Wake Forest University

East Asian Languages and Literatures, Chinese,

Patrick Edwin Moran





Zhu Zi Yu-lei, Juan 1, item 48

Traditional

問:「前日先生答書云:『陰陽五行之為性,各是一 氣所 稟,而性則一也。』兩『性』字同否?」曰:「一般。」 又曰:「同者理也,不同者氣也。」又曰:「他所以道 五行之生各一其性。』節復問:「這箇莫是 木自是木,火 自是火,而其理則一?」先生應而曰:「且如這箇光,也 有在硯蓋上底,也有在墨上底,其光則一也。」

節。

Simplified

问:「前日先生答书云:『阴阳五行之为性,各是一 气所 禀,而性则一也。』两『性』字同否?」曰:「一般。」 又曰:「同者理也,不同者气也。」又曰:「他所以道 五行之生各一其性。』节复问:「这个莫是 木自是木,火 自是火,而其理则一?」先生应而曰:「且如这个光,也 有在砚盖上底,也有在墨上底,其光则一也。」

节。

big5:

ݡGue͵ѤGy椧ʡAUO@ [Aөʫh@]CzyʡzrP_HvGu@Cv SGuP̲z]AP̮]CvSGuLҥHD 椧ͦU@ʡCz`_ݡGuoO ۬OA ۬OAӨzh@HvӤGuBpoA] bx\WA]bWAh@]Cv

`C

GB:

ʣǰƣ֮Ϊԣһ һҲԡͬ񣿡Իһ㡣 ԻͬҲͬҲԻԵ ֮һԡڸʣĪ ľľ ǻ𣬶һӦԻ⣬Ҳ ϵףҲīϵףһҲ

ڡ

[Someone] asked: "The other day Teacher responded to a letter, saying: 'As for the [way in which] Yin and Yang and the Five Components of Activity act as xing (innate characteristics), each [of them] is dispensed (paid out, bestowed) by the One Qi, and therefore their xing is one.' Were the two [instances of the word] xing the same or not?" [Zhu Xi] replied, "The same general category." [Zhe Xi] further said: "What is the same is their li, and what is different is their qi." And, again, he said: "That is why he (Zhou Dun-yi) said, 'In the production of the Five Components, each of them individuates its xing .' Jie asked once more: "Does this not just mean that wood is wood of its own [nature], fire is fire of its own [nature], and yet their li is one?" Teacher responded to this by saying: "Let us for the moment say that it is like this light. There is some that falls on the inkstone, and there is also some that falls on the ink stick. [But] its light is one."
Jie

Commentary:

There are many problems in understanding this passage. The xing of something is what it will do if not interfered with by external forces. The nature of cattle is to eat grass and drink water. It would be extremely difficult to train a cow to hunt rabbits and drink their blood. The nature of fire is to heat things up and/or to burn them. The nature of water is to cool off below the ambient temperature. (The Chinese of this period did not, perhaps, know about evaporative cooling, but they had observed that a crock of water would cool down, unless it were heated by the sun, a fire, or some other external source of heat.)

The Chinese quoted from the letter says: "Yin Yang, wu xing zhi wei xing...", and the question in my mind is how to handle the word "wei" in this passage. Without it, the passage just says, "The xing of Yin, Yang, and the Five Components...", but wei means "to be" or "to do." So the passage might be intended to explain how Yin, Yang, and the Five Components are themselves xing (natures), or it might be intended to explain how they make xing that apply to other things. The first five Chinese characters stand as a topic, so let us examine the comment to see whether it throws any light on the topic.

"Each [of them] is paid out (bestowed) by yi qi." The question is whether "yi qi" should be translated as "one qi [per entity]", or "the one qi". That phrase is immediately followed by a phrase beginning with "er", which usually indicates some kind of salient relationship between the preceding and following clauses. Moreover, the phrase after the "er" says, "therefore their xing is/are one/singular." It is unclear whether xing is intended to be a singular or a plural noun. So it is not surprising that Zhu Xi's student wants to know whether he is using one word to refer to two things, or is taking one word to have two meanings.

Judging by the text, the reason that one can put a "therefore" in the third phrase is because there is a "one" in the third phrase that is dependant in some way on the "one" in the second phrase. The most plausible interpretation would seem to me to be that because there is a single qi that produces them, there must be a single xing that is associated with them. But there is a serious problem with this interpretation since if the xing of Yin is the same as the xing of Yang, and also the same as the xing of Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal, then xing cannot mean the nature of each of the seven. What fire does if left to its own devices is not what water does.

Zhu Xi gives us another clue when he says, "What is the same is their li, and what is different is their qi." So if several things have the same li, how do they come to have different qi? If the interpretation suggesting that there is a single qi is correct, then what accounts for the differences in qi at this point?

