The Dao That Cannot Be Spoken

Over on the other side, Li Qi had eaten and drunk his fill, attended several banquets, mingled with many young masters native to Wushen Mountain, and become a familiar face.

The banquets were not merely for eating and drinking. These cultivators also raised many questions concerning the Dao Path for collective discussion, which was quite interesting.

Most of these questions did not touch upon the essence of the Dao Path, but they were all rather fascinating.

For example, if a circle had an infinite radius, would its edge be a straight line?

In theory, the larger a circle's radius, the smaller its curvature. Thus, when a circle's radius became infinite, its curvature would become infinitesimal.

At the same time, an infinite radius meant an infinite circumference, which was the same property as a straight line, since a straight line was also infinitely long.

However, some raised objections. If one used infinite division to explain replacing a curve with a line, that only held true for first-order infinitesimals, because beyond the differential lay higher-order infinitesimals. Curvature infinitely close to zero did not mean it was truly zero.

Others explained it from another angle. A circle was the set of points at a fixed distance from a fixed point, including that fixed point—the center of the circle—and all points on the arc. Therefore, no matter what, it could not be a straight line, and so on.

In any case, they were all little games. Everyone could understand the arguments from different angles and grasp the fundamental meaning behind those games.

The Dao that could be spoken was not the eternal Dao; the name that could be named was not the eternal name.

These so-called contradictions were, in truth, the limits of what cultivators could express, yet they were also a manifestation of