In traditional Chinese philosophy, epistemology was not an explicitly developed discipline, even if Chinese philosophers since ancient times were interested in problems related to human knowledge and developed some implicit theories of knowledge. Traditionally, there was no technical Chinese term equivalent to "epistemology" in Western philosophy, for which Chinese now use the terms "zhishilun" and "renshilun" as modern translations. In contrast, metaphysics has been a central interest of Chinese philosophy, traceable back to its origin in the Yijing or Zhouyi (The [Zhou] book of changes, c. 6th–5th century BCE). The discourse on the Way (daolun), in various forms, has always been an essential constituent of traditional Chinese philosophy. The term "xingershangxue," or simply "xingshangxue," now serving as the Chinese translation of the term "metaphysics" in Western philosophy, comes from the great appendix of the Zhouyi, where we read, "What is above forms [xing...