (2A2). Hereafter Maengja jipju. I am partially borrowing Graham’s translation of the phrase as “the flood-like ch’i.” See Disputers of the Tao, p. 127.

11. Ibid., p. 322 (6A6) See also p. 327 (6A8); pp. 103–4 (2A6); p. 226 (4A27); p. 326 (6A7).

12. Ibid., p. 373 (7A1).

13. Ibid., p. 322 (6A6); pp. 103–4 (2A6) The distinction between the Four Sprouts and the Seven Feelings, which have their respective roots in Mencius 2A6 and the Liji [The book of rites], ch. 9. See, for instance, one of the most famous references to the distinction found in Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei [Conversations of Master Zhu, arranged topically], ed. Li Jingde and Wang Xingxian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 4:1297 (hereafter Yulei—for citations from Yulei, I give the volume number followed by the page number).

14. Maengja jipju, p. 88 (2A2).

15. Ibid., pp. 88–89 (2A2).

16. Ibid., p. 338 (6A15). The heart-mind is the faculty of reflecting on and judging the relative importance of our various appetites and moral inclinations. Without it, “the senses simply yield to the attraction of what excites them and withdraw attention from everything else. We notice again that general assumption of his tradition, that moral thinking starts when the senses are already responding to stimulation from outside, and that its function is to choose between reactions in the light of the fullest knowledge” (Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 131–32). See also Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), p. xxxiv.

17. Zhang Liwen, Giui cheorak [A philosophy of gi], trans. Kim Gyo-bin (Seoul: Yemun seowon, 2004), pp. 131–36; Maebayashi Kiyokazu, Sato Koetsu, and Kobayashi Hiroshi, Giui bigyo munhwa [A comparative-cultural analysis of Ggi], trans. Park Mun-hyeon and Sekine Hideyuki (Seoul: Doseo chulpan hanul, 2006), .p. 76.

18. I follow A. C. Graham in translating li as “pattern.” “The Ch’eng-Chu Theory of Human Nature,” in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986), p. 421. A. S. Cua, “Reason and Principle in Chinese Philosophy: An Interpretation of Li,” in A Companion to World Philosophies, ed. E. Deutsch and R. Bontekoe (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 201–13.

19. See his reply to Huang Daofu’s letter (“Da Huang Daofu”) in Zhu Xi, Zhuzi wenji [Collected literary works of Master Zhu], ed. Chen Junmin (Taibei: Defu wenjiao jijinhui, 2000), 6:2798 (hereafter Wenji—for citations from Wenji, I give the volume number followed by the page number).

20. The concept of pattern (li) vis-à-vis psychophysical energy (qi) was initially derived by Cheng Yi from the Huayan Buddhist notion of the mutual nonexclusion of pattern (li) and fact (事 shi). Tomoeda Ryutaro, “Yi T’oegye and Chu Hsi: Differences in Their Theories of Principle and Material Force,” in The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 246–47. Zhu Xi combines the moralistic and rationalistic interpretation of pattern (i.e., as regularities or coherences in natural processes and in human behavior) by Cheng Yi and the question about the source of the generation and production of all things (the Supreme Ultimate for Zhou Dunyi, the Supreme Void for Zhang Zai, and the Change for Cheng Hao) (A. C. Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers: The Metaphysics of the Brothers Ch’eng, 2nd ed. [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1992], 108). The word “structuring” or “patterning” is the translation of pattern given by Don Baker in his Korean Spirituality (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), pp. 48–49. My designation of pattern as dynamic ontological creativity is based on the tendency observed in both Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi to view psychophysical energy—the very “stuff” of the universe—itself as constantly being produced and reproduced by pattern, although they refrain from speaking of pattern as the active “agent” of production and opt to refer to psychophysical energy’s spontaneous self-production in accordance with pattern. See Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi, Er Cheng ji [Collected works of the Cheng Brothers], ed. Wang Xiaoyu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 1:149: “The Way produces all thing-events spontaneously. Those that have been produced in the spring and matured in the summer—they are all offspring of the Way. In regard to those produced in the next season, we cannot say that the psychophysical energy that has already been used for production (in this season) will be used again. The Way gives birth spontaneously without ceasing.” See also Er Cheng ji, 1:163: “In general, when thing-events disintegrate, their psychophysical energy is accordingly exhausted. There is no pattern by which it returns to its source. What is between heaven and earth can be likened to an immense furnace. Even living thing-events melt and cease to exist. How can then the psychophysical energy that has already dispersed be present again? How can the creative processes of the universe use the psychophysical energy that has already dissipated? As a matter of course, the creative transformation of psychophysical energy consists of psychophysical energy that is vital.” Zhu Xi follows Cheng Yi’s view in saying the following: “Psychophysical energy that has already dispersed has already changed and no longer exists; but that which roots itself in pattern to emerge daily is truly vast, flood-like and infinite.” “Da Liao Zihui [Reply to Liao Zihui],” in Wenji, 5:2021. See also Yulei, 1:48.

