Chapter 42 of the Daodejing gives the sequence and does not explain it, which has kept commentators busy for two thousand years. The usual reading is that the one is undifferentiated primal qi, the two are yin and yang, and the three is their interaction — from which everything follows. What matters more than the arithmetic is what the passage is not: there is no creator, no decision, no moment of making, and nothing outside the process. The Dao is not a being that does this; it is the way it goes. Chinese thought accordingly never developed the problem of theodicy in the form the monotheisms have it, because there is nobody who could have arranged things otherwise. The ten thousand things is a standard Chinese idiom for everything, and the point of the phrase is that the list is not worth attempting.