Note. This is a machine-assisted translation of a Chinese original. Where wording matters, please consult the Chinese original.

Tianwen · Preface

For my younger self.

I have decided to go looking for an answer — an answer to a question I have been asking since I was young.

A friend once asked whether I had run into some major crossroads in life. As if only people who have been through life-and-death moments would care about questions like these. That is not my situation, but I have wanted to know the answer ever since I was a child.

Other friends have said this is the kind of thing one chases only when there is nothing better to do. Yet even in my poor, hard-pressed student years, these questions had already wrapped themselves around me. For more than thirty years I have repeatedly tried to force myself not to think about them, and I have never managed it. Perhaps this is simply my fate. Since I cannot shake them off, then — at an age when one is supposed to know one's destiny — I have decided to find an answer. At the very least, an answer that I myself can be persuaded by.

I still remember being puzzled in middle school when I first learnt Le Chatelier's principle.

Le Chatelier's principle, also called the principle of equilibrium shift:

If one of the factors affecting an equilibrium is changed, the equilibrium shifts in the direction that tends to reduce that change, so as to oppose it.

A simple example: drop a single drop of acid into a bottle of acid–base equilibrium solution, and a chemical reaction takes place inside the bottle that neutralises some of the acidic ions. Yet once the reaction is over and a new equilibrium is reached, the total quantity of acidic ions in the solution is still higher than before.

The first time I saw this principle, I thought it was extraordinary. Why, when acidic ions are added, does the solution have to react and weaken the change? After the weakening, why do the acidic ions still end up increased? And if they end up increased anyway, why bother reacting at the start to reduce them?

As I grew up, I gradually came to understand the line "The green hills cannot block it; in the end, the river still flows east", and to understand what is meant by "doing what one knows cannot be done".

It was at university that I first read the Daodejing. The Daodejing says: "reversal is the movement of the Dao". Different readers interpret this line differently, but when I first read it, what came to mind was Le Chatelier's principle — so this is what it means for the Dao to move. But then why must the Dao "reverse" in this way? The Daodejing also says, "The way of Heaven takes from what has too much and gives to what has too little" — but why should the way of Heaven be like this?

These doubts have stayed lodged in my mind, pressing me to look for an answer that has long eluded me. The world is so extraordinary; can it really only be the work of an omnipotent Creator — perhaps God, or some deity, the Buddha, or Brahman?

Is it really only an omnipotent Creator who could have made a world as extraordinary as this?