Spirituality – Zhou Dunyi: The Metaphysics and Practice of Sagehood (Part 2)

Joseph A. Adler

Diagram of the Supreme Polarity (Taiji tu)

Zhou’s best-known contribution to the Neo-Confucian tradition was his brief “Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Polarity” and the Diagram itself. The text has engendered controversy and debate ever since the twelfth century, when Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian (1137-1181) placed it at the head of their Neo-Confucian anthology, Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsilu), in 1175. It was controversial from a sectarian Confucian standpoint because the diagram explained by the text was attributed to a prominent Daoist master, Chen Tuan (Chen Xiyi, 906-989), and because the key terms of the text had well-known Daoist origins. Scholars to the present day have attempted to interpret what Zhou Dunyi meant by them.

The two key terms, which appear in the opening line of the Explanation, are wuji and taiji, translated here as “Non-Polar” and “Supreme Polarity.” Wuji had been used in the classical Daoist texts, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Liezi. Wu is a negation, roughly equivalent to “there is not;” ji is literally the ridgepole of a peaked roof, and usually means “limit” or “ultimate.” So in these early texts wuji means “the unlimited,” or “the infinite.” But in later Daoist texts it came to denote a state of primordial chaos, prior to the differentiation of yin and yang, and sometimes equivalent to dao.

Taiji was found in several classical texts, mostly but not exclusively Daoist. For the Song Neo-Confucians, the locus classicus of taiji was the Appended Remarks (Xici), or Great Treatise (Dazhuan), one of the appendices of the Classic of Change (Yijing): “In change there is the Supreme Polarity, which generates the Two Modes [yin and yang]”. Taiji here is a generative principle of bipolarity.

But the term was much more prominent and nuanced in Daoism than in Confucianism. Taiji was the name of one of the Daoist heavens, and thus was prefixed to the names of many Daoist immortals, or divinities, and to the titles of the texts attributed to them. It was sometimes identified with Taiyi, the Supreme One (a Daoist divinity), and with the pole star of the Northern Dipper. It carried connotations of a turning point in a cycle, an end point before a reversal, and a pivot between bipolar processes. It became a standard part of Daoist cosmogonic schemes, where it usually denoted a stage of chaos later than wuji, a stage or state in which yin and yang have differentiated but have not yet become manifest. It thus represented a “complex unity,” or the unity of potential multiplicity. In the form of Daoist meditation known as neidan, or physiological alchemy, it represented the energetic potential to reverse the normal process of aging by cultivating within one’s body the spark of the primordial qi (psycho-physical substance), thereby “returning” to the primordial, creative state of chaos from which the cosmos evolved. Chen Tuan’s Taiji Diagram, when read from the bottom upwards, is thought to have been originally a schematic representation of this process of “returning to wuji”, the “Non-Polar,” undifferentiated state.

Zhou Dunyi ignored the bottom-up reading of the Diagram, leaving one or two of its elements unexplained. Focusing on the top-down differentiation of the cosmos from the primordial unity to the “myriad things,” he departed from a Daoist interpretation by singling out the human being as the highest manifestation of cosmic creativity, thereby giving the Diagram a distinctly Confucian meaning. The enigmatic opening line of his Explanation suggests that the Supreme Polarity, the ultimate principle of differentiation, is itself fundamentally undifferentiated (this is stated explicitly a few sentences later). Similarly, activity and stillness, the first manifestations of polarity, each contains the seed of its opposite.

In bringing this largely Daoist terminology into Confucian discourse (chaos was generally frowned upon by Confucians), Zhou may have been attempting to show that the Confucian view of humanity’s role in the cosmos was not really opposed to the fundamentals of the Daoist worldview, in which human categories and values were thought to alienate human beings from the Dao. In effect, he was co-opting Daoist terminology to show that the Confucian worldview was actually more inclusive than the Daoist: it could accept a primordial chaos while still affirming the reality of the differentiated, phenomenal world. For Zhu Xi and his school, the most important contribution of this text was its integration of metaphysics (taiji, which Zhu equated with li, the ultimate natural/moral order) and cosmology (yin-yang and Five Phases).

Luc Paquin