​How Can Taiji Avoid Falling into Either Being or Non-being? ——Fang Yizhi’s Reinterpretation of “Wuji and Yet Taiji”

How Can Taiji Avoid Falling into Either Being or Non-being? ——Fang Yizhi’s Reinterpretation of “Wuji and Yet Taiji”

LÜ Taopin

(College of Philosophy, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China)

Abstract: “Wuji and yet Taiji” is a central proposition in Song–Ming Confucian accounts of Taiji. Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan debated the necessity of Wuji, seeking respectively to prevent Taiji from being reified as a determinate entity and dissolved into nothingness. Rather than compromise between them, Fang Yizhi reframed the dispute as a question of how Taiji could remain inseparable from being and non-being without falling into either. His critiques of “attachment to being” and “yearning for non-being” exposed the limitations of treating being and non-being as external opposites. The formulations “being and non-being are mutually implicative” and “Taiji does not fall into yin and yang, yet yin and yang are none other than Taiji” further define a relation of mutual implication without conflation. Fang then introduced Youji, giving a definite structural place to the differentiation of yin and yang, the configuration of trigrams and hexagram lines, and the unfolding of the Five Phases and the four seasons. Wuji primarily signifies latency, Youji manifest activity, and Taiji runs through both. They constitute not three coordinate ontological levels but a relational structure of latency, manifestation, and integration. Fang thereby transformed “falling into neither being nor non-being” into a framework for explaining the latent and the manifest, substance and function, and the myriad things of the actual world. 

Key words: Fang Yizhi；Wuji and yet Taiji；falling into neither being nor non-being；Youji；substance and function

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