21. Zhu Xi follows Cheng Hao in focusing on the creative nature of Change, as declared in the Classic of Change, chapter 5: “Producing—or giving birth—again and again is Change (生生之謂易),” and links it with pattern via the symbol of the Great Ultimate. Julia Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 247–48; Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers, p. 108.

22. Chung-ying Cheng, “Reality and Divinity in Chinese Philosophy,” in A Companion to World Philosophies, ed. Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 185–93. See also Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, pp. 32–37.

23. Or in Julia Ching’s translation, “the Infinite” or “the Limitless” (Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, p. 35).

24. See Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952–1953), pp. 438–42. While acknowledging the Daoist and Buddhist influence on Zhou’s Diagram (Religious Thought of Zhu Xi, pp. 18–20), Julia Ching sees in it a truly innovative attempt by Zhou to articulate a cosmological vision with the help of Yin-yang and Five Phases theories. Still, she recognizes the heavy influence of Daoist philosophy on him as seen in his emphasis on wu (nothingness) and jing (stillness or tranquility) (p. 37). Relying on the work of Imai Usaburo, she even accepts the alternative, seven-word version of the controversial first phrase—自無極而爲太極 (“from the Non-Ultimate to become the Great Ultimate”)—as the more original, authentic version coined by Zhou (p. 22).

25. Such a hierarchical interpretation of the relationship between the two Ultimates was prefigured by Kong Yingda’s following subcommentary on Wang Bi’s commentary on the Appended Remarks of the Classic of Change: “The Great Ultimate refers to the chaotically mixed and unified state of Primordial Psychophysical Energy before the division of heaven and earth. It is precisely [what is called] the Great Beginning or the Great One. Hence, the Laozi says, ‘The Way gives birth to One.’ This [the One] is no other than the Great Ultimate.” As evident, Kong interprets the Great Ultimate as the cosmological symbol of the one psychophysical energy subordinate to the Way as the metaphysical ultimate (Zhouyi zhengyi [Correct meaning of the Classic of Change of the Zhou Dynasty], vol. 1 of Shisanjing zhushu [Commentaries and subcommentaries to the thirteen classics], ed. Ma Xinmin and Li Xueqin [Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2000], p. 340). Unlike Kong’s subcommentary, however, Wang Bi’s commentary identifies the Great Ultimate with the Way itself rather than with psychophysical energy: “In general, being necessarily has its origin in nonbeing. Hence, the Great Ultimate gives birth to the two Modes. The Great Ultimate is the designation for that which has no designation. Because we cannot name it, we take the ultimate limit to which being can be extended and treat it as corresponding to the Great Ultimate.” While Zhou Dunyi’s hierarchical structuring of the relationship between the Non-Ultimate and the Great Ultimate mirrors Kong Yingda’s between the Way and the Great Ultimate, Zhu Xi, who has read Wang’s commentaries with great care, incorporates into his own reading of the passage Wang’s elevation of the Great Ultimate to the status of the Way, and ends up identifying the Great Ultimate with the metaphysical ultimate, that is, pattern: “Change is the transformation of yin and yang; the Great Ultimate is its pattern.” Zhu Xi, Zhouyi benyi, in Zhuzi quanshu [Complete works of Master Zhu], ed. Zhu Jieren et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe; Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010), 1:133. See Richard Lynn’s introduction to The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, trans. Richard John Lynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 7.

26. Ching, Religious Thought of Zhu Xi, pp. 43, 48.

27. See Zhu Xi, Taiji tushou jie [Commentary on the Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate], in Zhou Dunyi ji [Collected works of Zhou Dunyi], ed. Chen Keming (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 3 (hereafter Tushou jie), where Zhu Xi says, “The doings of High Heaven [i.e., the Great Ultimate] is without any sound or smell, yet it is in fact the pivot of creative transformation and the root of the differentiation of all things. That is why Master Zhou says, ‘the Non-Ultimate and the Great Ultimate.’ It is not the case that there is the Non-Ultimate outside of the Great Ultimate.” The Non-Ultimate, he adds, is “the very condition in which [the patterns of] yin and yang and the Five Phases are dissolved into one another with no gap left between them” (Tushou jie, p. 5).

28. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:1, 2. For Zhu Xi’s “kataphatic” construal of the metaphysical ultimate vis-à-vis Buddhism, see Yulei, 6:2365, 2376. The Neo-Confucian rejection of Daoist and Buddhist “nihilism” comes from their concern that too transcendent an interpretation of the ultimate might lead to escapism, that is, a metaphysical flight from the world. See Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, pp. 48–51.

29. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 6:2374. He makes it clear that he is using the Great Ultimate as a metaphysical and ontological symbol, not a cosmological symbol: “The Great Ultimate is the Way above physical form; yin and yang are vessels with physical form” (Tushou jie, p. 3).

30. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:3, 101. See Tushou jie, p. 7.

31. The Neo-Confucian notion of the mutual interdependence of substance and function is encapsulated in the following dictum of Cheng Yi, an important predecessor of Zhu Xi: “Substance and function are of a single origin; there is no gap between what is manifest and what is hidden” (Yizhuan xu [Preface to the commentaries on the Classic of Change], in Er Cheng ji, 3:689). Zhu Xi interprets this dictum as follows: “The meaning of ‘substance and function are of a single origin’ is that, although substance has no trace, function is already in its midst; the saying, ‘There is no gap between what is manifest and what is hidden,’ refers to the fact that what is hidden is present in the midst of what is manifest. Before heaven and earth come into being, the ten thousand things are already furnished—that is the meaning of substance having function within itself. Once heaven and earth are established, the patterns [of the ten thousand things] also continue to be—that is the meaning of what is manifest having in its midst what is hidden” (Yulei, 5:1654). See also Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:101, where he says, “When speaking of yang, yang is substance, and yin is function; when speaking of yin, yin is substance, and yang is function.”

32. See Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:3 where he says pattern is “without feeling, intention, deliberation, and productive activity” in contrast to psychophysical energy, which can “coalesce, congeal, and produce” concrete thing-processes. Pattern is certainly in the midst of psychophysical energy’s creative movement, he says, but without activity of its own. Zhu Xi is careful to interpret Zhou Dunyi’s statement, “The Great Ultimate moves and produces yang; it comes to rest, and produces yin,” in such a way as to ensure that the Great Ultimate’s “movement” and “rest” are understood as referring to the patterns of movement and rest, not movement and rest themselves, which he assigns to psychophysical energy (Yulei, 1:1, 6:2373). See also Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, pp. 29–30.

33. Precisely for this reason, Tu Wei-ming rejects the interpretation of li as creativity in favor of its interpretation as the “ground of being” underlying the creative process, although he does not refer to the substance-function relation: “In short, Chu Hsi envisioned principle [li]to be singular, unitary, above-form, permanent, and omnipresent. It is being rather than activity, reason rather than practice, and the ground underlying cosmic transformation rather than the actual creative impulse that engenders heaven, earth, and the myriad things. Principle in itself is neither dynamic nor tranquil, for it transcends categories of this kind. Indeed, principle is ineffable and beyond ordinary human experience.” Tu Wei-ming, “T’oegye’s Creative Interpretation of Chu Hsi’s Philosophy of Principle,” Korea Journal 22, no. 2 (1982): 12.

34. Robert Neville argues that the ontological creativity of pattern should be envisaged not so much in terms of ontological “causation” as in terms of ontological creation of value: “The special focus of Confucian ontogenesis, however, is less the grounding of physical existence than the grounding of the real value that existence bears and of the very definition of the human as the value-seeker.” Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 75.

