"Except for a string of definitions [in 18:03] this is the most comprehensive attempt in Chuang-tzǔ to organize basic concepts in a cosmological scheme. It share two traditional Chinese assumptions: (1) the generation of things from the ultimate root is not an event at the beginning of time but a continuing process; (2) the substantial condenses out of and dissolves into the insubstantial, the ch'i ([氣 qì] for which our English word is 'energy') which has the place in Chinese cosmology occupied by matter in ours. The basic metaphor behind the word 'matter' is of timber (Latin materia), inert and chopped up and put together by the carpenter; ch'i on the other hand is in the first place breath, alternating between motion and stillness, extended in space but insubstantial, although condensing to become visible on a frosty day. The ch'i is conceived as becoming solider the more slowly it moves, with the more tenuous circulating within and energizing the inert, for example as the ching [精 jīng], 'quintessence,' the vitalizing fluid in the living body. In its ultimate degree of fineness, we could think of it in Western terms as pure energy. Here this pure energy is identified on the one hand with the Nothing in which things originate, on the other with the Power at the centre of the man which generates him and all of those motions which are not chose but 'destined,' those which are on the point of coming about unless thought intervenes. By identifying himself with his most tenuous energies he assumes the larger view of the Great Man, and sees the utterances of philosophers (which Chuang-tzǔ identified with the twittering of birds [in 2:04] as equally valid and invalid from their different viewpoints; his own language blends them all and seems nonsensical.
The identification of the ultimate with Nothing, although common in later Taoism, is surprising in Chuang-tzǔ, which generally seems to put the Way beyond the dichotomy of something and nothing, as both 'without anything' and 'without nothing' [cf. ]. Some scholars therefore prefer a different punctuation of the first sentence, which becomes 'In the ultimate beginning there is that which is without nothing, which is without a name.'" (Graham pp. 156-57.)