33. Dual Ends; Duality-part two

Wang Fuzhi

Wang Fuzhi also wrote about the dual ends and the one:

The dual ends are space and fullness, movement and stillness, gathering and scattering, clear and muddy. If pursued to the end they will be found to be one. Fullness does not shut out space; to know space is to know fullness too. Stillness stills movement. It is not not moving. When one gathers from x, then one scatters from y; when one scatters from x, then one gathers from y. Muddiness enters clarity and embodies clarity; clarity enters muddiness and dynamizes muddiness. And then one knows their unity. It is not a case of uniting a duality and making unity their pivot. (Record of Thoughts and Questionings I, Inner Chapters, p. 411) This passage is reasonably clear. One should, however, note that clarity is change and muddiness is the fixed embodiment of one state of change.

The two are related rather as the solid and liquid forms of a substance are. The final point is that the unity is the unity of the duality and not a third unity superimposed from without.

      Wang also explained duality in terms of opposition, using a term, dui-li, that has passed into modern discourse as the standard term for op- position:

       The dual ends exchange functions and thus form the image

       of opposition. Thus it can be known that there movement

       and stillness, gathering and scattering, space and fullness,

       muddiness and clarity all are taken from and given by the real

       substance of intertwining great harmony. (Notes on Master

       Zhang's Correcting the Unenlightened Ia, Ultimate Harmon),,

       p. 20)