The Dao and God: Where Do Nature and the Cosmos Come From, and How Do They Move?

1) The Dao Came Before God vs God Came Before the Dao

The civilisation of the Dao in the East says that the Dao existed before God: “The Dao made the spirits divine and made the Lord on High divine” (Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters). The concept of God was created by human beings living in nature. Nature is the Dao.²⁹ Nature (自然, ziran) means “that which is so of itself.” Nature is infinite and eternal.

Nature is infinite and eternal. Why is nature infinite and eternal? Because nature has no purpose and wants nothing. (Daodejing 7)

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus held the same cosmology as the philosophy of the Dao. He explained that the cosmos existed before God.

The cosmos is eternal; no god or man made it; it always was, and is, and will be.³⁰

Philosophers such as Bacon (1561–1626) were fascinated by nature. For the thousand years of the Middle Ages, thought or philosophy that was not centred on God was forbidden in the West, and under this influence Bacon had no choice but to be careful. Without linking God and nature, he stresses the importance of nature in the strongest terms.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.³¹

After Bacon, the importance of nature found decisive expression in the philosopher Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza saw God as nature. Because the medieval philosophy of the West centred on God, Spinoza explains God in the light of nature. Linking God and nature, he put nature at the centre of his philosophy.

Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists… As he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end.³²

The revealed religions of the West take the “beginning” as the core of the cosmos, and the concept of a beginning naturally includes teleology. Bertrand Russell put it this way: there is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all; the idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. He held a theory of natural philosophy like that of the Daodejing: “nature has no purpose.” Spinoza, too, says:

Nature has no purpose of its own… An ultimate purpose is only something human imagination has made up.³³

This view of the Dao in the East, and the views of Heraclitus, Bacon, Spinoza and Russell in the West, can all be described as natural philosophy centred on nature. A different view of the cosmos unfolds in the West, as the revealed religions argue it. In the West, because God created nature, God is held to have existed before nature. Because God created heaven and earth, there was no nature before God’s creation. The earth God created is the centre of the cosmos, and human beings stand at its centre. Genesis, in the Five Books of Moses, gives the account of God creating heaven and earth, nature and humanity, out of nothing (無), and so entering a world of being (有).

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” There was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:2–5)

According to the Bible, God creates the universe in six days, in this order. The first day, light. The second day, the sky. The third day, the seas and the land, and plants. The fourth day, the sun, the moon and the stars. The fifth day, fish and birds. The sixth day, land animals and man (man was made in the image of God). And on the seventh day he rests. So the world moves from disorder to order, from chaos to an ordered world. This creation comes about by the “word” of God.

China, too, has a myth of the creation of heaven and earth. A being called Pangu (盤古) split chaos with a great axe and separated heaven from earth. He held up the sky for eighteen thousand years, growing as he did, and when he died his body turned into nature.³⁴

In the beginning there was a god named Pangu… When his time came to die, his body turned into nature… His hair and fur became grass and trees, and his eyes became the sun and the moon… The fleas that lived on his body became the many animals and the many races of human beings on earth.³⁵

The idea that the body of God became the parts of nature is expressed just as it is in one of the main concepts of the Jewish philosophy of the Kabbalah, which influenced Spinoza: the Kabbalistic concept of contraction, tzimtzum.³⁶ It holds that “God contracts his own infinity to create the world,” a concept of creation very like the creation myth of Pangu. (In this line of thought Spinoza reaches the conclusion that “God and nature are one.”)

This myth gives no date for creation. The eighteen thousand years are the time Pangu grew between heaven and earth. When did the God of Genesis create nature? Unlike the myth of Pangu, Western civilisation, a civilisation of creation, records in detail how God created the universe. Western philosophers believed it for thousands of years, and until not long ago they were calculating the “date” on which nature was created. After the six days of creation, the first man, Adam, lived 930 years, and how long each of his descendants lived is all recorded (Genesis 5). The Gospels of the New Testament, too, record in detail the genealogy from Abraham to Jesus (Matthew 1:1–17).

Following the Bible’s account, Western philosophers calculated the dates from the creation of heaven and earth to the birth of Jesus. By these calculations the creation took place around 4000 BC. The calculations went on, and by the early Middle Ages even an exact date was offered. In the West the calculation of the date of creation was continued by various philosophers until the seventeenth century. This way of thinking disappeared with the deism (理神論) of the Enlightenment and the development of science. Deism holds that the transcendent God, after creating nature, no longer intervenes in human affairs.³⁷ Deism denies the prophets and miracles of theism, but does not differ from theism in holding that God created nature.

In their answers to the question of which came first, the Dao or God, East and West came to hold different cosmologies, and from this starting point they came to have different structures of civilisation. The question is directly tied to the interpretation of natural phenomena, to how human beings explain the cosmos. Heliocentrism and geocentrism are at stake.

The Geocentrism of Revealed Religion vs the Heliocentrism of Natural Philosophy

The Daodejing records that “nature and the cosmos existed before God” (Daodejing, chapters 4 and 25). The West, by contrast, records that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” that is, that God existed before nature and the cosmos (Genesis 1:1). Here East and West come to different answers to the question of who human beings are. In terms of cosmology, Western creationism rests on geocentrism, the view that the earth on which human beings live is the centre of the cosmos; geocentrism, that is, is built into creationism. The natural philosophy of the East, on the other hand, accepts the account that the cosmos is the centre and that human beings are a part of it.

Under the influence of the church, Westerners were taught to believe the records of creation just as they stand, without a single letter of doubt. So nearly all Westerners firmly believed in creation until the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth century. And at the foundation of this creationism lies the premise that God made nature for human beings to rule as they please. Westerners have believed themselves to be beings “made in the image of God, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and over all the earth.” The geocentrism (天動說) of revealed religion believed that the earth and human beings were the centre of the world and that the universe revolved around the earth. So it was that one could pray to God, as Joshua did, to make the sun stand still:

He said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still on Gibeon! You, moon, stop in the valley of Aijalon!” The sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies… The sun stayed in the middle of the sky, and didn’t hurry to go down about a whole day. There was no day like that before it or after it, that Yahweh listened to the voice of a man. (Joshua 10:12–14)

Until the sixteenth century Westerners upheld the geocentrism of Aristotle and Ptolemy, thinking that the earth was the centre of the world and that the heavenly bodies revolved around it. This hypothesis agreed with the account of creation in Genesis in the Five Books of Moses. According to creationism, God gave human beings a purpose when he created them. In Western creationism, because God gave human beings the authority to rule nature, human beings stand at the centre of the universe. They are born with the clear purpose of ruling nature and worshipping God. So the Greeks and Romans, and the Westerners of the Middle Ages, lived with the firm belief that they were the centre of the universe.

For the Greeks and Romans, seafaring played an important part in the idea that human beings are the centre of the universe. Seafaring is possible only by observing the movements of the heavenly bodies. People tried to picture the universe with the earth, and human beings, in its very middle, and the heavenly bodies moving around the earth. This was the “earth-centred view of the universe,” geocentrism, supported by the Bible and by Aristotle and others. The geocentrism that most Westerners believed in at this time held that the earth stood still at the centre of the universe and that the sun and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it.

This geocentrism was challenged by those who observed the heavens and studied nature: heliocentrism appeared. In the West, humanity’s ability to think about the relationship between nature and humanity underwent a decisive change as the Middle Ages gave way to the modern era, because an occasion arose for fundamentally revising the relationship between humanity and nature. The change from geocentrism to heliocentrism took place. The miracle of Joshua, who stopped the sun in the sky, was challenged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The “sun-centred view of the universe,” heliocentrism (地動說), was put forward on the basis of the scientific facts of the astronomical observations of Copernicus (1473–1543), Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo (1564–1642). They argued that the earth is not the centre of the universe, but revolves around the sun.

For a long time the scientific facts they put forward were challenged under the influence of a religion that upheld geocentrism. It was not easy for the progress of science to overturn a philosophical system planted deep in Western history. Even after heliocentrism had spread widely among Western intellectuals, Luther, the spearhead of the Reformation, still upheld geocentrism on the authority of Scripture. Martin Luther strongly opposed the heliocentrism of Copernicus. At table, he is reported to have said:

There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves, and not the heavens… This fool wants to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. But as Holy Scripture teaches, it was the sun, not the earth, that Joshua commanded to stand still.³⁸

Heliocentrism denied the “earth-centred view of the universe” built into the biblical dogma that God had specially created the earth and human beings. It was a tremendous event that shook the geocentrism of the Bible, an earth-shaking event that exposed as false the infallibility (無謬性) of the Bible and the church, the claim that they had never erred, and their inerrancy (無誤性), the claim that they could not.

The Roman Curia desperately suppressed the results of their observations, that the earth moves around the sun. For according to geocentrism God had stopped the sun, but if their heliocentrism were followed, the sun stands still, and it was the earth’s rotation that would have had to stop. At the time this was a matter grave enough to turn heaven upside down. Westerners all firmly believed in the inerrancy of Scripture, and any claim that violated it became a matter for the Inquisition. And if the inerrancy of Scripture were challenged on the basis of facts established by scientific observation, and an error admitted in even one place, the breach would open like a floodgate and the principle of inerrancy would break. Only after a long struggle did heliocentrism barely secure its place as fact. Their heliocentric account of the motion of the heavenly bodies came not from the dogma of revealed religion but from the observation of nature.

Heliocentrism, as against geocentrism, had already been put forward in the third century BC, but it lay buried in history for nearly two thousand years, its very existence unknown, and was rediscovered only in the Renaissance. In the West, in the third century BC, lively geometric and astronomical observation took place in Alexandria, then the centre of the Western world. Aristarchus (c. 310–230 BC) realistically calculated the distance from the earth to the moon and from the earth to the sun. He argued that although the moon and the sun look the same size to the naked eye, the sun, being far away, is more than twenty times larger than the moon. Eratosthenes (c. 276–195 BC) had already, in the third century BC, measured the circumference of the earth almost exactly. He recognised that the earth is round, and is said to have devised the leap day, one day added every four years. And Aristarchus was the first in human history to put forward heliocentrism. But his heliocentrism was condemned as heresy by the philosophers of the day, who firmly believed in geocentrism.

The difference between geocentrism and heliocentrism held within it a momentous paradigm shift, one that could change everything: humanity’s view of the cosmos, the relationship between humanity and nature, humanity’s place in the cosmos, the purpose of life. But the heliocentrism of Aristarchus was too far ahead of what its age needed. Pushed aside by the validity of geocentrism, heliocentrism had to wait some two thousand years: until Columbus crossed the Atlantic and reached America in 1492, Vasco da Gama reached the East across the Indian Ocean in 1497, and Magellan and Elcano sailed around the world across the Atlantic and the Pacific between 1519 and 1522.

This story of geocentrism and heliocentrism says a great deal about the so-called “relevance” of a truth or a paradigm: a truth has no relevance until human activity makes it necessary. Philosophy is no exception. Until history makes human beings feel the need for it, a philosophy has no relevance, whether it accords with the truth or not.

Heliocentrism, which the voyages of discovery had made a practical necessity, came gradually to be accepted as fact as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others published their observations that the earth moves around the sun. Heliocentrism brought about a paradigm shift in the whole of human thought, including the human view of the cosmos. How vast is the universe? Does it have a purpose? Where did it come from? How does it move? Where is it going? On these cosmic questions we know nothing.³⁹

The question of geocentrism and heliocentrism called into question only the creation of the earth, that is, of nature; the creation of human beings passed unscathed. But in the nineteenth century this was challenged again, by Darwin’s theory of evolution. On a scientific basis Darwin showed that human beings were not shaped by God out of clay, as the Bible describes, but evolved from other animals. With this the core of the human-centred creationism and cosmology set out in the Bible was challenged once more.

2) The Dao Is Nature vs God Is Supernatural

The Dao is the law of nature; God is a supernatural being. The Dao follows nature (道法自然) and expresses nature: the Dao is nature. Compared with the “revealed religions,” which accept supernatural miracles, the Dao that rules Eastern civilisation is a “natural philosophy” that expresses nature. The Dao, as the law of nature, gives no thought to any being that transcends the laws of nature and the cosmos. Naturally, supernatural religion does not arise in an Eastern civilisation that rests on natural philosophy.⁴⁰ Even today, except in Korea, only some one or two percent of people in the countries of East Asia believe in a revealed religion, Christianity included.

The Daodejing contains no mention or analysis of any supernatural god. There is only the description of nature. There are no prophets and no law. Laozi is not a prophet. Moses, on the other hand, is a prophet. According to the Five Books of Moses, the God of the West yields to Moses’ pleading and tells him his name, works miracles, speaks with Moses face to face, shows part of his form on Mount Sinai, is described as a God of justice, of wrath and of jealousy, and with his own finger carves the Ten Commandments in stone and gives them to Moses. All of these are signs of God intervening in human affairs. The prophet becomes God’s representative and in the end forms a priestly class and stands at its head. A revealed religion takes shape. Successors appear.

The image of the God of the West is concentrated in the event of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, as God and man make a covenant. One way in which the God of the West differs from the Dao of the East is that, when he intervenes in human society, he uses supernatural “miracles.” God is a supernatural being who created nature. Miracles are supernatural and anti-natural: acts above the order of nature, or against it.⁴¹ Moses was called by God to save the people of Israel. To carry out that call he asked for God’s help, and the help came in the form of miracles:

Moses answered, “But, behold, they will not believe me, nor listen to my voice; for they will say, ‘Yahweh has not appeared to you.’” Yahweh said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A rod.” He said, “Throw it on the ground.” He threw it on the ground, and it became a snake. (Exodus 4:1–3)

So, at Moses’ request, God begins to work miracles. Through the miracles of the ten plagues, beginning with turning the waters of the Nile into blood and going on to the killing of the firstborn sons and firstborn animals of Egypt, God persuades and threatens Pharaoh, and helps the people of Israel escape. After that, too, God watches over Moses as he leads the Israelites out of Egypt towards the promised land flowing with milk and honey, works the miracle of parting the Red Sea to make a path for Moses, and works the miracle of raining down manna and quail in the wilderness as food.

The Daodejing, by contrast, says nothing at all about the phenomenon of supernatural miracles. It accepts neither the supernatural nor the anti-natural, holding that everything can be explained within nature. It saw the Dao of nature as inherent in all things in the world, and everything that happens in the world as a natural phenomenon. On this, Daoism and Confucianism take the same position. The words and deeds of Confucius in the Analects show that he did not believe in miracles. Confucianism tells us to take no interest in things like miracles, sorcery, magic and superstition.

The Master did not speak of the strange (怪), of feats of strength (力), of disorder (亂) or of spirits (神). (Analects 7:20)

And it warns against studying the doctrines connected with such “strange things, feats of strength, disorder and spirits.” To stress this, the leader (junzi, 君子: for Confucius, the person of cultivated ethics fit to lead others, which this translation, following the author, renders as “leader”) does not play the part of a vessel that simply follows strange logic others have laid down. It is a warning against metaphysical logic, expressed in the words “the leader is not a vessel”:

The leader is not a vessel (君子不器). (Analects 2:12)

This stance is set out still more clearly by Xunzi (荀子, c. 310–235 BC), a thinker of the late Warring States period who tried to bring together the thought of Confucianism and Daoism. It is a philosophy that stands in contrast with a Western civilisation that believes in miracles.

Stars fall from the sky, and the trees in the forest cry out. People are afraid, and ask in fear what it portends. It portends nothing. It is only a change in nature, only the working of yin and yang, only something that rarely happens. It is fine to find such things strange, but wrong to fear them. (Xunzi 17:8)

In Western civilisation, by contrast, God leaves a record of miracles unlike the Dao of the East. When the miracle-working God gives Moses the Ten Commandments near Mount Sinai, a strict “covenant” is at last made between the people of Israel and God. The God of the West went on working miracles and keeping his covenant with the people of Israel.⁴² In Exodus 34:11 he says, “Observe that which I command you today. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.” God also told Moses’ successor Joshua the strategy and tactics he needed to conquer the promised land, rained great hailstones from the sky to kill the enemy, and stopped the sun for a day to bring Joshua victory.

The Dao of the East makes no covenant with human beings. No individual, tribe or state can therefore claim the Dao as its own. The philosophical system of the East believes in the Dao, a natural philosophy, as absolute truth. In Greek and Roman times, by contrast, the tribes and states of the West each had their own gods. This Western faith in God grew stronger after Christianity, a revealed religion, became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century AD, and it carried on through the thousand years of the Middle Ages. In the early modern Enlightenment a movement arose in the West that denied miracles through deism (理神論), but the belief that God created the universe continued. The Dao of the East and God of the West approach human beings as systems of natural philosophy and of revealed religion.

3) Where Did the Cosmos Come From: Nothing (無) vs Being (有)

The Daodejing and the Five Books of Moses first establish which came first, the Dao or God, and then explain the origin and principles of the cosmos. The concepts that the philosophical systems of East and West put forward in common here are nothing and being. What is the origin of the cosmos? Empty space, that is, nothing? Or filled being, that is, the stars? The civilisations of East and West differ fundamentally on what the origin of the cosmos is. Eastern civilisation explains that being came from nothing and that everything returns in the end to nothing. This is the law of nature as the East expresses it. Nothing and being are linked, but nothing is at the centre.

All things under heaven are born of being, and being begins in nothing. (Daodejing, chapter 40)

In Western civilisation, by contrast, the process of creation, expressed as creation out of disorder, is central. Emphasising the being that was created, it explains that the origin of the cosmos is not nothing, non-being, but being. Being is the beginning of existence, having overcome nothing. Nothing has no meaning, and being has all meaning. God’s action in working supernatural miracles, being, is the centre of existence. Being is expressed as light that replaces the darkness of nothing.

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

The philosophy of revealed religion is of a piece with the idea Parmenides argued in Greece in the fifth century BC: that “being alone is true, and nothing is a deception.” In his poem “On Nature” Parmenides sets out a philosophy not of the phenomena or changes of nature but of truth and being. He argued that only being is true and that nothing (non-being) cannot exist: nothing is a fiction that can be neither spoken nor thought. He was convinced that the senses deceive, and that only the mind perceives truth. He argued that being is one, unchanging and eternal. Further, since we cannot think what does not exist, he expressed in his poem that thinking and being are the same. These claims became known through quotations in later philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and they contributed decisively to the rise of a metaphysical current in the Western philosophical system.

Two entirely different approaches to understanding the world were formed and lasted for thousands of years. The two approaches concern human affairs, the understanding of the world and of nature, and different ways in which thought proceeds. These different approaches, the Western and the Eastern, were produced and grew up separately, without influence from each other.⁴³

In the Eastern view of the cosmos, nothing does not simply mean “absence”; it is a concept set against being. Following the Eastern philosophy of change, nothing and being change into each other. Nothing stands for a more fundamental existence, the unmade, or the original state before the world took form. Being, by comparison, means the world we experience in daily life, the changing state of things, the world of coming to be and passing away. So wuji (無極), or nothing, in Daoism does not simply mean “there is not.” It refers to a deeper, more fundamental existence or state that comes before being and is hard to perceive with our everyday senses.

The nameless is the source of heaven and earth; the named is the mother of all things… These two are in the end the same, but as they appear, they are named differently.

(Daodejing, chapter 1)

In the West, a book of woodcuts was published that depicted, in pictures and commentary, the major events of the Bible: the beginning of the creation of the universe, the first day of the world, and so on. It was produced in Nuremberg in Germany, is known as the “Nuremberg Chronicle,” and was first published in 1493. It opens with a woodcut of the first day of creation. It highlights, for Western civilisation, the existence of being created out of nothing, which is disorder. It announces the beginning of creation, from chaos (disorder) to universe (order). With the creation of being, nothing, non-being, disappears. Everything that exists through creation comes to rest on an “unchanging philosophy of being.”

From the fifteenth century, around the time the Nuremberg Chronicle was published, Daoism began to use the Taiji diagram, which holds the Eastern view of the cosmos. The Taiji diagram begins from wuji, which means nothing, and forms taiji. Taiji divides into two parts, which stand for yin and yang.⁴⁴ The design of the Taiji diagram came into use in the fifteenth century, but the concept of yin and yang it contains is clearly described in the Daodejing, written two thousand years earlier: “All things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang” (Daodejing, chapter 42). This view of the cosmos sets out the principle of a cosmos in which all things are in harmony within a “philosophy of change composed of yin and yang.”

4) How Does the Cosmos Move: The Philosophy of Change (變化論) vs the Philosophy of Being (存在論)

East and West set the “origin of the cosmos,” its root, in opposite places. The East understood the world as ceaseless change and relationship; the West grasped the world through the essence and structure of being. The East attended, that is, to the fact that “everything changes,” and the West concentrated on “what exists.” These ways of thinking come from the difference between East and West over the origin of the cosmos, over where the cosmos came from: the nothing (無) of the East and the being (有) of the West. From this difference in the “origin of the cosmos,” East and West set the “principle of the cosmos” differently: the philosophy of change of the East and the philosophy of being of the West.

In the East, as things change from nothing into being, both nothing and being have value. The philosophy of change between nothing and being is at the core. The West, however, takes as the core of its philosophical thought a philosophy of being that gives all value to being, to existence. The East grasps existence as change in flow and relationship; the West sees existence as fixed substance and essence.

Western philosophy starts from the question of substance, “What is being?”, and action is understood as a way of revealing the essence of being. The human being is emphasised as an independent subject, the centre that defines its action through its own choices and freedom. Rationality is accordingly valued, action is judged by logical and ethical standards, and norms take shape in the course of inquiring into the meaning of being. The Eastern philosophy of change is a philosophical way of thinking about the cosmos that stands in contrast with the Western philosophy of being. At the core of Western philosophy is the philosophy of being, of existence beginning with God’s creation of heaven and earth. The philosophy of being emphasises the importance of law grounded in an unchanging human nature. The law of Judaism is the revelation the Jewish prophets received from God, the “Word of God.” What matters is that God, as the “Ultimate Being,” is the manifestation of created existence: being (有) is the beginning of everything. In Western human affairs the tradition and philosophy of valuing law, grounded in the thought of youwei, have continued unchanged into modern society. They grasped existence as “fixed substance” and flowed into a metaphysics that inquires into the essence and structure of being. The East came to emphasise a dynamic, integrated view of the world; the West, a static, analytical one.

As Western civilisation developed, this tradition and philosophy grew into a form that values Western laws, institutions and models. To repeat, this philosophy rests on a philosophy of being in which what has been created exists forever. So the West, regarding its own institutions and models as grounded in an eternal philosophy of being, attaches great importance to them; and since these institutions and models are linked to the whole, it values them and makes them the means by which Western civilisation spreads.

The philosophy of change is a key concept for understanding Eastern civilisation, but because the West is immersed in the metaphysics of being, it is a hard concept for the West to grasp. The technical English terms for the two are transformationism and ontology.⁴⁵ In plainer terms, they are the philosophy of change and the philosophy of being. Eastern civilisation has understood the change of the cosmos from the standpoint of yi (易). The character 易 means “change.” It comes from a pictograph that stands for the changing skin colour of a lizard, or the cyclical change of the sun and moon. The concept of a philosophy of change has been widely accepted in the East since the third millennium BC. The Yijing (易經), which contains the philosophy of change, is the oldest Chinese philosophical classic, begun around the first millennium BC, and it planted the philosophy of change in Daoist and Confucian philosophy.⁴⁶

Change is a fundamental attribute of reality. The philosophy of change put forward by quantum mechanics, in modern physics, shares this attribute. It stands in contrast with the philosophy of being of classical physics, in which independent substances exist. The principle of the cosmos as the East saw it is a philosophy of change moving between nothing and being. Eastern thought starts not from an unchanging being but from a philosophy of change in which everything is always changing. The philosophy of change is a philosophy that would understand existence not as fixed substance but as relationship and process. Analysed through the philosophy of change, “to exist” means “to change.”

In Western cosmology nothing does not exist, so it becomes a “cosmology of being.” Concentrating on being alone, it is described philosophically as a philosophy of being. Parmenides argued that “being is ungenerated and imperishable, whole, unchanging and complete. It was, it is, and it will always be the same.” He argued that “non-being can be neither spoken nor thought, and does not exist. Only what exists can be thought.” This philosophy of being became the foundation of the manifest view and the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. The core of a Western cosmology that “creates being” lies in being. Being, created out of the disorder of chaos, keeps its unchanging attributes intact through the philosophy of being.⁴⁷

The Western philosophy of being grew stronger as philosophical thought combined with religious belief. In the thinking of revealed religion, the philosophy of being, that what God created must not change, is the foundation. Even when the West acknowledges change, it values the unchanging element within change, and still treats it within the bounds of the philosophy of being. Such is the claim in Plato’s philosophy that behind the changes of reality there exist the Ideas, unchanging essences: a philosophy of being in which change is a secondary phenomenon and essence is unchanging. This thinking was taken up by Descartes in the seventeenth century. These thinkers built their philosophical systems treating matter or mind, as unchanging substance, as the foundation of existence. Because the philosophy of being, and the metaphysics resting on it, matter so much in the West, Descartes came to be called the father of modern philosophy.

The standpoint of the Eastern philosophy of change is reflected directly in the Eastern philosophical system. Nowhere in the Eastern classics is there a concept of a creator, or of creation. Everything in the cosmos and in nature was already there, not the result of an act such as creation, and by changing continually it makes the phenomena we see. Look at the vast cosmos, and everything is always moving and changing. Nothing ever rests. Change has no purpose, and its core cannot be grasped. So the constancy of the philosophy of change is, in a sense, the foundation that makes all change possible. From this philosophy, from the change of the cosmos, comes the concept of the Dao, which follows the flow of change.

The Eastern philosophy of change seeks to understand the cosmos through the relationship between what is not (nothing) and what is (being). Nothing does not simply mean absence; it is the source that makes being possible. Nothing is the possibility of creation, and being is its realisation. The origin of the cosmos is nothing, and nothing is not emptiness but the source of potential and possibility. The flow of the cosmos is the movement of nothing and being, and through coming to be and passing away, rise and fall, the changes of yin and yang, the cosmos circulates endlessly between nothing and being. The philosophy of change means that “change itself is the principle of the cosmos,” not being. It puts its weight not on “the change of existing things” but on “change itself,” and none on the things, because by changing, the things change too.

The philosophy of being, on the other hand, centres on the existing thing, which holds the value of its existence as it is, regardless of change. Here metaphysics, ontology, teleology and the epistemology that knows them, forms the core of Western philosophy. In the Western philosophical system the opposite of being is non-being. With such Western-centred thinking a comparison of East and West is impossible. In comparing East and West, the philosophy of being can be compared not with non-being but with the philosophy of change: the counterpart of being is not nothing but “the change between nothing and being.” In the end the philosophy of change and the philosophy of being set the thought of the two civilisations on entirely different philosophical systems. What God created must have a purpose. Philosophical systems of a metaphysical bent, such as ontology, teleology and epistemology, could not develop in Eastern thought, which takes the philosophy of change as its core, and they are unimportant concepts in Eastern philosophy.⁴⁸

According to the philosophy of change, the cosmos is not the fixed substance the philosophy of being assumes, but a process of change. The cosmos and nature are not the purpose or instrument the philosophy of being assumes, but something that is so of itself, changing forever as the philosophy of change says. In the quantum mechanics of modern physics, the nothing of the vacuum is a space of possibility that is not empty. In classical physics the vacuum means nothing; it is the empty space in which absolute matter and energy play their parts. So in the Western philosophy of being, true human wisdom is youwei, which follows the creation that began in being. In the East, however, true human wisdom is wuwei (無爲), which follows not changing being but “nothing, the source of being.”

In the West, the philosophy of change was voiced by Heraclitus in Greece. “No one can step into the same river twice” is his famous line on change. But his philosophy of change was pushed aside by the philosophy of Parmenides, which the Western manifest view followed after Socrates, and disappeared. In the West it was only in the twentieth century that philosophers such as Whitehead argued for a philosophy of change.⁴⁹ He argued that the universe is the sum of processes of ceaseless creation and formation, a succession of events, with no fixed substances. The philosophy of change centres on the dynamism that is the essence of reality: coming to be, passing away, interaction. Things are therefore defined not as independent substances but within “processes” or “relationships.”

Eastern philosophy interprets the two fundamental principles, being and nothing, not as existing independently but as complementary and changing. So interest in, or reasoning about, a philosophy of unchanging being did not develop in Eastern civilisation. Instead, the East developed the philosophy of shi (勢), of grasping and using the hidden flow within change, together with the philosophy of shu (術), grounded in human nature, and a view of ethics that values ethics (倫理) above law. At the centre of Eastern civilisation stand the philosophical system of shi, shu and a law (法) that puts ethics first, and the practical philosophies of political ethics and political economy that rest on them. A philosophical system of law that puts ethics first, of shi and of shu, could not develop in Western thought, which rests on the philosophy of being.

Until around the first millennium BC, Eastern civilisation, like the West, used the concept of gangrou (剛柔, hard and soft) and valued hardness above softness. After around the first millennium BC, however, a clear tendency appears to value softness above hardness. This period marks the turn in which the thought of yin and yang replaced the thought of hard and soft and became the central thought of Eastern civilisation.⁵⁰ The evidence appears in the Yijing, which used the thought of hard and soft until around the first millennium BC, after which the thought of yin and yang replaced it. This change in thought is expressed in the core values of Daoism and Confucianism, which represent Eastern philosophy. Daoism and Confucianism came to put forward gentleness, softness, restraint and self-cultivation.

Comparing the civilisations of East and West, we find an interesting fact. We should note that the time when the thought of hard and soft was replaced by the thought of yin and yang in Eastern civilisation is almost the same as the time when polytheism was replaced by monotheism in Western civilisation. While polytheism swept most of the West and the Middle East, monotheism appeared in Egypt, Persia and Judea. This can be put at around the first millennium BC. After this period, the thought of yin and yang spread in the East in place of hard and soft, and monotheism in the West in place of polytheism.

