  Another Guodian document, given the title “Taiyi shengshui” (“The Great One Gives Birth to the Waters,” translated in Ames and Hall 2003; also see Boltz 1999 and Allan 2003) and which may have formed an integral part of the Guodian Laozi “C” text, certainly reflects strong interest in cosmogony and cosmology. The text known as “Heng Xian,” one of the documents found in the corpus of bamboo slips recovered by the Shanghai Museum in 1994 and which I interpret in the sense of that which comes before and determines the created order, testifies further to the active engagement with cosmological and metaphysical questions in early China (Ma Chengyuan 2003; a special issue of the journal Dao 12.2, 2013 is devoted to this work).