 Though the Daoist literature does not use these philosophical distinctions much, and though occasionally it is read there as a monism in passing, the standard model of the Dao just recounted is best understood as an impersonal panentheism—as are the classical theisms and Bishop and Perszyk’s model of God  (Section 2.2).  The Dao-world relation has the asymmetry that defines panentheism: all the forms of being at 1–4 (or at least 2–4, if Being is read as identical to the Dao) depend for their existence on the Dao, but the Dao does not depend on them, or anything, for its  existence.[47]  In addition, if we take the theme of immanence in a full-throated way so that really there is nowhere down the line of the stages that the Dao is not, then the Dao is both the efficient and material cause of the universe, as we saw in the Bhakti Vedanta views. So the view of the Dao traced here is close to the idea of Brahman as the builder of a house out of Brahmanself, who eternally dwells in this eternal Brahman-house which depends on Brahman for its existence but not vice versa. But “builder” is too intentional for the Dao, and, at least on the temporal reading of the sequence, there is no eternal house and thus no eternal dwelling in it. So try this: think of the Dao as an eternal seed for a house. The seed sprouts naturally in stages into a house filled with 10,000 things which depends on the seed but not vice versa, until the house dies back into the seed, which then lies dormant, pregnant with being, until it sprouts into being again, and so on, eternally.