Lieh Tzu (said to have lived in the fifth century B.C.), one of the brightest stars in the Taoist constellation, considered this nameable world as having evolved from an unnameable absolute being.  The evolution did not take place through the direction of a personal will working out a plan of creation:  “In the beginning there was Chaos [hun tun].  It was a mingled potentiality of Form [hsing], Pneuma [ch’i], and Substance [chih].  A Great Change [t’ai i] took place in it, and there was a Great Starting [t’ai ch’u] which is the beginning of Form.  The Great Starting evolved a Great Beginning [t’ai shih], which is the inception of Pneuma.  The Great Beginning was followed by the Great Blank [t’ai su], which is the first formation of Substance.  Substance, Pneuma, and Form being all evolved out of the primordial chaotic mass, this material world as it lies before us came into existence.”  And that which made it possible for Chaos to evolve was the Solitary Indeterminate (i tu or the tao), which is not created, but is able to create everlastingly.  And being both Solitary and Indeterminate it tells us nothing determinate about itself.

Chuang Tzu’s Super-tao

Chuang Chou (fourth and third centuries B.C.), generally known as Chuang Tzu, the most brilliant Taoist of all, maintained with Lao Tzu that the universe started from the Nameless, but it was if possible a more absolute and transcendental Nameless than that of Lao Tzu.  He dwells on the relativity of knowledge; as when asleep he did not know that he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly, so when awake he did not know that he was not a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. [10] But “all is embraced in the obliterating unity of the tao, and the wise man, passing into the realm of the Infinite, finds rest therein.”  And this tao, of which we hear so much in Chinese philosophy, was before the Great Ultimate or Grand Terminus (t’ai chi), and “from it came the mysterious existence of God [ti].  It produced Heaven, it produced earth.”

Popular Cosmogony still Personal or Dualistic

These and other cosmogonies which the Chinese have devised, though it is necessary to note their existence in order to give a just idea of their cosmological speculations, need not, as I said, detain us long; and the reason why they need not do so is that, in the matter of cosmogony, the P’an Ku legend and the yin-yang system with its monistic elaboration occupy virtually the whole field of the Chinese mental vision.  It is these two—­the popular and the scientific—­that we mean when we speak of Chinese cosmogony.  Though here and there a stern sectarian might deny that the universe originated in one or the other of these two ways, still, the general rule holds good.  And I have dealt with them in this order because, though the P’an Ku legend belongs to the fourth century A.D., the I ching dualism was not, rightly speaking, a cosmogony until Chou Tun-i made it one by the publication of his T’ai chi t’u in the eleventh century A.D.  Over the unscientific and the scientific minds of the Chinese these two are paramount.