Tao Te Ching XLII

The way begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets the myriad creatures.

The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.

There are no words which people detest more than solitary, desolate, and hapless.  Yet lords and princes use these to refer to themselves.

Thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.

What others teach I also teach:  the violent will not come to a natural end.  I shall take this as my precept.

A mathematics exists apart from that found in ledgers and calculators.  It begins with 0, moves to 1, then to 2, to 3, and finally to countlessness.

0 is the way and the object of fear for the Greeks and Christians—a secret the East let loose in the Middle Ages, causing ecstasy, chaos, discovery, and desperation in the West.  The West’s modern structures are largely built from a blending of the older firm structures of 1 and the recent chaotic responses to 0.  0 is the limits of knowledge; the ineluctable fact of death; the insignificance and dissolution of all things; our fundamental inability to grasp anything.  0 is the circle and yin and female.

1 is the monolithic Judeo-Christian God; the subjection of life and flesh to idea and metal and system; the structures of the furthest reaches of desire before it breaks and returns.  1 is the line and yang and male.

2 is mind’s perception and naming of humanity’s fundamental tensions:  good and evil, male and female, order and chaos, time and eternity.  2 is the endpoints of the line.

3 is the lords and princes and kings that bind the myriad creatures.  3 is the triangle—the borders of government and law that delineate the people in their swirling pool of flesh.

The myriad creatures bear the weight of humanity’s ever-increasing tensions and hungrily clasp their desire for what doesn’t tangibly exist.

There is a mathematics of a different order.  The operators of this mathematics—the additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions—do not function in the manner of spreadsheets:  sometimes you add and subtraction occurs, sometimes you subtract and the sum is greater.  Thus the sage knows all the numbers and so avoids violent means.