 Second, because it is capable of singlehandedly originating everything, the Dao is taken to be necessarily ziran, meaning “self-so” or “spontaneous”, which is read as entailing something like the kind of necessity and aseity of being causa sui in the Thomist tradition (Perkins 2019). Wang explains the entailment in her explication of a famous passage (“Human beings follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows dao, and dao follows ziran”): the Dao’s following ziran arrests the regress because “following” spontaneity is the opposite of following since spontaneity is making it up yourself on the fly (DDJ, ch. 25; Wang 2012: 51).