1.1.1 Care of the Self

Several important studies have contributed to new understandings of the relations of body, mind, and spirit in early China. Some approaches discuss something analogous to what Foucault has called “the care of the self,” better understood in a Chinese context as “self-cultivation” (xiushēn 修身) or “nurturing life” (yangsheng 養生). Self-cultivation traditions fundamentally involve the care and preservation of body, mind and spirit, but often disagree about relations between them. Some recent studies emphasize the importance of embodied self-cultivation traditions, from very different points of view.Footnote ³

Michael Puett argues for a fundamental change in Chinese understandings of the relation between humans and gods, beginning in the fourth century BCE. At this time, critics of court sacrificial practices argued that humans could use self-cultivation practices to appropriate the powers of spirits, in effect to “become” spirits. As a result, the term shén – spirit(s) – came to include not only extrahuman spirits with powers over natural phenomena but also “spirit” capacities within humans, achieved through the refinement of qi within humans (Puett Reference Puett2002: 21–23, 80–224).

Why did Warring States thinkers begin to claim that they could “become” spirits? According to Puett, Bronze Age attitudes toward spirits were fundamentally agonistic because spirits were capricious; sacrificial rituals were used to control them by transforming ancestors into gods in a divine hierarchy that was amenable to human manipulation through prayer and sacrifice (Puett Reference Puett2002: 31–79, cf. Keightley Reference Keightley1978, Reference Keightley1998; Poo Reference Poo1998). Warring States thinkers argued against these attitudes and effectively used the self-cultivation practices they advocated to reduce the distance between humans and gods. Such “self-divinization” practices increased individual human control and reduced the importance of divination and sacrifice.Footnote ⁴

In a very different approach to self-cultivation, Edward Slingerland argues for the centrality of wuwei 無為 or “acting without acting” as a spiritual ideal for thinkers as diverse as Confucius, Mengzi, the authors of the Daodejing, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi. Slingerland describes wuwei as both a mental state (characterized by effortlessness and lack of self-consciousness) and a mode of efficacious action (efficacious because it is in accord with the normative order of the cosmos) (Slingerland Reference Slingerland2003b: 5, 7, 29–33). He considers wuwei central to a worldview in which the cosmos has a normative order, but humans have fallen away from their proper roles and modes of behavior. A person who has regained this original state through wuwei acquires power or charismatic virtue (de 德), but, paradoxically, “effortless action” can only be accomplished through self-cultivation characterized by the need to “try not to try.”

Mark Csikszentmihalyi uses the Mengzi and two versions of the Wuxing 五行 (“Five Kinds of Action”) recovered from Guodian 郭店 and Mawangdui 馬王堆 (Changsha, Hunan, c.168 BCE) to argue for what he calls a “material virtue” tradition: a detailed moral psychology that describes procedures for the cultivation of virtue(s) (Csikszentmihalyi Reference Csikszentmihalyi2005: 7). In particular, they describe virtues in terms similar to bodily humors. Csikszentmihalyi argues these texts describe sagehood in terms of material virtue; and that this “material virtue” tradition was a Ru (“Confucian”) response to criticisms of the adequacy of “archaic” rituals for self-cultivation or the creation of social order.

In this material virtue tradition, virtue was grounded in the transformation of qi. It manifested physically in the body, and was inseparable from it. Cultivation of the virtues transforms the body and its appearance: it manifests in a jadelike countenance and the appearance of the eyes. This view of qi draws on late Warring States physiognomy and medicine. Medical and physiognomic texts share the view that internal qi is reflected in appearance and makes it possible to judge character or potential. In economic and military contexts this meant judging the “character” of an animal or weapon. Excavated texts show the importance of physiognomy in practical contexts. Examples include a text from Yinqueshan on the physiognomizing of dogs, a Han sword physiognomy text from Juyan and a text on the physiognomy of horses from Mawangdui.

