Fan · 返 · return

Returning is the movement of the Tao (Daodejing 40): everything that goes out comes back, the ten thousand things rise and fall back to the root, and the sage's wisdom is to move with that homeward turn rather than against it — back toward stillness, toward the source, toward the uncarved simplicity of the beginning. It is the same turn every door on this bench keeps finding: the Sufi's reed crying to rejoin the reed-bed, Plotinus' epistrophē, and the Hebrew word the whole annex circles — teshuvah, return, which in the Kabbalah is a deed you choose, not only a law of nature. One tradition's gold is the beginning it returns to; the other's is the end it returns for.