u/transcendentalcookie

Hello all, my understanding is that Western scholars have tended to focus almost exclusively on the Laozi and the Zhuangzi when examining so-called “philosophical Daoism” (daojia). However, the main concerns of “religious Daoism” (daojiao)—prosperity rituals, immortality elixirs, alchemy, etc.—seem to have very little precedent in the Zhuangzi specifically. The text seems to have almost no ritual component and an overall attitude of equanimity toward death, though I can certainly see Daoist concerns for good health prefigured there. So my question is, what was the nature of this text’s influence on the traditions that came after it, given the seemingly notable discrepancies in emphasis and attitude?

Hello, I recently heard (not for the first time) that immediately after the Big Bang (perhaps after the Planck Epoch?), the universe had gone from smaller than an atom to the size of a grapefruit. However, based on what I know about inflation, this doesn't make sense to me. From what I understand, inflation means that space itself is expanding, but measuring the "new" space is only really possible by looking at how galaxies and such move apart from each other. But in the early universe, there ostensibly weren't distinct bodies whose distances we could measure––not even on the (sub)atomic scale. So when cosmologists say that the early universe expanded to the size of a grapefruit, what does that actually mean?