There are two fundamentally different accounts that can be used to explain the differentiation of qi in the world, and, hence, to explain the existence of vast numbers of different entities in the world. By one account, Zhu Xi is a metaphysical monist. By another account, he is a metaphysical dualist. The dualistic account is easier to explain because it simply assumes the independent existence of diversity. It assumes that there is a kind of substance in the universe that forms the basis for all concrete things and it also powers those things if they happen to be living, or happen to be some active process like fire. This qi is not continuous. There are patches of it, or volumes of it, here and there in the universe, and some are of high quality, some of low quality, some huge, some minute, and so forth. There is one li in the universe. It is that which gives form and regularity to the things of this world. If it does not metaphorically "shine down upon" a perfect volume of qi, then what takes form out of that volume of qi will not be a perfect actualization of the information (the form, the regularity) that is present in the one li. So the one li may fall on one puff of qi and a sea horse will take form. That same single li may fall on a somewhat better puff of qi and then a human being may take form. There are several problems with this kind of theory. Perhaps the most telling of all of them is that it makes our everyday experience and understanding of the facts of reproduction completely wrong. Tigers and tabby cats should appear wherever in the world a suitable puff of qi could be found, not in the company of mother tigers and mother cats. There would appear to be no reason whatsoever that wheels and other inventions appear at some point in history and continue on from there. Why was it necessary to wait for a human to invent the wheel and to convey the principles of wheel manufacture and use to other humans? Why does a perfect drop of rain hit the ground and run off as groundwater, its original li for sphericality lost somewhere as it courses downhill toward the ocean?

The second kind of account that has been attributed to Zhu Xi is a monistic theory that follows the basic outline displayed in Zhou Dun-yi's Tai-ji Diagram. It states that in terms of what depends on what for its existence, there is "first" the Tai-ji. That entity is nothing but the reason or the ground for the existence of being and form. It has no discernible characteristics. It is neither light nor dark, neither dense nor vacuous, and so on. But its nature, its "what it does spontaneously because that is the kind of thing that it is", is to produce being and form. And, according to the Tai-ji Diagram, the way followed by that process of production occurs level upon metaphysical level. On the first perceptible level there is an alternation of truly cosmic proportions. The whole universe presumably partakes of this cycle. The cycle has two phases, one is a waxing phase, and the other is a waning phase. It is more abstract than the things that most people can isolate in their attentions. It is analogous to the waxing and waning of the moon, but it is more abstract since it is not identifiable with the waxing and waning of any particular thing or things. It is one thing, but it has two discernible qualities, each of which has its own name.

Descending a step in the Tai-ji Diagram we find another level of existence, one that has five phases. These five phases are not discrete entities. They are, like the colors in a rainbow, parts of a continuum that appear qualitatively different to us.

The next step downward in the Tai-ji Diagram brings us rather suddenly to the level of the myriad creatures. There is a much more fully developed account of this sort that is told using the vocabulary of the Yi Jing and involves six levels before the appearance of the myriad creatures. Zhu Xi indicates that this second account could also be carried through further descending levels.

Now note one very important thing about the way this array of levels is set up. Each descending level is rooted in the preceding level, all the way back to the Tai-ji, and that fact will be true no matter how many levels of descent are detailed. This fact has a profoundly important result as far as the status of John Doe and Mary Phahn as individuals are concerned. Whatever someone may point to as an "individual" will in fact be no more individual than are metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. Just as it is confusing to speak of them as "elements", it is also confusing to speak of John and Mary as "individuals" because they are just phases of some incredibly complicated cycle, and they are not only both rooted in the same Tai-ji but may well share many phases on intervening levels.

As soon as something comes into this universe, whether it be Yin, Yang, metal, water, wood, fire, earth, or whatever, it has characteristics and characteristic ways of behaving which we can call xing if it is a living creature or something that we think of as a living creature (fire, for instance), or we can call li if we choose to use a more general term that also applies to inanimate and abstract entities. (These terms came into philosophical use at different times in Chinese history, so they cover some of the same ground and can also be used to explain each other.) However, it also has what we in the West would call a physical aspect. The Chinese understanding of the activity of biological (and other) systems was different from the current standard Western interpretation. Their explanatory concept was not matter and energy or matter-energy, but something they called qi. They believed that the bodies of humans and other living organisms were both constituted of qi and motivated by qi. While qi is most commonly understood as a "breath" or "bio-plasma," Zhu Xi also maintains that there are denser fractions of qi, and that what we in the West would call the material aspect of things is qi. Since the basic categories of his philosophy are li and qi, it could hardly be otherwise.

