Wake Forest University
Patrick Edwin Moran
Traditional:
「天地始初混沌未分時，想只有水火二者。水之滓腳 便成地。今登高而望，群山皆為波浪之狀，便是水泛如此 。只不知因甚麼時凝了。初間極軟，後來方凝得硬。」問 ：「想得如潮水湧起沙相似？」曰：「然。水之極{濁}便成 地，火之極{清}使成風霆雷電日星之屬。」僩。
Simplified:
「天地始初混沌未分时，想只有水火二者。水之滓脚 便成地。今登高而望，群山皆为波浪之状，便是水泛如此 。只不知因甚麽时凝了。初间极软，後来方凝得硬。」问 ：「想得如潮水涌起沙相似？」曰：「然。水之极{浊}便成 地，火之极{清}使成风霆雷电日星之属。」□。
Big5:
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GB
32 ʼδʱֻˮߡˮ֮ҽ ɵءǸ߶ȺɽΪ֮״ˮ ֻ֪ʱˡ伫Ӳ 糱ˮӿɳƣԻȻˮ֮{} أ֮{}ɷ֮
Translation: "At the chaotic period in the beginning when Heaven and Earth had not yet divided, I believe that there existed only two things: water and fire. Then dregs in the water formed earth. Today, if you climb to a high point and look out, the ranges of mountains all take the form of waves, and that is because water when unconfined takes this form. However, it is not known for what reason or at what time it solidified. During the initial period it was exceedingly soft (plastic), and later on it congealed into something hard."
[Someone] asked: "Can we think of it as something like the way that tidal waters toss up sand?"
[Zhu Xi] responded: "Yes. The extreme [turbidity] of water forms earth,
and the extreme [purity] of fire forms wind, claps of thunder, lightning,
the sun, stars, and things of that sort."
Xian
Commentary:
What Zhu Xi has to say about the early appearance of water and fire is echoed in cosmological diagrams such as Zhou Dun-yi's Tai-ji Tu, in which the schematic representations of Yin and Yang are followed by the diagram of "fire, water, earth, wood, and metal". Fire and water are drawn at the top, earth is in the center, and wood and metal are at the bottom.
This passage also echoes other places in Zhu Xi's work where he explains the appearance of solids in the universe by saying that Yin and Yang grind against each other and "dregs" are cast off. But there is a basic problem of communication involved in bringing these ideas over into English because the modern world view is very different from the world view of thinkers such as Zhu Xi.
It looks like we are talking about concrete objects, or at least sets of concrete objects, when we mention fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. And it looks like yin and yang must be characteristics or aspects of things that exist in the universe. If one only wanted to talk about actual entities in the world, and their characteristics, then one could say that some things, the ones that are waxing in regard to their powers, are yang in character, and that other things, the ones that are waning in regard to their powers, are yin in their character. One could look at fire, water, earth, wood, and metal as elements, and one could say that any actual entity is a compound of these five elements. But to make that kind of analysis yields no explanation for the processes, the activities, that occur in the universe.
If yin and yang were only a couple of the most common and most abstract characterists of the things of the world, then there would be no reason to give them a position directly under the Tai-ji. And, of course, there would be no reason to have the Tai-ji in the Tai-ji Tu (Tai-ji Diagram) because there is no characteristic of things to which it corresponds.
There is one more complication: The moon is explained to be Yin and is even called the "Tai Yin" (great Yin), and the sun is explained to be Yang and is called (even in everyday language) the "Tai Yang" (great Yang). But the sun and the moon are not abstract and not characteristics. So what is going on? One way that translators have handled this problem is to call the sun the "emblem" of Yang, and to call the moon the "emblem" of Yin. That makes translations seem more plausible, but it does not explain the relationship between the concrete objects and the abstract characteristics given the same names.
An imprecise analogy may be helpful at this point. Consider that electrons appear in two main ways in our world: They are major constituents of people, stones, helium in balloons, and just about anything in our world that you could mention. In that form they are invisible to us, and, generally speaking, their existence is masked because their charges are matched by the positive charges of protons. But at times they appear in unmatched and unmasked form as lightning, sparks, and other flows of electrons. One problem with this analogy is that electons are understood by most people as discrete individuals, and it may be a mistake to think that there are discrete particles of Yin and Yang.
If fire, water, earth, wood, and metal work in an analogous way, they may present themselves to us in two ways, as concrete pieces of wood, nuggets of metal, bodies of water, etc., and as constituents of living creatures and other composite entities in this world.
In the passage above, Zhu Xi argues that fire and water existed first, and that earth came out of the water somehow. This passage does not speculate on the origins of wood and metal. But if we take what Zhu Xi says seriously, then we have to see a strange universe in which, for a time, fire and water coexisted without anything for them to be characterists of. Fire had no fuel to consume. Water had nothing to contain it. And they had nothing to hold them apart.
It seems difficult to hold that picture in mind and not conclude that we are looking at a cosmological process, and a narrative of how the universe was constituted in time. In that case, when one says that first there was the Tai-ji and then there was Yin and Yang, one is not talking about the logical priority of one aspect of the universe over some other aspect of the universe.
To make an analogy with modern physics, Zhu Xi would not be talking about a steady-state universe composed of atoms that can be shattered in cyclotrons but probably were never composed out of sub-atomic particles. He would be talking about a Big Bang, an initial plasma stew in which only the most primitive sub-atomics particles existed, an expansion, a cooling, and a "settling out" of electrons, protons, neutrons, an amalgamation into atoms, the formation of vast clouds of gas, condensation, star formation, and so forth. But there are other places in his writing where he maintains that we have no proof for anything other than the actual entities of the universe, their characteristics as physical entities, their characteristic activities, etc.
-- PEM