The Seba library treats Great Ultimate in 5 passages, across 4 authors (including Kohn, Livia, Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming).
the Great Ultimate is depicted as an ellipsis with ten stations on its periphery… shows it as a blank circle. Daoist speculation made special use of Zhou Dunyi’s version and related it to alchemical
Kohn documents the multiple diagrammatic forms through which the Great Ultimate was visualized in Daoist tradition, from concentric circles to blank circles, each representing a distinct cosmological and alchemical theory.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000thesis
To plumb the principles that underlie the prephenomenal world is what is meant by the term profundity… it is the numinous alone that thus allows one to make quick progress without hurrying
Wang Bi locates the pre-phenomenal ground — the conceptual horizon of the Great Ultimate — within the Sagely Dao as a domain of profundity, incipience, and numinous efficacy.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
when you know the One, all tasks are done; if you do not know the One, then thought is out of place. How many students in the world know the One?
Liu Yiming’s Taoist I Ching frames the cosmological One — the unifying principle behind the Great Ultimate — as a meditative and ethical attainment whose realization integrates thought with reality.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
The Book of Changes (I Ching)… is based on five diagrams made up of trigrams… increased by doubling them into hexagrams to sixty-four.
Hakuin situates the structural apparatus of the I Ching — the trigram and hexagram system that emanates from the Great Ultimate — within a broader context of vital-energy cultivation and Zen practice.
, Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, 1999aside
The talisman ensures total protection against the demonic forces assembled in the deep wells of death, while diagrammatic map of Mount Fengdu helps to project himself into the processes of cosmic involution, thus allowing him to return to the origin of all things
Kohn describes how Daoist ritual diagrams serve as instruments for returning to the cosmological origin — a context adjacent to the Great Ultimate’s function as the generative source underlying all diagrammatic cosmology.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000aside