The word's field
Wú is the ordinary word for negation in Literary Chinese, doing the plain grammatical work of there is not, without, lacking, and in that function it saturates the classical texts. It stands opposite yǒu, the word for presence and having, and the paired terms yǒu and wú together carry one of the deepest oppositions in the tradition: presence and absence, being and non-being, the determinate thing and the undetermined ground from which things come. In its lowest register wú is simply the sign that something is missing. In its highest it names a positive principle.
The Daoist tradition raises the word furthest. In the Daodejing and in the commentarial line that runs through Wang Bi, wú becomes the name for the unnameable source — that which precedes and underlies the ten thousand determinate things, the empty hub that makes the wheel useful, the hollow that gives a vessel its worth. Wang Bi's reading, the recension our corpus indexes, treats wú as ontologically prior: the fullness of the world rests on an original absence, and the sage's power lies in returning to it. Here wú is not deficiency but fecund emptiness, the ground against which all presence shows.
The Confucian texts pull the word back toward the everyday. In the Analects and in Mencius, wú mostly does its grammatical work of denial: a person is wú this virtue, a state is wú that condition, though it also frames ethical absolutes, as in the injunction to be without certain faults or without a certain kind of selfishness. The same character therefore travels the whole distance from a clerk's negation to a metaphysician's first principle, and the tradition never fully separates the two, since even the Daoist non-being keeps the grammatical flavor of plain denial. A simplified graphic variant, 無 written 无, appears in the record as a separate lemma and is not counted in the figures below.
In the corpus
Our corpus records 811 occurrences of 無 across 3 works. The distribution is uneven and telling: the Daodejing (Wang Bi recension) carries 410 of them, the Mencius 271, and the Analects (Lunyu) 130. The single short Daodejing thus holds more than half the total, and against its length that density is extreme — this is a text for which negation is not incidental grammar but a central instrument of thought. The Mencius and Analects, far longer works of ethical and political argument, use the word heavily too, but there it does the steady labor of denial and prohibition rather than naming a principle.
The count concentrates the tradition's two faces in its two poles. Where wú clusters most tightly, in the Daodejing, it is closest to non-being as a named ground; where it spreads more thinly across the Confucian texts, it is closest to ordinary without. The corpus does not resolve which sense is primary, and it should not: the word's philosophical career depends precisely on carrying both at once. A reader watching the frequency alone would already sense that something unusual happens to negation in the Daoist text.
Canonical moments
The corpus's citations for this word all land at one locus, the opening chapter of the Daodejing, and that single locus is the natural place for wú to declare itself.
Daodejing 一章 — the first chapter states that the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth while the named is the mother of the ten thousand things, and it sets wú and yǒu, non-being and being, side by side as two aspects of one source seen from two directions. This is the passage on which the whole later metaphysics of wú is built. Wang Bi's commentary takes the nameless, undetermined wú as ontologically first, the origin against which all determinate presence arises, so that the sage who would grasp the world's subtlety turns toward absence and the one who would grasp its manifest forms turns toward presence. That the corpus returns to this chapter repeatedly is fitting: it is the founding statement of wú as principle, the moment where a grammatical negation is lifted into the name of the ground. The weight our record places on this one passage matches the weight the tradition itself places on it.
The word's world
Wú sits at the center of a cluster of Chinese soul- and cosmos-words and answers to several across the traditions. Within its own wing it defines itself against the positive terms it grounds: the vital breath qi that fills and moves the world, the dao that the first chapter names alongside it as the nameless source, the potency or virtue de by which that source is present in things, and the nature xing each thing receives. Where those words name what is there, wú names the fertile absence from which they come — the emptiness the xin, the heart-mind, is counseled to keep open.
Across the wings the resonances run to the traditions' words for emptiness and ground. The Buddhist term nibbana, the blowing out that is not annihilation but release, shares with Daoist wú the refusal to treat absence as mere lack; both name a fullness that ordinary presence cannot hold. The Sanskrit brahman, the undetermined absolute behind all determinate form, stands to the world much as wú stands to the ten thousand things — a ground reached by negation, approached by stripping away rather than adding. And against the Western soul-words the contrast is sharpest: where the Greek psyche and the Latin anima name a positive animating principle, a breath or life that is, wú names the prior emptiness that even breath presupposes. The tradition's distinctive move is to make the negative word do the founding work.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). Cross-references: qi, dao, xin, nibbana, brahman, psyche.