道 Dao Knowledge Base

Wu Shi Wu Zhong — 无始无终 (No Beginning, No End)

The Zhuangzi's four-character deletion of time: no past, no present, no beginning, no end — spoken by Confucius in the Zhi Bei You dialogue with Ran Qiu, where the question 'what was before heaven and earth?' is answered by removing the line the question presumes. The child-and-grandchildren example, the refusal to make the origin a thing, and the grammar: this is not a claim about the deep past but a correction of the question.

中文: 无始无终 · wú shǐ wú zhōng ·

PRIMARY SOURCESCHOLARLY INTERPRETATION

The term

无始无终 — no beginning, no end — appears in the Zhuangzi’s Zhi Bei You dialogue between Ran Qiu and Confucius, and it is preceded there by its twin: 无古无今, no past, no present. The four characters are the answer to a specific question — Ran Qiu’s “can anything be known about the time before heaven and earth existed?” — and their function is to delete the line that the question presumes. Confucius answers first with a single sentence (yes: the ancient is like the present), then, when Ran Qiu comes back the next day dim instead of clear, with the full theorem:

无古无今，无始无终。未有子孙而有孙子，可乎？ — No past, no present; no beginning, no end. For there to be children and grandchildren without there having been children and grandchildren — could that be?

The example carries the whole argument. Children come into being from no prior children in every generation; nobody finds this strange. The question “what was before heaven and earth” presumes that the world is different from children — that a world needs a prior thing to stand on. The chapter’s answer is that it does not. Guo Xiang’s commentary condenses the point to nine words: heaven and earth always endure — there was no time before they were.

The rest of the passage unpacks what the four characters imply. Death and life do not create each other — each has its own integrity (皆有所一體). The origin of things is not a thing (物物者非物). And the turn that gives the term its weight: because the having of things is without end, the sage’s love of people is also without end (圣人之爱人终无已) — he draws it from this very source. No-beginning is not a claim about the deep past; it is a property of the present, and its ethical face is care without a cutoff.

How it is used on this site

One distinction the site keeps sharp: 无始无终 is not the modern physics claim that time is an illusion, and it is not the promise of personal immortality. The chapter is doing grammar, not cosmology: it is answering a question about the origin of the world by correcting the shape of the question. The site’s translation policy registers this kind of term as “untranslatable-but-explainable” — the four characters survive as a unit, and the explanation travels beside them.

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