Dakuai (大块)
Dakuai 大块, the 'great clod' — the Zhuangzi's name for the world-process: no maker, no plan, things born 'clod-like, of themselves.' It breathes out and the breath is called wind.
The term
大块 (dàkuài) — 块, a clod, a lump, a mass of earth; 大块, the great clod. The term appears twice in the site’s verified passages, and the two uses bracket the book’s cosmology:
- As the breather (ch. 2, opening the chapter): 夫大块噫气，其名为风 — “The great clod breathes out; the breath is called wind” — and the breathing’s sound runs through every hollow: 是唯无作，作则万窍怒呺 — “only when it does not stir; when it stirs, the ten thousand hollows roar.”
- As the carrier (ch. 6, the four friends): 大块载我以形，劳我以生，佚我以老，息我以死 — “the great clod carries me with a form, labors me with life, rests me with age, and quiets me with death.”
Why the term matters
- The anti-creationist name. The tradition’s own gloss (the Zhuangzi yi commentary, verified on the passage) makes the point explicit: 塊者，無物也 — the clod is that which has no thing-ness; and 物之生也，莫不塊然而自生 — “the birth of things: nothing that is not clod-like, self-born.” The word is chosen precisely because a clod has no face and no plan: the world-process is not a maker, not a person, not a mind — it is a mass that breathes and carries without being asked. The ziran concept page holds the family; 大块 is its heaviest member — the 自 in 自生 given the weight of earth.
- The same clod does both jobs. Ch. 2’s clod breathes out the wind (the chapter’s opening scene, whose hollows are the 吾丧我 passage’s three sounds — earth, human, and heaven); ch. 6’s clod carries the body through its four seasons (form, life, age, death). The site keeps the two together because the book does: the same impersonal mass gives you your body and your weather — which is exactly what makes death in ch. 6 rest (息我以死) rather than punishment: the carrier that labors you also quiets you, and the labor was never personal.
- The wind’s connection. 大块噫气 is the site’s anchor for the book’s wind-family: the pity chain’s wind (ch. 17, roaring from the North Sea to the South) and this ch. 2 wind are the same breathing — and both passages end in the same refusal to find the driver (怒者其谁邪 in ch. 2; the chain’s silence at the mind in ch. 17). The tian-ji glossary holds that refusal’s vocabulary.
Usage notes
The term stays in pinyin with the gloss “the great clod”; the clod’s self-birth reading (块然而自生) is always carried with the term, because it is the term’s whole point against maker-readings; both attested uses are cited, per the site’s rule.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 2 (Qiwu Lun, inner chapter): 夫大块噫气，其名为风 — verified against the Wikisource full text; the Zhuangzi yi commentary (Shidian guji, HY1406) glosses 块 as 'that which has no thing-ness' and reads all things as 块然而自生, 'clod-like, self-born' — which is why the clod is called great
- Zhuangzi ch. 6 (Dazongshi): 大块载我以形，劳我以生 — verified on the four-friends page, which quotes the passage in full