Sublime

The China scholar William Callahan, who has launched a critique of Zhao’s conception, suggests that his conception of tianxia as a top-down project of bringing order to a chaotic or potentially chaotic world cannot be derived from the thinkers Zhao uses such as Laozi and Zhuangzi.

Additionally, Wang Mingming tells us that the cosmology of tianxia cannot be grasped in a singular fashion. Rather, it has to be understood in its two different varieties datable to the periods before and after the Qin unification of 221 BCE.

Wang argues that, after the imperial unification, tianxia cosmology became subordinated to the imperial state (guo) and the earlier distinction between the Zhou imperial state and the realm of tianxia began to disappear.

tzu-jan, or “of-itself-so.”