著 岆 燴 峈 翋 ﹝ 晷 ﹝
big5:
帝 是 理 為 主 。 淳 。
Di (Lord) is li acting as master.
-- Chun
Many passages among the writings of Zhu Xi are concerned with explaining the vocabulary used in the earliest texts by means of the philosophical concepts current at Zhu Xi's time. Li refers to the regularities in nature in a complex way. The term exhibits a problem that has troubled Western philosophy -- it has different meanings, and it is easy to slip from one meaning to another meaning without realizing it. When such slippage occurs, it is very easy to reason incorrectly. Li has three meanings: (1) In the concrete, it refers to regularities found in nature and/or in human artifacts and activities. Examples would be such things as the specific grain pattern found in a piece of wood, or the complicated but regular path that a planet takes across the background of the fixed stars. (2) On the second level, li refers to the reasons for things being as they are and acting as they do in this universe, e.g., the reasons that oak wood has one characteristic grain pattern, and walnut has another grain pattern. (3) The third level of explanation of pattern and regularity pertains to why there are actual entities that inevitably have group and individual characteristics. Zhu Xi maintains that there has to be a reason or a cause for something to exist before that thing could ever exist, and, in fact, we can see instances where we first conceive of the possibility of constructing some artifact and then bring something new into the world.
In this passage, Zhu Xi is talking about the second level of meaning of li. The ancient texts say that the Lord on High first decides things, just as a human sovereign would issue orders, and those things come to exist in the real world. Zhu Xi claims that what is really happening is that li, the reasons for things, operate to guide the way that things occur in the real world.
There is a very complicated explanation for how this "acting as master" occurs. The clearest explanation appears in Zhu Xi's Yi xue qi meng , but even there it is difficult to see more than the broad outlines of a theory.