ABSTRACT
The writings of the early Daoists are permeated with the unmistak able flavor of vagueness. The highly metaphorical, laconic, and imagistic text of the Laozi seems, for better or worse, to have all the determinacy of a Rorschach blot. The text communicates with suggestive and paradoxical language that may at times encourage the interpreter to blur just a little too quickly the boundary between reading into and reading out of the text. But vagueness is not just a stylistic quirk of Daoist writing, it is also important as a philosophi cal theme. It is on occasion taken up explicitly, but it is not expounded on at any great length. So the question arises, ‘What clues are there to uncovering the significance of vagueness in the Laozi?* The purpose of this chapter is to bring to light, or perhaps ‘reconstrue,’ one manner in which vagueness informs, as a kind of inchoate presupposition, the process oriented world view expressed in the Laozi By ‘inchoate’ I do not mean to suggest that this understanding is undeveloped or lacking in sophistication, only that it remains unfocused, throwing a diffused light from the periphery.
