<p>This study investigates conceptual metaphors in traditional Chinese legal terminology, revealing their cognitive foundations in correlative logic and cultural significations embedded in cosmological and ethical frameworks. Analyzing classical texts, legal codes, and judicial records, it identifies three primary metaphor categories: artifact metaphors project tools’ material properties onto law to construct depersonalized, objective authority; natural order metaphors frame law as emergent resonance with cosmic forces like hydraulic constancy or seasonal cycles; and kinship metaphors embed Confucian relational ethics into governance. These metaphors operate via correlative logic, a cognitive pattern connecting domains through analogical resonance rather than categorical identity. The research exposes a tripartite meaning structure (nature-value-function) that resists Western “legal instrumentalism”: metaphors anchor law in non-volitional ontology, derive ethics from material physics, and manifest function only when constrained by the cosmic normative order and moral principles. This addresses, rather than definitively resolves, the “sovereign’s paradox” by binding rulers to cosmological inevitability, not volitional command. The study highlights modern relevance in power-constraining mechanisms like self-executing law, advocating epistemic pluralism in global jurisprudence.</p>