The Nameless and the Named

A friend recently asked me a question about two lines in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching. It reads:

The Nameless is the origin of the universe.

The Named is the mother of myriad things.

What does that mean? This is my interpretation:

Elsewhere, in Chapter 42, the Tao Te Ching also says that “The Tao gives rise to One; One gives rise to Two; Two gives rise to Three; Three gives rise to the myriad things.”

It is the same idea. In the beginning is unity or oneness. But if there were only this Primordial One, then there cannot be any activity or change. One Hindu myth says that in the beginning, God was all by himself. He was bored because he had no one to play with. For this reason, he split himself into two. This means the arising of duality and polarities. In this sense, God created duality for his own entertainment. We can relate this to the Bible story of creation too. In Genesis, Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil can be understood as this fundamental split. Without the split, we will still be living in the primordial soup of unawareness.

The yin-yang symbol can be seen as a symbol for duality. The masculine and the feminine are polarities. Goodness and evil are polarities. Light and darkness are polarities. Even more basically…