Time transcending tense: An examination of heng 恒 in pre-Qin Daoist philosophy

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on the philosophy of time in pre-Qin Daoist thought has not yet produced a thorough examination of dao’s relationship to time. This essay resolves this omission through a systematic study of the concept heng 恒 in pre-Qin Daoist literature. While principally expressing the ‘constancy’ of dao, heng also significantly presupposes dao’s ability to change. This change is characterized in the texts as a cyclical movement of ‘return’ and identified with the universe’s circular metanarrative of generation and reintegration. The essay turns to examine pre-Qin Daoist literature’s use of primal wu 無 metaphors to describe dao. It concludes that they present dao as undifferentiated infinitude, liberating dao as heng from the tense structure of past-present-future that divides life in time. These metaphors further associate the movement of dao with the flow of time, reformulating time’s relentless ever-greater advancement into an endless cycle of creative transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• heng 恒
• dao 道
• wu 無
• Pre-Qin Daoism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘metaphysics’ is used in this essay in the generic sense of ‘the study of the fundamental character of reality’, including the concepts of existence, change, and time.

2. All translations given in this article are the authors’ own unless otherwise specified.

3. This logical ordering is substantiated by the centrality of ziran 自然 in pre-Qin Daoist thought (see section five, below), which frames transformation as an inherent potential in all things and thus time as an ontological structure making all change possible.

4. It is predominant scholarly opinion that the Taiyi shengshui can be characterized as a pre-Qin Daoist text based on its fundamental commonalities of beliefs and concepts with other pre-Qin Daoist literature (see Z. Wang, 2015, p. 81). For the purpose of this essay, appeal to the Taiyi shengshui is justified, in particular, by the notable similarities between its cosmogony and that of Laozi 42 (Small, 2021, pp. 32–33).

5. It is widely accepted among scholars that the Hengxian should be placed within the milieu of pre-Qin Daoist literature and hence that it can be examined alongside the received texts of the Laozi and Zhuangzi for mutual explication (see, for example, Brindley et al., 2013; J. Liu, 2021; Small, 2021; Z. Wang, 2019).

6. Fan 返, meaning ‘to return’, is used instead of fan 反 in some versions of the Laozi.

7. In the Taiyi shengshui, the term taiyi 太一 replaces dao as the preferred name for the ultimate origin.

8. The Erya is an authoritative lexicographic work on Han texts, canonized in the Song dynasty by Confucian scholars.

9. While B. Wang (2011) reads this passage to mean ‘there is nowhere it does not reach’ (p. 65), G. Chen (2015, p. 152) and Gao (2010, p. 47) argue the more natural reading is to ‘move in cycles’, with this movement emphasized via budai 不殆 (‘without ceasing’). This literal reading is further supported by the subsequent application of fan to dao in the same passage (zi zhi yue dao … yuan yue fan 字之曰道 … 遠曰反).

10. This specific meaning of ‘spontaneous’ reflects the literal etymology of ziran, namely zi 自 (‘self’) + ran 然 (‘so’). ‘spontaneous’ should not be understood here in the sense of ‘capricious’ or ‘without warning’. For further information on this translation, see Z. Wang (2015, pp. 130–134), X. Liu (2010, pp. 80–81), and Karyn Lai (2008, p. 106).

11. The Lüshi Chunqiu (Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals) is a Chinese classical compendium of the thought and culture of the time it was written (approximately 239 bce).

12. The term mengmeng 夢夢 used here evokes the image of a marshland.

13. For example, Plotinus likens eternity to ‘a point’ that has ‘not yet begun to go out and flow into lines’ (Plotinus & Armstrong, 1993, 7. 3. 16–20), and Thomas Aquinas likens the relationship between time and eternity to that between ‘the circumference and the centre of a circle’ (Aquinas & Pegis, 1955, p. 66).

14. By contrast, see Kohn (2021, p. 1).

15. Since the metaphor of the watery abyss communicates the nature of dao via an epistemological unity-in-distinction, the undifferentiated character of primal time reflects dao’s transcendence of phenomenal temporality as heng. Nevertheless, this primal time corresponds to wu and hence the nameable dao, not to heng itself as the truest reality of dao that transcends all language (see, Mawangdui Laozi 1); hence, heng and primal time cannot be strictly identified in pre-Qin Daoist thought. This distinction is illustrated in the fact that, while heng expresses both transcendent permanence and immanent transience through the image of reiterative cyclical movement, primal time (as wu) cannot remain unified and undifferentiated when it flows in the world (as you).