 The Huainanzi offers a number of ways out of this difficulty, but the most developed one is the use of the distinction between root (ben 本) and branch (mo 末) as applied to areas of knowledge. Each of the various schools, areas of human knowledge, and things in the world can be considered a “branch”, where the branches are connected to one another via their grounding in the same “root”. This root can be understood as the pattern (li) of nature that links the branches. The image of the umbrella and rib above shows us one example of this, and there are many others in the text. A passage in Ch. 2 reads: