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Tao Te Ching

Time is cyclic and reversible: "Reversal is the movement of the dao" (40). The ten thousand things arise from the dao, flourish, and return — there is no eschatology, no progress, no end-state. Direction is non-directional in principle, though local processes have apparent arrows (a tree grows toward the sky, then falls back to earth). The sage attunes to the rhythms rather than fighting them.

Tao Te Ching

Space is relational and shaped by what fills it. The famous chapter 11 — "thirty spokes share one hub; it is on the nothing within that the wheel's usefulness depends" — argues that emptiness is functional. Space is curved in the sense that nothing in the dao is finally flat: every configuration is part of a flow that yields and returns.

Tao Te Ching

Matter — the "ten thousand things" (wanwu) — emerges from the dao's undifferentiated state, takes determinate form for a season, and returns to the source. "Things flourish, and each returns to its root" (16). Material existence is real, conserved across transformations, but never finally separate from the dao. The hylomorphic Aristotelian sense of substance is absent.

Tao Te Ching

The sage observes without imposing — wu wei is precisely a passive agency, an act of not-acting. "The sage manages affairs without doing anything and conveys teachings without speaking" (2). Knowledge is immediate and intuitive, not propositional; "the more you know, the less you understand" (47). Observer Number is plural at the empirical level (sages, rulers, peasants are all distinct) but the unification is the dao's own. The metaphysical agency is cosmic-ordering — there is a Way, but it is not a willing personal agent.

Tao Te Ching

Qi is treated implicitly throughout — the breath, the pneuma, the animating energy of the cosmos and of bodies. It is emergent (arising within the dao's manifestation), variable (waxing and waning), and reversible (cycles between yin and yang). The Tao Te Ching does not develop qi-theory systematically — that comes later in the Huangdi Neijing — but the framework is presupposed.

Tao Te Ching

The dao's pattern (li) is preserved across the eternal cycling; the sage knows this pattern through quietude rather than collection of data. Personal information is *not* conserved — the sage's ego should dissolve, names should be discarded, the self should align with the nameless source. "He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened" (33) — but the highest enlightenment is precisely the loss of the egoic self into the dao.