Let me explain what "Tao gives birth to one, life gives birth to two, life gives birth to three, and life gives birth to everything".

"Tao gives birth to one, life gives birth to two, life gives birth to three, and life gives birth to everything." This is a sentence from Laozi's Tao Te Ching. Tao Te Ching is known as metaphysics, and this sentence is especially mysterious, intriguing and puzzling.

In the past, scholars' explanations of this sentence were mostly compared with the Book of Changes-Cohesion. They think that Lao Tzu's so-called one refers to Tai Chi (something that can only be seen in chaos), the so-called two refers to Yin and Yang, and the so-called three refers to the harmony of Yin and Yang.

It is said that there is a painting called "Tai Chi Tu" in the Book of Changes, which may have been written by Chen Tuan, a Taoist priest in the Northern Song Dynasty, so it may be a forgery. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Zhou Dunyi wrote "Illustration of Taiji", and Shao Yong imagined that this picture was different from nature and nurture. Fu painted a congenital Tai Chi map, while he painted an acquired Tai Chi map. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhu formally incorporated Taiji into the Book of Changes and placed it in front of it.

It is said that Zhu believes that if there is no Taiji diagram, the Book of Changes is just an ordinary book of divination, which is not the first of the group classics at all. The great Confucian scholars in the Song Dynasty were really great. They cooperated with Taoist priests to transform Confucian classics and make them more perfect than before, so Confucianism in Song Dynasty played an important role.

Taoism and Confucianism sometimes suspect each other and sometimes brag about each other's support. Indeed, there are no eternal enemies and friends. In this way, both sides have become metaphysics, so it is very mysterious.

So what does Lao Tzu mean by this sentence? It's actually quite simple. I want to say that everything is generated by Tao, and there are some processes in it. These processes are inconvenient to say or needless to say or impossible to say, so I use first-class, second-class and third-class figures instead.

The meaning of this sentence of Laozi is to emphasize that because everything is generated by Tao, everything is also ruled by Tao. The so-called "born without, long without killing" just refers to a virtue possessed by Tao. Tao's rule over all things is unique, or brilliant.