The Nameless and the Named: A Commentary on Tao Te Ching, Chapter One

The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.
— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

1. The Non-Discriminating Mind

In Buddhism, the highest form of wisdom is often described as Nirvikalpa-jñāna (Sanskrit: निर् विकल्प ज्ञान), or “non-conceptual wisdom.” This corresponds to what Mahāyāna texts call the non-discriminating mind — a state of awareness unburdened by labeling, judging, or dividing experience into opposites. According to this view, suffering arises from arbitrary discriminations: we divide reality into self and other, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, desirable and undesirable. In doing so, we mistake mental constructions for reality itself.

2. Naming and the Birth of Duality

The moment we name something, we separate it from the seamless whole. Naming is an act of conceptual isolation: to call a flower “flower” is already to set it apart from the soil, air, and sunlight that sustain it. This act of labeling gives rise to the dualistic worldview — a world seen as composed of independent entities rather than interdependent processes.

In Buddhist terms, this is the root of avidyā (ignorance), the failure to see that all things…