So one aspect of the first level of descent from the Tai-ji is formal, the primal waxing and waning that are called Yang and Yin. But the other aspect of that first level of descent is qi. Characteristics, after all, have to have something to inhere in. I think that this primal qi is what Zhu Xi means by the "One Qi". It is the "way of the Universe" that this One Qi waxes and wanes, which accounts for our perception of the Yang and Yin characteristics or qualities -- which are the only things by which we can know that the One Qi is there. It is also the "way of the Universe" that this primal qi (the One Qi) can also vibrate at a higher harmonic, so it also vibrates four times per cycle while it is vibrating two times per cycle, and that differentiates the One Qi qualitatively into not only Yang Qi and Yin Qi, but also into the qi of the Five Components. That explanation may take care of the words: "As for the [way in which] Yin and Yang and the Five Components of Activity act as xing (innate characteristics), each [of them] is paid out (bestowed) by the One Qi," but why does he add the words: "and therefore their xing is one"? I do not believe that he could possibly mean that the xing (nature) of fire is identical with the xing of wood. The whole point of talking about the Five Components is to delineate their different characteristics and explain how those characteristics enter into the individuality of the entities constituted on them. I think, instead, that Zhu Xi is using xing as a synonym for li (which is possible because xing is a special kind of li). If that is true, then the liwhich would be one and identical for all of them would be the Li that is the metaphysical source of all of them. Its other name is Tai-ji. When his student asks him whether the two occurrences of the word xing in the first speech are the same, Zhu Xi answers not that they are the same but that they are in the same general category. The xing of fire, for instance, is a characteristic, the way it characteristically behaves if nothing is interfering with it. Fire heats and burns, and anything that partakes of its nature will share in that fireyness. The primal xing, which can also be called the primal Li or the Tai-ji is also a characteristic way of behaving, but the result is not heating but instead is creation.

"That is why he (Zhou Dun-yi) said, 'In the production of the Five Components, each of them individuates its xing .' " If the above discussion is correct, then this dictum becomes a little easier to understand. Each level of descent is rooted in the level above it, and in that way each phase of a certain level shares in and interacts with the characteristics above it. But to descend is to differentiate, and so each phase constituted on a new, lower level has a new kind of specificity. Fire may be yang-like, but it is specifically a fiery kind of yang activity. So fire being fiery is a consequence of its being fire, i.e., it is a consequence of its being that phase at that level of descent. One must see the total context of that phase to know it fully.

As for the last example that Zhu Xi gives, it is very easy to interpret it as supporting the dualistic interpretation. But that is because in our everyday experience of the world we understand light to be a simple agent that has no information or ability to give form to other things, and we understand that when it strikes a blue object all the wavelengths that are not blue are absorbed, and the remaining blue light travels to our eyes and gives us some information about the object it struck. So we could understand the analogy to say that Li reaches out and strikes some qi, and if it is a qi suitable to form a blue diamond then it will form a blue diamond, but if it strikes some qi that is suitable to form a ruby then it will form a ruby.

The alternative would be to conceive of the sunlight as a life-giving power that conveys information about how, e.g., a tree should form, and also provides for the substance of the tree. That is not good Western science, but it may give yet another way to try to understand the monist interpretation of Zhu Xi's philosophy.

The Ji Shuo commentary to the Tai-ji Tu Shuo, which is included on page 7 of the Zhou Zi Quan-shu, collects the following words of Zhu Xi: "For Tai-ji to produce Yin and Yang is just for li to produce qi." (According to Fan Shou-kang's Zhu Zi Ji Qi Zhe-xue, p. xxx, these words are also recorded in the Zhu Zi Quan-shu. That book is different from both the Zhu Zi Yu-lei and from the Zhu Zi Da Quan. I have not been able to find the quotation in that book, which may simply be because Fan Shou-kang miscopied a juan or page number.)

The passage quoted above helps to make clearer to the modern student ideas that may well have been perfectly clear to students who grew up sharing their cultural context with Zhu Xi. Zhu Xi was trying to use the professional philosophical vocabulary of his own day to give an integrated explanation of philosophical ideas going back more than 1,500 years. The earlier terms often had no systematic connections with each other. Each term such as "Tai-ji", "xing", "dao", and so forth, had been created to express a particular insight. How these concepts related to each other was often not clear. Zhu Xi sought to preserve the valuable insights of previous philosophers and show how the expressions of these insights could be integrated with each other. One of his tools for that task was a set of philosophical concepts that had been worked out in view of each other.

