Laozi's Cosmogony: Metaphor and Verification

Two thousand five hundred years ago, Laozi stood on the banks of the Han River, gazing up at the Milky Way and down upon the ten thousand things, and distilled into five thousand characters the most concise and profound cosmogonic statement in the history of human thought: “Dao generates One; One generates Two; Two generates Three; Three generates the ten thousand things.” In the millennia since, interpreters have followed one after another, yet as to what ontological status this generative sequence ought to bear, scholarship has to this day left one divide untheorized: the divide between metaphorical and verificationist interpretation. This paper takes as its object of study the “Concrete Metaphysics” system of Professor Yang Guorong of East China Normal University, systematically examining his three representative works—Lectures on the Laozi, On Dao, and The World of Zhuangzi's Thought—to reveal a methodologically consistent interpretive feature: whether addressing the “One” of “Dao generates One,” or the “One” of Zhuangzi's “Dao pervades and unifies all things,” Yang Guorong invariably directs it toward logical and epistemological categories rather than a celestial or ontic sequence; the generative expression “mother of all under heaven” is explicitly designated a metaphor; and the dual meaning of “Heaven,” though touching the literal semantics of astronomy, ultimately reverts to the twin tracks of ontology and axiology. This interpretive path is doctrinally profound and systematically rigorous, drawing on Heideggerian phenomenology as its reference resource, and represents the most authoritative and internationally influential paradigm within the contemporary Chinese institutional tradition of Daoist interpretation—this paper deliberately selects this authoritative path as its comparandum precisely in order to exclude the possible objection that “the absence of a verificationist reading is merely the limitation of an individual scholar.” By contrast, this paper systematically advances the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) as a methodologically divergent interpretive path: it holds that what Laozi intuitively grasped while gazing at the Milky Way's reflection on the banks of the Han River at Jingchuchong was not an abstract metaphysical principle, but an empirically reducible sequence of celestial generation—Dao (the Milky Way) generates One (the Sun); One generates Two (the Earth); Two generates Three (the Moon); Three generates the ten thousand things (the Sun-Earth-Moon triad jointly generating life and civilization). The Following Chain and the Generative Chain together form a precise cosmological skeleton; “Nature” in “Dao follows Nature” thereby ceases to be a modifying value-adverbial and instead directly denotes the cosmos as a whole. The five core concepts—Nature, Dao, Heaven/One, Earth/Two, Three—each carry a definite astronomical referent, among which the reading of “Three = the Moon” is singled out as the most breakthrough single-point innovation within the LYGC interpretive system. This verificationist turn is further corroborated fourfold by Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures, complex systems science, modern astrophysics, and Earth systems science, and gives rise in turn to a series of practice-oriented theoretical constructions: Sage Entropy theory, Dao-Centric Cosmology, the Universal OS, Natural Civilization, and Natural Cybernetics. This paper further extends the comparative study to the level of excavated manuscripts: the Taiyi Sheng Shui (“The Great One Generates Water”), unearthed in 1993 from Tomb No. 1 at Guodian in Jingmen, Hubei, and buried together with the Laozi manuscript excerpts, is to date the pre-Qin excavated document most closely related to the generative-cosmology text of the Dao De Jing. This paper systematically surveys the series of papers Charles X. Yang has devoted to this manuscript—the core-thesis paper “The Sun Is the Father of Al