Chinese culture is unusual for us in that it doesn’t have a creation myth of the sort that almost all western cultures have, e.g. there is no divinity or god that brings the world into existance.
This has significant consequences for how we think about the world and structure it. If we think of the world as having been brought about by something else, the world is always secondary. If we think of it as having a creation point, an arrow of time is implied; the precarious present is allways barely clinging on, like a person running across a collapsing bridge into deep fog.
If we don’t have a creation myth in the normal form then all the things that we think of as acting upon the world are qualities of the world.
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