35. In his effort to relate Zhu Xi’s thought to the tradition of American naturalism, particularly to that of Justus Buchler, John H. Berthrong argues that pattern’s priority over psychophysical energy is epistemological, not ontological. Pattern is prior to psychophysical energy in the order of our knowing the myriad thing-events, because “we learn about new objects and events by recognizing something different, some novel pattern that attracts our attention—namely, li 理 as a coherent, ordered principle or pattern that makes the thing or event stand out from the rest of the ten thousand things and events…. It is this recognition of principle that happens first, that is all” (Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008], p. 97). Further, as Zhu Xi firmly believed in the concrete, factual togetherness of pattern and psychophysical energy, he “has a theory of ontological parity, not of ontological priority” (ibid). Although Berthrong points to a fresh way of interpreting one of the most ambiguous points in Zhu Xi’s thought, the force of the statements such as the following—well-known—one seems to resist his naturalistic approach: “The so-called pattern and psychophysical energy are definitely two different things. But when looked at from the standpoint of concrete thing-events, the two are merged with each other and cannot be separated into their respective locations. This, however, does not hinder the two from each being one thing. When looked at from the standpoint of pattern, before things existed, their pattern had already existed” (“Da Liu Shuwen [Reply to Liu Shuwen],” in Wenji, 5:2095). Further, the ontological priority of pattern is quite clearly presented in this statement quoted earlier: “Psychophysical energy that has already dispersed has already changed and no longer exists; but that which roots itself in pattern to emerge daily is truly vast, flood-like and infinite” (“Da Liao Zihui [Reply to Liao Zihui],” in Wenji, 5:2021; italics mine).

36. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:1; 6:2371, 2374.

37. “The Great Ultimate is not a separate entity. It is present in yin and yang as yin and yang, in the Five Phases as the Five Phases, in the ten thousand thing-events as the ten thousand thing-events. It is [nonetheless] only one Pattern. Because of its ultimate reach, it is named the Great Ultimate” (Zhu Xi, Yulei, 6:2371). See also 6:2372: “Question: ‘How was it before anything existed?’ Answer: ‘There existed a shared Pattern of all under heaven, not the patterns of individual thing-events.’”

38. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:61; 4:1177.

39. According to Zhu Xi, “The Great Ultimate is simply the supremely excellent and perfect normative pattern…. What Master Zhou called the Great Ultimate is the exemplary virtue of all that is good and most excellent in heaven and earth, in people and thing-events” (Yulei, 6:2371). Fung Yu-lan compares the Great Ultimate with Plato’s Idea of the Good and Aristotle’s God in his History of Chinese Philosophy, 2:537.

40. Zhu Xi, Yulei 6:2409.

41. Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, Er Cheng ji, 1:153. I am using Wing-tsit Chan’s translation of this saying with one modification, substituting “all figures” for “all things.” Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 555.

42. Cheng Yi, “Da Yang Shi lun xi ming shu [Reply to Yang Shih’s letter on the Western inscription],” in Er Cheng ji, 2:609.

43. See Zhu Xi, Yulei, 6:2437, where he says the phrase “empty and tranquil, and without any sign” is none other than an explanation of “the Non-Ultimate and the Great Ultimate.”

44. Zhu Xi, “Da Lü Ziyao [Reply to Lü Ziyao],” in Wenji, 5:2186.

45. See also Zhu Xi, Tushou jie, p. 9: “In regard to his [Cheng Yi’s] saying, “substance and function constitute one source,’ from the standpoint of the ultimate hiddenness of pattern, the saying refers to the Great Ultimate being ‘empty, silent, and without any sign,’ while all thing-events, shimmering, are already present in it. In regard to his saying, “there is no gap between what is manifest and what is hidden,’ from the standpoint of the ultimate manifestness of things, the saying refers to pattern being everywhere, in every entity or state of affair. When speaking of pattern, substance comes before pattern, but the function of pattern is already present in its substance. That is why the two constitute one source; when speaking of states of affairs, what is manifest comes before what is hidden, but in every state of affair the pattern of its substance can be seen. That is why there is no gap between the two.”

46. See Zhu Xi, Yulei, 4:1286: “Heaven and earth are merely one psychophysical energy, but it spontaneously divides itself into yin and yang. Consequently, the two forces of yin and yang interact, and in so doing give rise to the myriad thing-events. Nothing, therefore, is without its opposite. Heaven is the opposite of earth; life is the opposite of death; speech and silence, movement and rest—these are likewise opposites, each according to its kind.” For a detailed account of the birth of the myriad thing-events of the world from the creative transformation of psychophysical energy, see Tushou jie, p. 5. For the various analogies used by Zhu Xi to explain this process, see Yulei, 1:58, 73.

47. The phrase “moral metaphysics” was coined by Mou Zhongsan to point to the fact that in Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism pattern functions as the metaphysical basis of authentic human existence. Tu Wei-ming, “T’oegye’s Creative Interpretation,” p. 10.