These ethically normative self-cultivation traditions are important for several reasons. All involve body, mind, and spirit, often not clearly distinguished or explicitly blended. They provide strong expressions of “individualism” in early China, insofar as only an individual can perform self-cultivation (xiushēn) or “nurture life” (yangsheng). Only individuals can “xiu” their “shēn” or “yang” their “sheng.” Most important for the purposes of this Element, they all involve knowledge that is embodied in the immediate sense that it is gained through physical practices. These approaches thus place the study of the body squarely within the purview of ethics. (A full account of issues of individualism is beyond the scope of the present discussion. See Brindley Reference Brindley2010.)

1.1.2 Arguments for Dualism

Several recent studies have argued for the importance of dualist views in early China (Graham Reference Graham1989: 25, cf. Goldin Reference Goldin and Cook2003: 232, 243n22). Paul Goldin argued for the presence of mind–body dualism several of the most philosophically important Warring States texts. He points to passages in the Zhuangzi that seem to suggest the possibility of an immaterial mind or spirit, a passage in the Xunzi that presents a contrast between bodily and mental state, and Chinese beliefs about ghosts and postmortem consciousness (Goldin Reference Goldin and Cook2003: 228, 231, Reference Goldin and Richard2015).

In a recent monograph and several shorter studies, Edward Slingerland argues forcefully for the presence and importance of dualism in early China, and considers mind–body dualism to be one of several reductionist “Chinese-Western” dichotomies (Western dualism vs Chinese holism, Slingerland and Chudek Reference Slingerland and Chudek2011; critique by Klein and Klein 2012). Slingerland (Reference Slingerland2013: 9–15) argues against what he takes as the strongly holist positions of Roger Ames (Reference Ames1984, Reference Ames, Kasulis, Ames and Dissanayake1993), François Jullien (Reference Jullien2007: 8, 69), and Herbert Fingarette (Reference Fingarette1972, Reference Fingarette and Jones2008), among others. He argues for “weak” mind–body dualism, both in early China and as a psychological universal. He argues that in Chinese weak mind–body dualism, mind and body are experienced as functionally and qualitatively distinct, although potentially overlapping at points (Slingerland Reference Slingerland2013: 28).

Slingerland’s arguments also draw heavily on longstanding Chinese beliefs about the status of the soul after death. Chinese belief in some form of consciousness of the dead dates to the Shang oracle bone inscriptions; and Slingerland argues that, despite earlier evidence of belief in continuity between the world of the living and the dead, in late Warring States views of the afterlife, the dead were viewed as categorically different from the living (Guo Reference Guo, Olberding and Ivanhoe2011: 85–87; G. Lai Reference Lai2005: 42; Slingerland Reference Slingerland2019: 66–75).

He further argues that pre-Qin writers described the heart-mind or xin as the locus of personal identity, thought, free will, and moral responsibility, and as qualitatively different from other parts of the self (Slingerland Reference Slingerland2019: 101). Finally, he argues that soul–body dualism was strongly developed by the third century BCE, including detailed accounts of ritual and religious techniques for freeing the mind/spirit from the body.Footnote ⁵

Finally, Slingerland argues that any tripartite or multipartite account of the constituents of a person are “parasitic” on mind-body dualism because they all require the separability of personal essence from the physical body. (It also requires a close association between shén and the cognitive functions of xin.) He concludes that “if there is a unifying feature behind this diversity of terminology and divisions, it is that the soul … is intimately bound up with consciousness or mind” (Slingerland Reference Slingerland2019: 90). He argues that the unifying thread in a complex range of accounts of body-soul relations is

A dualist account of early Chinese psychology faces several problems. First, Chinese dualist arguments set up a problematic “body–mind” binary that conflates “mind–body” dualism and “spirit–body” dualism into one material–non-material binary that is historically Eurocentric. Second, most studies of mind–body dualism in early China are either not comparative or anachronistically compare early Chinese texts with modern European philosophers. Third, a dualist framework accounts for some of Chinese texts, but excludes others. Most broadly Confucian texts tend to identify the heart-mind with spirit and are thus friendly to this framework of analysis. But others present very separate roles of “mind” and “spirit.”

