Beyond the Ontology–Cosmogony Dichotomy: Qi and the Worldview of the Laozi Zhigui

This study examines the Laozi Zhigui—a key text of Han dynasty Huang-Lao thought—and reconstructs the categorical status of qi to reassess received primordial qi-centered cosmological interpretations and clarify the text’s distinctive worldview. The Laozi Zhigui explains the relation between Dao and the myriad entities through four stages of wu (nothingness)—Dao, De, Spirit-Illumination, and Great Harmony—and previous studies, working within inherited qi-centered cosmological frameworks, have generally assimilated these stages to qi. A contextual reading of key passages on cosmology, mind–nature, and self-cultivation clarifies that in the Laozi Zhigui, qi does not belong to the same ontological category as these four stages of wu. Instead, it functions as a mediating substance through which the order of wu is carried over into you (somethingness). Furthermore, the four stages of wu are likewise not as the internal differentiation of qi but as a non-substantialist account of the “generation of order.” On this basis, the worldview of the Laozi Zhigui can be reconstructed as a triadic schema of wu–qi–you (nothingness–qi–somethingness), which yields a distinctive model of qi cosmology that, unlike Han dynasty primordial qi-centered accounts, does not presuppose the generation and fission of a single primordial qi.