GB:
徐问∶天地未判时，下面许多已有否？ 曰∶ 只是都有此理。 天地 生万物千万年古今只不离许多物。
big5:
畗拜ぱゼ砛Τ り 琌常Τ瞶 ぱ ネ窾窾さぃ瞒砛
Xu asked: "Before Heaven and Earth separated [to form our universe], did everything below (i.e., in this world) already exist?" Zhu Xi responded: "It is just that in all cases there was [already] these li. From antiquity to the present day, in thousands and tens of thousands of years since Heaven and Earth produced the myriad creatures, it is just the case that not many of them left the scene.
Commentary:
This passage is a little unclear because it appears to involve some colloquialisms that are not used today. (Or perhaps I am merely unfamiliar with them.) Zhu Xi appears to mean that the li for everything existed from the very beginning (or even from before the beginning of the universe), and that most of these li always find instances in the world. He surely knew, as Han Fei Zi knew, that elephants once roamed China and were no longer to be found there. In other passages Zhu Xi indicates a knowledge of fossils. Perhaps he found instances in the fossils he saw of creatures that no longer existed in his time. In still other passages Zhu Xi indicates that the li for human inventions (such as the boat) were there before the artifacts were first constructed.
This is one of the passages that makes it clear that one insight conveyed by the word li is that there can be possibilities or potentialities for things that determine whether they can come into existence. In some passages Zhu Xi uses the expression "there is no such li" to indicate that some creature or event that someone else has imagined is in fact an impossibility.
We have already seen that the formal aspect of a huge entity such as a mighty oak is contained in a tiny thing like an acorn, and that huge entities grow out of small ones by a process of regular accretion governed by something that must have been in the original seed. But in this passage Zhu Xi indicates that there is something that accounts for the formal aspect of concrete entities even before those concrete entities come into existence.
To take up, once again, the image of the oak tree, if we traced its development back in time we would eventually reach a single fertilized cell. If we traced farther back, through the entire history of life on this planet, we would presumably come to the first fortuitous moment at which unliving amino acids fell into a self-perpetuating combination with each other. And at that point we could see that there was something about the chemical characteristics of the amino acids that made their synthesis into a living entity a real possibility. And if we searched further, back to the instant at which time began in the Big Bang, we could imagine that there is something outside of time and space that made the characteristics of time, space, matter, and energy such that it was possible for things of the order of complexity of oaks and humans to evolve based only on what was already present in some sense at the moment of the Big Bang.
Zhu Xi's explanation for the development of complexity in the real world does not follow from ideas very much like those of Western physics and chemistry, but he does indicate in this passage that he had some idea of how to make his own accounting of the birth and growth of complexity.
-- PEM