The terms that Zhu Xi uses to explain the philosophical concepts of the past include li and qi. Both of these words have a venerable history of philosophical use, so it is not surprising that confusion could arise when meanings appropriate to Zhu Xi's time are used in the same breath with meanings appropriate to Zhou dynasty times. Both of these concepts also have different meanings when used in explanations appropriate to different levels of metaphysical complexity. For instance, the word li means one thing when it is used to characterize the Tai-ji, which is supersensual, and when it is used to describe the grain in a piece of wood, in which case the li is simply the structural pattern that is available to the senses. Superficially, these two li are totally different, yet they are linked because the concrete li is dependent on the supersensible Tai-ji.

Li matches pretty well what, in current Western vocabulary, we would call the possibility or potentiality of something, and/or the formal aspect of something. Qi matches pretty well what we would call the actuality of something, and/or its material aspect. What the ancients called the Tai-ji, Zhu Xi calls li. There is no way to capitalize things in Chinese, but it would make sense to me to capitalize both these words in English because they function as proper nouns. Zhu Xi's basic theoretical stance is that there can be no thing come into existence in the universe unless it is first possible for it to come into existence. That is to say that the "rules" exist before any specific entities come into being. In modern science there has been a fair amount of attention paid to the question of how likely or unlikely it was that life be produced. The answers to these questions come in terms of the fundamental physical constants of the universe, and those constants appear to have been determined at the beginning of the universe. So our own view is not greatly different from that of Zhu Xi in this regard. Zhu Xi calls the Tai-ji a li because its only characteristic is that it makes a certain kind of being and pattern (or regularity) possible. To distinguish this primal li from all of the other, derivitive, li in the universe, I generally capitalize it.

Yin and Yang are not pure potentials or simply the possibilities for things in the universe. They are two aspects of the universe that we can know only by a process of abstraction. They can be described as the inhalation and exhalation, or the waxing and waning, of the entire universe. In other words, the universe vibrates as a whole. The li of the universe can be explained as this characteristic two phase vibration. The qi of the universe can be explained as that which is actually there and vibrating. We could model this situation in a crude two-dimensional way by imagining a large balloon with various figures painted on it. Somebody inhales from and inhales into this balloon and so it expands and contracts. If the figures painted on the balloon were sentient creatures, they would have great difficulty in perceiving this universal expansion and contraction, but it is still there. The li of this model universe would be the physical laws that govern the expansion and contraction of substances, and the qi of this model universe would be the actual balloon. Saying that the Tai-ji produces Yin and Yang is equivalent to saying that the primal li produces the primal qi.

In the history of Chinese philosophy there was, early on, discussion of a single primal qi from which all things that come into existence derive their substance and being. Zhu Xi tends not to mention this qi, preferring to speak of the waxing qi as one thing (yang qi) and the waning qi as another thing (yin qi), but it appears in this passage.

Just as Yin and Yang have both a li aspect and a qi aspect, so too the Five Components have both a formal aspect and a material aspect. The possibility of the Five Components coming into existence derives from the two-phase cycle of Yin and Yang, i.e., the "natural law" that permits the creation of the Five Components resides in primal Yin and Yang. In other words, it is the nature of the Yin-Yang level of existence to "spin off" the level of the Five Components. So Zhu Xi speaks of the xing of Yin and Yang, and by that he means nothing other than their li. Sometimes the terms related to reproduction (xing, nature) come naturally to mind even when we are speaking of cosmic processes. The natures of Yin and Yang are determined by the Tai-ji, and the natures of the Five Components are determined by Yin and Yang, but are ultimately derived from, inherited from, or prefigured in the Tai-ji.

One of the remarkable things about this theory of Zhu Xi and his predecessors is that it is one of emergent complexity. The Tai-ji appears to be utterly simple. All that can be said about it is that it is the ground of all being and all pattern in the Universe. Yet if we try to trace the complexities of a dolphin or a human being back to their source we conclude that the potentiality for all of those intricacies had to be present in the Tai-ji. That is very similar to the picture we get from modern science. If we look at the physical and chemical characteristics of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and the other elements present in the universe, it would be very difficult to see the mind of Einstein prefigured therein. We wonder whether there are other, hidden, actors involved in the creation of life. Then we discover that we can at least assemble a virus from its elements.

The li that permits something is on the next level higher than that thing. And it is a single entity that produces multi-phase entities. So the same li produces a set of different qi. So Zhu Xi says: "What is the same is their li, and what is different is their qi." And when some actual thing (some qi) is produced, it has its own characteristics, its own productive potential, its own li. That is why Zhu Xi said: "That is why [Zhou Dun-yi] said, 'In the production of the Five Components, each of them individuates its xing .'

-- PEM Chinese text checked against the Zhu Zi Yu-lei, 7 July 2003.