What is the Mysterious Origin in Taoism? 道教中妙本的含义？

Originally, it refers to the essence of The Dao that transcends form and name, being mysterious and unfathomable. It is the original source from which all things are generated and the ultimate state to which all things return.

What is the Mysterious Origin in Taoism?

Cheng Xuanying annotated the line All things in heaven and earth are born of being, and being is born of non-being in the Dao De Jing as: All things in heaven and earth are born in accordance with the responsive Dao and its inherent principles. This responsive Dao arises from the Wonderful Origin, and the root of the Wonderful Origin is the ultimate non-being. He gave a sub-commentary on the line The Dao begets the One in the same classic: *The ultimate Dao, the Wonderful Origin, transcends all forms and names in its essence. From this fundamental origin, it manifests in tangible traces and initiates the birth of primordial Qi.* In these annotations, the term "Wonderful Origin" refers specifically to the essence of The Dao in its primal, original state.

Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty endowed the category of the Wonderful Origin with new philosophical connotations in his Annotations on the Laozi, establishing it as a more fundamental, profound and abstract concept than The Dao itself. In his Sub-commentary and Explanation of the Title of the Dao De Jing, he stated: The classic says, 'There is a thing formed in chaos, born before heaven and earth. I know not its name, so I style it the Dao, and reluctantly name it the Great.' Thus we know that the Great Dao is a forced name for the ultimate emptiness of the Wonderful Origin, a name referring to its all-pervading nature. In his sub-commentary on the line The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao in the Laozi, he wrote: The Dao is a forced name for the ultimate emptiness of the Wonderful Origin, interpreted as all-pervading and constant. ... The speakable Dao means that this Wonderful Origin generates all things in an all-pervading way and serves as the path for all things, hence it can be called the Dao, and thus we say 'the speakable Dao'. The non-eternal Dao means that the Wonderful Origin transforms and generates all things with no fixed form; a forced name can never fully encompass it, hence it may be called the Great, the Transcendent, the Distant, or the Near, and is not confined to a single constant form of the Dao—thus we say 'not the eternal Dao'.

All these expositions hold that the Wonderful Origin is the ontological essence of The Dao, while the so-called Dao is merely a forced nominal designation for this Wonderful Origin. The relationship between the Wonderful Origin and The Dao is that of essence and nominal form, of original source and the all-pervading generative path. Regarding the Wonderful Origin as a more abstract concept than The Dao actually reflects the ideological tendency to understand the essence of The Dao from an integrated perspective of ontology and cosmogony. Therefore, when elaborating on the implication of the Wonderful Origin in his Annotations on the Laozi, Emperor Xuanzong both stated that the Wonderful Origin is neither being nor non-being and noted that the Wonderful Origin descends to generate all things and reveals all phenomena as omens.

Later scholars of the Twofold Mystery school further developed the philosophical connotations of the Wonderful Origin. For example, the Fundamental Principles of the Three Treatises states: The Wonderful Origin is the profound mystery of nature... The Wonderful Origin ultimately reaches the state of having no origin at all. It establishes the great Twofold Mystery doctrine that all phenomena have no ultimate origin based on the principle of natural interdependent causation. The Treatise on the Great Dao states: Emptiness is the essence of the Wonderful Origin, for it is not a tangible entity; nature is the innate character of the Wonderful Origin, for it is not artificially created; The Dao is the function of the Wonderful Origin, hence it is called the all-pervading generative Dao. Emptiness, nature, and The Dao—all three are the true innate character of the Wonderful Origin. It holds that the Wonderful Origin takes emptiness as its essence and the all-pervading Dao that generates all things as its function, and that nature, as the medium connecting the essence and function of the Wonderful Origin, is its innate quality. This illustrates that the Wonderful Origin is not a supreme creator, and the process of all things transforming from non-being to being is a process of spontaneous natural evolution.