The Yijing (易經) vs the Oracle (神託): The Yijing Lives On in Eastern Thought Through Daoism and Confucianism

For thousands of years, the Yijing and the oracle played the role of gauging the future at decisive moments in the history of East and West. In how the Yijing and the oracle are to be used, the difference between the Eastern philosophy of change and the Western philosophy of being appears. The word for oracle, 神託, means that a god (神) answers human questions by borrowing (託) a human body. A mediator appears between God and man. The priestess who lived in the temple and delivered oracles played a role like that of a prophet in revealed religion. Since the future has been decided by God, a transcendent being, the idea is to learn it in advance through the mediator. God’s decision carries a powerful claim that human beings must follow it. And so a psychology of asking an absolute God for strength is inherent in human nature.

But the age of the oracle, when people believed in miracles and in the logic that God intervenes directly in human affairs, vanished into history with the progress of science. The systems of thought that emerged from the Western Enlightenment, deism and rationalism made the Western oracle a relic of Greek and Roman times. But the Yijing of the East, or at least its philosophy of change, remains useful as the core of Eastern thought. This is above all because, in keeping with the syncretism characteristic of Eastern civilisation, the Yijing’s philosophy of change is reflected directly in the philosophical systems of Daoism and Confucianism. The Daoist thought of wuwei and the Confucian thought of the leader are both linked to the Yijing’s philosophy of change.

The thought of the Yijing rests on the philosophy of change: that the human future is not already decided, but flows from the interaction between nature and humanity. What matters is for human beings to grasp this flow and influence the flow of the future. The Western oracle works by determinism, but the choices of the Yijing work within the framework of a philosophy of change that includes human choice:

Every human situation depends on whether a person acts well or badly. The role of the Yijing is to help people choose to act well. The Yijing is therefore on an entirely different plane from fortune-telling that predicts the future.⁵¹

The Yijing goes beyond the character of a book of divination that simply predicts the future and delivers heaven’s decision to people as a fate already given.⁵² So in the Yijing of the East, unlike the oracle of the West, the human role is valued. The three lines of the Yijing’s trigrams place heaven, earth, and at the centre of them the role of human beings. One must observe well the timing of heaven and the lie of the land, but within them human beings should find the role that best suits them and carry it out, and so decide and shape their own fate.

According to the Yijing, for every situation there is an action that corresponds to it. In each given situation, right action and its opposite exist as choices. The Yijing is not a mere book of prophecy or divination but a work of philosophy that holds wisdom and ethics. “You must not refuse to consult the divination, nor believe it entirely. But always consult it” (an edict of King Sejong to his commander of the northern campaign, from the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty). Right action brings good fortune; its opposite brings misfortune.

What, then, is the right action for each given situation? Finding it out is what people must decide in the situation they are given. The Yijing stresses that if human action is taken as early as possible in a situation that is always changing, it can have a greater influence on the future. The Yijing has a strong ethical side, and it is meant to be used as wisdom for shaping one’s situation.

Many people vaguely regard the Yijing as a book of divination, or as one of the mysterious ancient scriptures of the East.⁵³ But the weight of the Yijing in Eastern culture is great enough that it sets out the Eastern view of the cosmos and of the relationship between nature and humanity.

In Eastern culture, through centuries of interaction with Daoism, Confucianism and others, the Yijing laid its philosophy at the foundation of Eastern thought. As the commentaries on the Yijing took shape and were completed in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, a deep relationship of give and take in thought formed between the Yijing, Daoism and Confucianism. In studying and interpreting the Zhouyi, Daoist and Confucian scholars absorbed the philosophy and orientation inherent in it into Daoist and Confucian thought and developed them. Through this exchange the Zhouyi developed the system of thought of the earlier Yijing by way of Daoism and Confucianism, and through its commentaries came to include thought influenced by Daoism and Confucianism: views of nature, of ethics, political philosophy. Because of the Yijing’s deep influence on Daoism and Confucianism, its influence is still vividly present in the countries of the Daoist-Confucian cultural sphere.

There is no doubt that the Yijing is one of the most important books in the world… It is the supremely important and meaningful book in which three thousand years of China’s cultural history are contained. All of China’s cultural history has either been inspired by this book or has influenced its interpretation. So the Yijing holds the polished wisdom of thousands of years. It is only natural that Confucianism and Daoism, at the centre of Chinese philosophy, both rest on the philosophy of the Yijing.⁵⁴

The most important point from this perspective is that the naturalistic view of the cosmos and the philosophy of change inherent in the Yijing join into one with the ethical, political and economic philosophy inherent in Daoist and Confucian thought. This means that the ethics, politics and philosophy of the East were built on nature and formed around it. The importance of this philosophical system is reflected in the philosophical systems of Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and it is symbolised even in national flags (國旗).⁵⁵

The theory that a philosophical foundation should be built around nature was argued in the West two thousand years later, in the early Enlightenment, by Bacon, Spinoza and others. It became possible as the West broke away from the tradition of revealed religion. Bacon, as quoted earlier, stressed the importance of nature for philosophy. Spinoza went further and declared that “God is the same as nature.”