Finally, the dualist position and the comparative “mind–body dualism” debate on which it draws rely on Western conceptual categories based on a Western “mind–body” binary. Most studies of “mind–body dualism” in early China collapse mind and spirit into one entity, which can be dualistically contrasted to the body, for example, in metaphors of the heart-mind as ruler of the body. Others tacitly equate mind–body dualism during life with body–spirit dualism after death, and result in alternating treatments of “mind–body” and “body–spirit” dualisms.

1.3.1 Bodies: Frames and Forms

As important studies by Nathan Sivin and Deborah Sommer have demonstrated, Chinese terms for body have important differences from the English lexicon. They identify four key terms: ti 體, the physical body; xing 形, its structural form; gong 躬, the ritual person; and shēn 身, the social and self-cultivated person (Sivin Reference Sivin1995, Sommer Reference Sommer2008).

The ti or frame referred to the concrete physical body, including its major parts – usually the four limbs (si ti 四體) – and its physical form. An example of ti comes from Mengzi (2A2), who clearly refers to the entire body when he attributes to Gaozi a view of the body (ti) in which

By contrast, the xing 形 – literally form or shape – is visible, with clear boundaries, and refers to the body’s outline. It has nothing to do with a person as a whole; it is not conscious and has no personality or sense of self. There are important differences between frames and forms. Body frames involve relationships between wholes and parts; body forms involve relationships between inner and outer (Sommer Reference Sommer2008, which provides a detailed account of differences between ti, xing, and shēn).

Shēn refers to a body, person, or “embodied person,” both as a lived physical body and as a socially constructed personality. As lived in bodies, shēn can be measured in space (height) and time (lifespan). The physical boundaries of one shēn do not overlap those of another. As social constructions, shēn have characteristics such as status, personal identity, character, moral values, and experience. Shēn are self-aware and are the locus of inner reflection and self-cultivation. They are materially discrete, but socially permeable, and can absorb social attributes such as honor, disgrace, and so on (Sommer 2008).

Finally, the term ren 人 or “person” refers to the entire person, including the shēn, heart-mind, and spirit (Ames Reference Ames, Kasulis, Ames and Dissanayake1993).

1.3.2 The Heart-Mind

Most texts attribute consciousness and thought to the xin, a term that refers to the mind but also to the heart, located in the center of the chest (Y. Lo Reference Yuet-Keung, Chong, Tan and Ten2003). This term is especially difficult to translate, and there is no consensus whether to call it “mind” or “heart”; I use the perhaps awkward “heart-mind.” Several psychological attributes are associated with the heart-mind: will or intentions (zhi 志), knowledge or consciousness (zhi 知), desires (yu 欲), and thought or awareness (yi 意).

There are important differences between Chinese and Western understandings of heart and mind, and the cognitive linguist Ning Yu has argued that Chinese cultural conceptualizations of the heart or mind differ fundamentally from Western dualism, because the “heart” (xin) is understood as the central faculty of both affective and cognitive activity and also as the source of thought, feelings, and emotions. By contrast, modern Western philosophy asserts a dichotomy between reason and emotion in which thoughts and ideas are linked to a largely disembodied “mind” and desires and emotions with an embodied “heart” (N. Yu Reference Ning2007: 27–28, cf. Damasio Reference Damasio1994, Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999). By contrast, early Chinese philosophy understood “heart” and “mind” as one xin 心: “the core of affective and cognitive structure, conceived of as having the capacity for logical reasoning, rational understanding, moral will, intuitive imagination, and aesthetic feeling, unifying human will, desire, emotion, intuition, reason and thought” (N. Yu Reference Ning2007: 28).

