Originating from a confluence of Confucianism, Daoism, and the Abstruse Learning dating from pre-Qin through the Wei-Jin period, the yi→xiang→yan paradigm offers a broad framework for examining Chinese thinking about literary creation in this book. By the late Warring States era, the philosophical import of three concepts, yi, xiang, and yan, had evolved into a protocosmological theory in The Commentary on Appended Phrases (§§14–15, 20–22). Subsequently the Wei philosopher Wang Bi would not only tease out ontological and epistemological aspects of these concepts but even establish a causative relationship between them. He thus founded the basic yi→xiang→yan paradigm, in which the three key terms engage each other bidirectionally. Thus yi gives rise to xiang which in turn gives rise to yan—myriad objects come into being from nonbeing, and from hidden to manifest. Meanwhile, human understanding operating on the...
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