section_path: Core concepts of theology and cosmology/Tian, its li and qi
section_name: Tian, its li and qi
paragraph_text: Tian, its li and qi
  
  Confucians, Taoists, and other schools of thought share basic concepts of Tian. Tian is both the physical heavens, the home of the sun, moon, and stars, and also the home of the gods and ancestors. Tian by extension is source of moral meaning, as seen in the political principle, the Mandate of Heaven, which holds that Tian, responding to human virtue, grants the imperial family the right to rule and withdraws it when the dynasty declines in virtue. This creativity or virtue (de) in humans is the potentiality to transcend the given conditions and act wisely and morally. Tian is therefore both transcendent and immanent.
  
  Tian is defined in many ways, with many names, the most widely known being Tàidì Chinese: 太帝 (the "Great Deity") and Shàngdì Chinese: 上帝 (the "Primordial Deity"). The concept of Shangdi is especially rooted in the tradition of the Shang dynasty, which gave prominence to the worship of ancestral gods and cultural heroes. The "Primordial Deity" or "Primordial Emperor" was considered to be embodied in the human realm as the lineage of imperial power. Di (Chinese: 帝) is a term meaning "deity" or "emperor" (Latin: imperator, verb im-perare; "making from within"), used either as a name of the primordial god or as a title of natural gods, describing a principle that exerts a fatherly dominance over what it produces. With the Zhou dynasty, which preferred a religion focused on gods of nature, Tian became a more abstract and impersonal idea of God. A popular representation is the Jade Deity (Chinese: 玉帝 Yùdì) or Jade Emperor (Chinese: 玉皇 Yùhuáng) originally formulated by Taoists. According to classical theology he manifests in five primary forms (Chinese: 五方上帝 Wǔfāng Shàngdì, "Five Forms of the Highest Deity").
  
  The qi Chinese: 气 is the breath or substance of which all things are made, including inanimate matter, the living beings, thought and gods. It is the continuum energy—matter. Stephen F. Teiser (1996) translates it as "stuff" of "psychophysical stuff". Neo-Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi developed the idea of li Chinese: 理, the "reason", "order" of Heaven, that is to say the pattern through which the qi develops, that is the polarity of yin and yang. In Taoism the Tao Chinese: 道 ("Way") denotes in one concept both the impersonal absolute Tian and its order of manifestation (li).