In mind-centered texts especially, the heart-mind was importantly considered the ruler of the body or the senses. In a major study of the body as an organization of space in early China, Mark Edward Lewis identifies two contrasting metaphors of the body as state. In “harmonious” body-state metaphors, the mind rules the state, and the body or senses are functionaries within it. By contrast, in “agonistic” metaphors, body components – including the senses and emotions – contest the heart-mind’s rulership (Lewis Reference Lewis2006: 37–39). These two metaphors provide two very different accounts of the heart-mind. The Huangdi neijing uses harmonious metaphors; here, the heart-mind is one of five yin “viscera” (zang 藏), and psychological functions are distributed harmoniously among the five. (The other four yin organs are the kidneys, liver, lungs, and spleen.) In the more prevalent agonistic metaphors, the mind asserts domination over the five sense organs – described as ministers or officials – who try to assert independence, and reject hierarchical control. This view appears in a wide range of Warring States and Western Han texts, including the Guanzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi. A potentially agonistic version of the metaphor appears in the text Wuxing 五行 (Five Kinds of Action), excavated from tombs at Mawangdui and Guodian. Here, the heart-mind rules the body as a ruler rules a state, and the senses are its servants or slaves.

A very different picture of the xin as heart appears in medical and recipe texts, which seem to have had different audiences and objectives than philosophical texts. Most describe xin straightforwardly as the heart, an organ in the center of the chest. For example, medical texts excavated from Mawangdui, Zhangjiashan 張家山 (Jingzhou, Hubei, 196–186 BCE), and Wuwei 武威 (Gansu, 25–220 CE) focus on description of ailments associated with the heart (xin) and spirit and accounts of therapies that involve them.

These medical passages treat xin in relative isolation, in contexts that are clearly diagnostic or therapeutic. Within these contexts, the absence of cosmological analogies or other theoretical content is not surprising. As in the multi-authored Greek Hippocratic corpus, treatises range considerably in content and audience from the clearly medical to the rhetorical, philosophical, and cosmological.

1.3.3 Spirits

Several terms with complex semantic fields refer to spirit or “soul” (shén 神). In its oldest uses, shén referred to extra- (or formerly) human entities, including ancestors, divine powers, and the inhabitants of mountains, lakes, and forests. These powers needed to be identified and placated. The term also came to be used of human beings of extraordinary sagacity who become “like” spirits. The term is also used of a “spirit” quality within humans that makes them “spirit-like.” In some medical contexts, spirit is one of the fundamental and necessary constituents of a living human being.

References to external, extra-human spirits begin with the oracle bone inscriptions. They appear repeatedly in the Book of Odes and Book of Rites, and, less frequently, in the Confucian Analects. Ritual texts – the Liji especially – address the role of sacrifice and other methods to achieve the presence of extra-human spirits. In Masters texts, discussions of spirit are divided between debates about the nature of extra-human shén, how humans should relate to them, and the nature and limits of their consciousness.

Starting in the fourth century, the view arose that individuals could store, enhance, and refine spirit internally. This internal spirit was closely linked to essence (jing) and qi. Importantly, it was independent of ritual relations with external spirits. Accounts of internal spirit are prominent in the Guanzi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi, as well as in excavated texts from Mawangdui and Guodian. It is also prominent in medical texts as an important component of a person, which must be preserved and kept from harm. According to Puett, the term spirit was only applied to intra-human refined qi in the Warring States period, when the term’s meaning was redefined by ongoing debates about the nature of both spirits and spirit powers (Puett Reference Puett2002: 21–23). Advocates of new self-cultivation practices claimed that self-cultivation practices could offer spirit-like powers to humans, and thus tried to reduce the difference between spirits and humans.

Another meaning of shén, primarily in a medical context, is the animating force that maintains life in a living body. Living bodies are vivified by essence (jing), qi, and spirit, and when spirit leaves the body, it dies. For example, in the Huainanzi:

2.2.1 The Heart-Mind in Mencian Moral Psychology

Having an unmoved heart-mind is important for Mengzi because it manages the will and through it, the qi. But the unmoved heart-mind only nourishes floodlike qi if it itself is nourished with rightness and propriety (yi 義). According to Kwong-loi Shun, the heart-mind can only be unmoved if the will – which governs the qi – accords with rightness and propriety. Cultivating qi is thus necessary to support the will. The unmoved heart-mind is what makes the will conform to rightness and propriety (Shun Reference Shun1997: 75–76, 84). Mengzi’s innovation here is to link qi cultivation to moral excellence. As Alan Chan puts it, for Mengzi, “floodlike qi” is the moral vigor of a sage; qi thus shapes the heart-mind, and this fundamental insight underlies Mengzi’s approach to ethical life. Chan (like Shun) takes the will as the aim or direction of the heart-mind, and necessary to set the heart-mind in a firm direction. However, well-nourished qi is not sufficient to direct the heart-mind, since it can also be set in a wrong direction (A. Chan Reference Chan and Chan2002: 43 and 47).