48. For Zhu Xi’s identification of human nature with pattern, see Yulei, 1:67. See also his commentary on The Doctrine of the Mean, 1.1—the alleged origin of that identification—in Zhu Xi, Daehak Jungyong jang-gu [Collected commentaries on the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean], rev. ed., trans. with commentary by Seong Baek-hyo (Seoul: Jeontong munhwa yeon-guhoe, 2006), p. 82. For Zhu Xi’s identification of humanity (ren) with human nature, which can be traced back to Mencius, 2A6, see his commentary on the passage in Maengja jipju, p. 104.

49. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:40, 85, 95. Zhu Xi acknowledges that nonhuman creatures also have heart-minds and consciousness, albeit without a capacity to deliberate upon feelings (Yulei, 4:1431). Due to the partial and obstructed type of psychophysical energy with which they are endowed, they simply respond to their environment spontaneously without exhibiting the “spiritual” qualities of the human heart-mind. Their spontaneous psychosomatic responses, however, are in most cases conducive to harmony on account of the harmonizing pattern present in them as their respective natures, although the kinds of harmony they manifest are incomplete compared to harmonies possible in human relations (Yulei, 1:59).

50. See the succinct description of the Neo-Confucian moral psychology by Michael Kalton in the introduction to The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought, trans. Michael C. Kalton et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. xxii–xxv. For the relationship among the heart-mind, the human nature and feelings, see Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:89, 92, 94–95. For the role of intentional deliberation (意 yi), see Yulei, 1:96. For Zhu Xi, desires are intensifications of feelings; and people have evil desires when their feelings become excessive and unbalanced to the point of being uncontrollable (Yulei, 1:93–94).

51. Originating in the obscure phrase in the Shujing (the Classic of History), “The heart-mind of the Way (Daoxin)” became a widely used term among the Neo-Confucians to designate the human heart-mind fully enacting the human nature within, including Zhu Xi who wrote a commentary on the above phrase in the introduction to his Collected Commentaries on the Doctrine of the Mean. See Zhu Xi, Daehak Jungyong jang-gu, pp. 73–74.

52. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:113: “Humanity [ren] implies the life-giving intention.”

53. For Zhu Xi’s identification of humanity with the “fecund heart-mind of heaven and earth,” see Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:111, 7:2633. See also his “Renshuo” [A treatise on humanity], in Wenji, 7:3391–92. Zhu Xi argues that the heart-mind of heaven and earth, which can be said to be a “lord and master,” is in fact none other than pattern, and that this heart-mind is creative and conscious (“numinous”), though not really with deliberation and purpose. He seems to entertain a theistic language while at the same time qualifying it in a nontheistic direction. See Yulei, 1:4, where he says, “One cannot say that the heart-mind of heaven and earth is without numinous consciousness (靈 ling). Its numinous consciousness, however, cannot be compared to the way humans reflect and deliberate. Yichuan [Cheng Yi] said, ‘Heaven and earth has no heart-mind yet accomplishes transformations; the sage has a heart-mind yet does not act.’ … The heart-mind [of heaven and earth] is a lord and master in terms of its basic intent. Nonetheless, the so-called ‘lord and master’ is simply pattern.” Ultimately, Zhu Xi’s notion of the heart-mind of heaven and earth seems to be the name for the one Pattern when its embodiment is taken universally and generally “across the world” and given certain vague qualities of consciousness and intention that are directly related to its creative “urge” and proportionally analogous to the one Pattern’s more individual instances of embodiments in human and creaturely minds with varying degrees of intensity of consciousness. See Jonathan R. Herman, “Human Heart, Heavenly Heart: Mystical Dimensions of Chu Hsi’s Neo-Confucianism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 1 (2001): 103–28. See also Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, p. 252.

54. As David L. Hall’s process interpretation suggests, yin may be construed as the data of the past actualized world (the objective immortality of actual occasions) whereas yang could be interpreted as an activity of integrating the data of the past into a novel event. See David L. Hall, The Uncertain Phoenix: Adventures toward a Post-Cultural Sensibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 221–22. Robert Neville shares this process interpretation of the Great Ultimate’s movement: “A more primordial meaning is that yin has to do with the conditions of matrix, a situation out of which things can arise and to which they can return for replenishment. Yang on the other hand has to do with expression, with moving out from home base, with extension beyond the situation in which everything is mutually reinforcing, particularly with making something new that goes beyond the resources of yin. Change is thus a series of adventuring moves which must return to their source, or resource, for a renewal of their own power…. Change, or we may say creativity, involves a pulsation away from the given source and a contraction back to it…. Creativity is not an act making something out of nothing, as in the Western Hebrew-Platonic tradition, but the very being of process weaving novelties out of matrices filled with incipiencies and then reconstituting itself as at one with its sources.” Robert C. Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 54.