The philosophical connection between the Yijing, Daoism and Confucianism appears in the way the Yijing’s philosophical system of cosmology and human affairs is reflected directly in the Daoist thought of wuwei and the Confucian thought of the leader. The core of the Confucian thought of the leader is the importance of ethics; its starting point is that ethics must come before law. At the same time the Daoist thought of wuwei, set against the Western thought of youwei, rests on the Yijing’s philosophy of change. Because the Dao is eternal, unchanging and belongs to no one, it gives ethics absoluteness, and at the same time makes it impossible for anyone to claim, or to claim to have discovered, an absolute ethics. Confucianism stresses this character of ethics, and it differs greatly from Western religious dogma. Confucius stressed that “in practising ren, one does not yield even to one’s teacher (當仁不讓於師)” (Analects 15:35), and Mencius explained that “to believe everything in the Book of Documents (書經) would be worse than having no Book of Documents” (Mencius 7, “Jin Xin, Part Two,” 盡心章句下). Christianity, on the other hand, makes its attitude to the importance of law unmistakable through a clear law: “The law of God is twofold. The first is to love God, and the second is to love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31; Matthew 22:36–40). This means precisely that the civilisations of East and West took shape around ethics and around law respectively.

The difference between ethics and law comes from the fundamental difference between the civilisations of East and West: the Dao and God, the unmanifest and the manifest. Daoism developed the thought on cosmology, ethics and human nature inherent in the Yijing and built a comprehensive system of thought on the relationship between humanity and nature, grounded in nature. By leaving reflection on the relationship between nature and humanity to the yin-yang thought of the Yijing and the thought of the Dao in Daoism, Confucianism could concentrate on ethics and political thought. The Yijing began as a book of divination, but thanks to efforts to broaden and deepen it into a work of philosophy and thought, such as the Great Commentary (繫辭傳), it holds, together with the Daodejing and the Analects, the wisdom of the East on a cosmological plane. Compare it with the revealed religions of the West, which have a similar historical background, and one can feel the difference between the civilisations of East and West. Compared with the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, which rest on strict laws laid down by God, it offers a chance to touch the core of an Eastern civilisation that, against a background of ethics, shapes life by its own strength.

The Yijing is founded not on good and evil but on the concept of yin and yang. In a world that is always changing, an eternal philosophy of being, or a thought of good and evil, cannot apply. The concept of yin and yang is not static but dynamic. In yin there is the seed of yang, and in yang the seed of yin. The two simply have the nature of changing in complement with each other. So yi puts forward not the “self-centredness” founded on the philosophy of being but the “relationship-centredness” of the thought of yin and yang. This philosophical approach provides the foundation of the thought of Eastern civilisation.

The original Yijing existed for more than two thousand years before the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, before Daoism and Confucianism were founded, changing and evolving, and formed a great foundation of Eastern thought. We know this from the story left by Confucius of “the leather thongs broke three times” (韋編三絶): Confucius read the Yijing so eagerly that the leather thongs binding its bamboo slips broke three times. We should note that the hexagrams and lines that form the basis of the Yijing were used as signs and symbols for a long time before writing was invented. This means that in the early days of Eastern civilisation the Yijing had already set and consolidated the foundation and orientation of Eastern thought and concepts: that the philosophy of interpreting the change of all things through hard and soft lines, through the thought of yin and yang, and the view of nature inherent in it, had already been established through the Yijing.

The Yijing is so deeply connected with Confucianism that in the ages when Confucian scholars ruled, it was often a subject of the civil service examinations. For this reason it became one of the Confucian classics and holds an important place in Confucianism. Unlike the Analects, the Daodejing of course makes no direct mention of the Yijing, but many passages here and there in the Daodejing reflect the ideas the Yijing contains. Daoism, too, is so deeply connected with the Yijing that it came to take as its symbol the Taiji diagram, which has its origin in the Yijing. In the end the Yijing serves as the common source of cosmology, of the theory of human nature and of ethics for Confucianism and Daoism, the two great mountain ranges of Eastern civilisation.

Here the timing of action matters. Pursuing “the choice of wuwei” reflects a strategic choice to reduce unnecessary effort by taking the appropriate action at an early stage. It follows a philosophy of foreseeing the future and, through early action based on it, letting the result appear naturally, by wuwei. This approach points towards minimising wasted energy and concentrating on efficiency and on reaching the goal.

The purpose of the Yijing is to help us watch the process of change and intervene at the earliest possible stage. The early stage is what matters most. The earlier one intervenes in a changing situation, the easier it is to take control of the flow. Intervening late is useless because everything has already taken shape, and whatever one does cannot change the result.⁵⁶

The Yijing drew attention in the West as well. In the early eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment, Leibniz grasped the thought contained in the Yijing; in 1835 the Jesuit Father Régis published the Yijing in Latin in Germany; and later Carl Jung studied the Yijing intensively and took great interest in it. Leibniz judged that the Yijing and the thought of yin and yang of the East provide human beings with practical and ethical guidance using a system of signs grounded in nature. Looking at the hexagrams of the Zhouyi, he connected them with the binary system and applied it to Western mathematics: the yin line (--) can be matched with 0, and the yang line (─) with 1. He is said to have first conceived the binary system used as the core mechanism of computers, and then to have found its principle confirmed in the hexagrams of the Yijing.⁵⁷