These names are however merely stop-gaps. We can call it, as above, the Sameness or the Mystery. Strictly speaking, the world as seen in vision has no name.
For they issue from the same mould (‘proceed from a sameness’), and nevertheless are different as regards name. But the two modalities of the Universe, the world as the Taoist sees it in vision and the world of everyday life, contradict the basic assumption of the Realist.
The whole doctrine of Realism was founded on the conviction that just as things which issue from the same mould are mechanically identical, ‘cannot help being as they are’, 226 so by complete codification, a series of moulds ( fa), can be constructed, which will mechanically decide what ‘name’ (and consequently what reward or punishment) should be assigned to any given deed. The Realist, his vision distorted by desire, sees only the ‘ultimate results’, the Outcomes of those essences, never the essences themselves. Provisionally we may call them miao, ‘secret essences’. In dispassionate vision the Taoist sees a world consisting of the things for which language has no names. The Taoist replies that though there does exist a ch‘ang-tao, 225 ‘an unvarying Way’, it cannot be grasped by the ordinary senses nor described in words. The Realists demand a ch‘ang-tao, an ‘unvarying way’ of government, in which every act inimical and every act beneficial to the State is codified and ‘mated’ to its appropriate punishment or reward.
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