55. Julia Ching reads Zhu Xi’s account of the Great Ultimate’s creatively harmonizing movement cyclically (Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, p. 248). But there is nothing that prevents a spiral reading, given that Zhu Xi never spoke of it as some kind of “eternal return of the Same.”

56. Zhu Xi, “Da Huang Shangbo [Response to Huang Shangbo],” in Wenji, 5:2075 (quoted also in Yulei, 1:57): “If we discuss it from the perspective of the single origin of the myriad thing-events, pattern unites, while psychophysical energy differentiates.” See also Yulei, 1:59: “What makes them similar is their pattern; what makes them different is their psychophysical energy.”

57. Zhu Xi says, “When looked at from the perspective of the myriad thing-events’ different [physical] bodies, their psychophysical energies appear to be similar to each other while their [respective] patterns are definitely not alike.” “Da Huang Shangbo [Response to Huang Shangbo],” in Wenji, 5:2075.

58. Ching, Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, pp. 98–101. Zhu Xi, Yulei, 1:69: “Human nature is always good, yet there are some who are good from the time of their births, and there are those who are evil from the time of their births. This is due to the differences in their physical endowment…. The goal of learning is to transform the physical endowment, although such transformation is very difficult.”

59. In his Conversations, Zhu Xi makes the following statement: “The Great Ultimate is that which gathers [總 zong] the patterns of heaven and earth, and of all things” (Yulei, 6:2375). Lao Siguang distinguishes between two meanings of zong (總), i.e., as “subsume” (總攝 zong she) and “comprise” (總和 zong he), and argues that Zhu Xi uses the term more in the latter sense, i.e., as pointing to the sum of all the individual patterns, while criticizing him for being unclear and confusing on this matter. Siguang Lao, Jung-guk cheorhaksa [History of Chinese philosophy], trans. Jeong In-jae (Seoul: Tamgudang, 1987), pp. 329–30. See also Yulei, 6:2365, where Zhu Xi says, “The so-called Great Ultimate refers merely to the patterns of the Two Forces [yin and yang] and the Five Phases. It is not the case that there is a separate entity which constitutes the Great Ultimate.”

60. Zhu Xi, Tushou jie, pp. 3–4.

61. See Zhu Xi, Tushou jie, p. 4, where he says, “The subtlety of the Non-Ultimate is never absent from each individual entity…. When it comes to the very condition of the Great Ultimate being what it is, which can first be spoken of as being without sound or smell, that is the way the substance of the nature of thing-events is…. But in the production of the Five Phases, what thing-events are endowed with differs according to their respective psychophysical constitution; and that is the so-called ‘each has its one nature.’ ‘Each has its own nature’ means that the entirety of the indeterminate Great Ultimate never fails to be present within each thing-event.” See also Zhu Xi’s comment in Yulei, 6:2409: “Fundamentally there is only one Great Ultimate, yet the ten thousand thing-events are each endowed with it. Furthermore, they each have one Great Ultimate in its entirety.” The meaning of “one Great Ultimate in its entirety” is a bit clearer in Taiji tushou jie, p. 5: “In general, to speak comprehensively, the myriad thing-events altogether embody one Great Ultimate; to speak analytically, each thing-event individually has one Great Ultimate.” See also Yulei, 6:2409: “The saying, ‘Many and one are each right; small and large are [each] determined,’ refers to the fact that many are one, and one is many. All thing-events together embody one Great Ultimate; but each single thing-event individually has one Great Ultimate.” Fung Yu-lan compares this notion of the Great Ultimate with the Huayan Buddhist concept of the Jewel Net of Indra or the tathagatagarba (storehouse of the absolute), while recognizing the difference between the notions in that, whereas the Buddhist concept envisions that within each concrete thing-event all other concrete thing-events are physically present, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian notion sees within each concrete thing-event only the patterns of all other concrete thing-events (Fung, History of Chinese Philosophy, 2:541–42). What this implies is that when each individual thing-event partakes of the Great Ultimate beause its pattern participates in the one Pattern, all the other individual patterns of all the other thing-events of the world are co-present within each at the same time.