Many readers of Zhou Dunyi’s Taiji teaching have felt that its cosmology is drawn in lines that are almost too clean: Taiji gives rise to yin and yang, which in turn generate the Five Phases and then the myriad beings. This has been criticized as metaphysically vague and overly schematic, more a suggestive diagram than a rigorous account of how reality actually unfolds. The famous formula “Non‑polarity and yet Supreme Polarity” has especially invited charges of logical inconsistency, as if it were trying to affirm both being and non‑being without explaining their relation. Traditional Confucian critics have also worried that this language, and the very diagram Zhou uses, lean too heavily on Daoist and Buddhist sources, importing a mystical flavor that seems foreign to the early Confucian concern with concrete ethical life.

Neo‑Confucian thinkers responded by reframing Zhou’s cosmology as a symbolic and normative vision rather than a literal cosmogony. Taiji came to be read as li, the morally charged pattern or principle that pervades all things, rather than as a creator standing apart from the world. From this perspective, the movement from Taiji to yin–yang and the Five Phases is not a temporal sequence but a way of speaking about logical priority: one unified principle expressing itself in ever more concrete patterns. The tension between Wuji and Taiji is softened by treating them as two aspects of a single reality, quiescent and active, rather than as two separate ultimates. In this way, what appears at first as a contradiction becomes a way of pointing to the mystery of unity and differentiation without splitting them apart.

Another line of criticism has focused on the apparent distance between such an abstract cosmology and the lived concerns of Confucian ethics. If the universe is described as an impersonal play of qi, yin–yang, and Five Phases, some have asked whether this leaves any room for a morally responsive Heaven or for genuine human agency. The worry is that a fixed cosmic pattern might slide into determinism, making self‑cultivation seem like a mere unfolding of what is already cosmically ordained. In response, later interpreters emphasized that while the overarching patterns are constant, the way they are embodied in each person’s endowment of qi is open to transformation. The heart‑mind is capable of recognizing and realizing li despite the limitations of its particular configuration, so that moral learning becomes a process of clarifying Taiji within oneself rather than passively submitting to fate.

A further concern has been that Zhou’s brief and highly symbolic exposition offers little concrete guidance for daily practice, especially when compared with the more discursive teachings of texts like the Analects or the Mencius. Here, later Neo‑Confucians did not so much deny the charge as complete what they saw as an unfinished picture. Zhou’s Taiji teaching was treated as a cosmological framework into which more detailed doctrines of self‑cultivation could be placed, such as investigation of things, rectification of the mind, and the cultivation of sincerity and reverence. In this way, the diagram and its terse commentary came to function less as a self‑sufficient manual and more as a kind of spiritual map, orienting practitioners toward a universe in which moral order and cosmic order are ultimately one and the same.