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Conclusion The cosmological texts we have examined intend to describe how (descriptive cosmology) the world is rather than why (explicative cosmology) it is so. According to the Huai-nan Tzu Weltanschauung, the world as we perceive it is the spontaneous outcome of a natural process. Naturalness (tzu-jan) is all at once inherent in the objective cosmological process and in man's awareness and understanding of the cosmos: things are so of themselves; they form harmonious patterns of themselves. As far back as the mind can reach in the profound obscurity of Non-Being (lan-ming 覽冥)， there is a tendency ‘to be', and ‘to be ordered and organized'. The perceptible order and organization of things is not created or fashioned by an all-powerful agent different from the universe, but is an intrinsic tendency of the original substance of the universe, which the mind can follow unto indistinctness. Huai-nan Tzu pushed back to an ever-receding beginning the fundamental patterns of the present world. It made the formation of the cosmos a natural event, not a supernatural one. Furthermore, the basic structure of the formative process can be ‘grasped' here and now. For the human mind, being itself.in continuity with nature, has the capacity ‘to know',‘to become' and ‘to reproduce' the cosmic process, not through 208 Conclusion divinely granted revelation, reflection or contemplation, but on the affective and participative level of being. In this sense true knowledge (chen-chih) is not a mirror-image - neither a representation of ‘what's out there' nor a focal or peripheral vision of the intellect - but rather a direct and immediate affectus of things themselves, an affinitive correspondence and union that precedes any reflected awareness of it. It is this ontological relation of an affinitive rather than causal type that actualizes in the discrete world of space, time, species and individuals the primal unity of the cosmos. True knowledge, which, according to Huai-nan Tzu, constitutes the ultimate entelechy of nature, is the total and universal resonance (kan-ying) of all things. 1 True knowledge does not lead to the quest for a first cause or for an irreducible atom, but to the self-transformation (tzu-hua) whereby man becomes one (yi-t'i 一體) with the cosmos, ‘returning (fan) to 'his órigin as if he had not yet begun to emerge from the Grand Unity'.2 The seven stages described in the cosmological texts should not be interpreted in a purely temporal and quantitative sense. They also correspond to ever-recurring patterns of the natural world-order and to operational structures of the human mind. Being and knowledge in Huainan Tzu may appear at first glance as the two sides of the same coin, but in the final analysis, they merge into a common vanishing point, original unity. From that standpoint it is possible to reduce the foregoing seven stages to a threefold scheme: 一 The primal indistinct unity, characterized by Emptiness (hsü) and encompassing the realm of Non-Being (wu yu) (stages one to three). - The process of differentiation and distinction of the 1 Huai-nan Tzu 2/lOb (Morgan, p. 42; tr. mod.) states that ‘it is only with the True Man (chen-jen) that there is true knowledge (chen-chih 真好)'. Through true knowledge the True Man becomes one substance with Tao， γi tao' 體進 (Huai-nan Tzu 1 月a)，‘yü tao wei yi' 與道為一 (Huai-nan Tzu 1/23a). The same idea is expressed in a more dynamic and even mystical way in Huai-nan Tzu 14/1b (already quoted): ‘He who can return to that which produced [him] as if he had not yet acquired [physical] form, we call him a True Man. The True Man is he who has not yet begun to differentiate himself from the Great Unity.' A similar description is found in the ‘Essay on the Lute-tuner and the True Man' in Huai-nan Tzu 6月 a.3-5: ‘ He who is merged with Supreme Harmony . . . is as if he had not yet begun to emerge from his origin' (cf. supra, p. 138). Finally, if we may paraphrase a passage from Huai-nan Tzu 6, which obviously applies to the True Man, it is 'he who has the capacity to gather things within one category from the Supreme Ultimate above, thus transcending yin and yang and attaining a deeper level of reality, which at the same time goes beyond and contains the fundamental dualities.of the universe' (Huai-nan Tzu 6/4b.I-5; cf...

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