GB:
问∶有是理便有是气，似不可分先后。曰∶要之也先有理，只不可 说是今日有是理明日却有是气也。须有先后且如万乙山河天地都陷 了，毕竟理却只在这锂。
big5:
拜Τ琌瞶獽Τ琌ぃだり璶ぇΤ瞶ぃ 弧琌さらΤ琌瞶ら玱Τ琌斗Τ窾猠ぱ常炒 拨澈瞶玱硂綴
[Someone] asked: [When you say] there being such-and-such a li there must be such-and-such a lifebreath, it seems that you cannot divide things according to which is prior and which is anterior. [Master Zhu] said: In essence, li is there first, it is only that you cannot say that today there is such-and-such a li and tomorrow there is such-and-such a lifebreath. There must be priority and anteriority, for instance, in the extreme case that the mountains and rivers and [even] heaven and earth all were destroyed, in the final analysis the li would, contrary to what you might expect, just be here.
Commentary:
In the previously quoted passage Zhu Xi seemed to affirm that li and lifebreath are mutually aspective. Now he asserts that li can exist without the presence of lifebreath. There may be two ways he can mean this and still be consistent with the previous passage. One way is to say that oak trees come and oak trees go, but there is only one kind of acorn, one basic plan for growing an oak tree of a certain variety. So, in a sense, the formal aspect of an oak tree can be abstracted and known, and the potentiality to have an oak tree in a particular time and place depends on the existence of copies of the basic plan in the form of a supply of acorns. A simpler way to say this, in line with what we know about the genetics of living creatures, is that there is basically only one phenotype for one kind of oak tree. If all of the oak trees of a certain variety ceased to exist, the only way to get them back would be to somehow recreate their original genetic identity by recreating the appropriate genetic structure in a living cell.
Zhu Xi may also mean something analogous to this: If all human beings ceased to exist there would still happen to be eyes of the general quality of human eyes. We know this because the eyes of octopuses are functionally a very close match for ours, apparently because environmental forces have driven evolution in similar directions. And, more speculatively, we might believe that even if all life were to be destroyed on Earth it would evolve elsewhere in the Universe, and that where environmental forces were similar to ours similar organisms would sometimes evolve because there are not an infinite number of solutions to the same evolutionary problems.
The question this discussion raises is: How can Zhu Xi trace the constituting of the multitudinous entities in our world back to more fundamental entities -- in the absence of a theory that involves matter, energy, physics, and chemistry? Plato would have spoken of chaos and the world of Ideas, Aristotle would have spoken of prime matter and successive levels of forms. Does Zhu Xi have an interest in this kind of discussion of a prime cause or of earliest causes?
--PEM