After and Before — The Impossibility of Completion

The Dao De Jing (Chapter 45) teaches: 'Great perfection seems imperfect, yet its use is inexhaustible; great fullness seems empty, yet its use is endless.' Completion and incompletion are not sequential stages but simultaneous aspects of every moment — this is the Daoist insight into the impossibility of a final state. Because the Dao never ceases its transformations (huà), any apparent completion immediately becomes the raw material of the next becoming. Laozi (Chapter 40) confirms: 'Returning is the motion of the Dao' — there is no terminus, only the perpetual cycling of fan (反), reversal folding back upon itself without end.