Mengzi’s claim that qi fills the body was conventional by this time, but his claim that the heart-mind commands it (via the will) is more complex. It is not clear whether Mengzi thinks that qi always follows the dictates of the heart-mind because qi is controlled by the will, rather than the heart-mind. The problem is that everything we do affects our qi. Thus, the heart-mind could only command the qi if it could control its affective and cognitive movements, especially likes and dislikes. The Zuozhuan, Gaozi, and Mengzi (and also the Zhuangzi and the Guodian texts) agree on the importance of regulating the will, so that it does not succumb to the excesses of qi. What distinguishes Mengzi’s approach to self-cultivation is his focus on the importance of the heart-mind’s control of the qi, and how to achieve it.

At issue is how the heart-mind is directed. Chan suggests that Mengzi’s important innovation is the view that we can nourish qi so that the resulting “floodlike qi” becomes one with rightness and propriety. But this can only happen if the qi is consistently nourished by rightness and propriety, since our tastes and preferences affect the qi. Here Mengzi disagrees with Gaozi, who relies on learning from external sources. Mencius takes the source of rightness and propriety to be internal. According to Chan, the heart-mind has an inherent inclination toward rightness and propriety, so that feelings of commiseration and respect arise naturally (A. Chan Reference Chan and Chan2002).

This point is pursued in 2A6, where Mencius famously argues that all persons have a heart-mind that cannot endure the sufferings of others (buren ren zhi xin 不忍人之心). This “mind” is the basis of the four sprouts of virtue (3.6/ 18/ 4). He identifies four innate “heart-minds” that are inherent in human nature:

He considers these four tendencies to be the origin of four major virtues and identifies each tendency as a “mind.” The mind that feels empathy and compassion is the “sprout” (duan 端) of the virtue of humaneness (ren 仁); the mind that feels shame and dislike is the sprout of rightness and propriety (yi). The mind that feels modesty and courtesy is the sprout of ritual propriety (li 禮), and the mind that distinguishes right from wrong is the sprout of wisdom (zhi 智). These four tendencies are as inherent in our nature as having four limbs (Mengzi 3.6/18/8–9). These tendencies resist classification as either purely “affective” or “rational”; the result is a distinctive Mencian conception of practical reason (D. Wong Reference Wong1991, Shun Reference Shun1997). Mengzi thus redefines the mind as a central part of ethical life.

It is in this context that he briefly mentions the heart-mind’s relation to the senses. At 6A15 he argues that individual morality depends on which part of a person guides and controls. That is, whether one follows the greater or more petty part of oneself. Here, the senses play a role. He argues that “the offices of the eyes and ears cannot think, and can be confused by things; it is the office of the heart-mind that can think.Footnote ¹² He thus uses the relation of the heart-mind to the senses to account for ethical failure, which occurs when people follow their less important part (the senses) instead of their greater part (the heart-mind). Mengzi thus locates ethical failure in the senses but stops short of claiming the heart-mind’s rule over the senses (Shun Reference Shun1997: 175–77). The full version of that claim is put forward by Xunzi.

2.2.2 Mengzi on Spirit

Mengzi has little to say about spirit; the term shén appears only three times in the Mengzi. One is a clear reference to external spirits, and two passages discuss internal shén. At 7A.13 he remarks that an exemplary person (junzi) manifests spirit. The context is a contrast between the influence of a gentleman, a hegemon (ba 霸), and a true king (wang 王). A hegemon makes the people happy; a true king makes them deeply content, but where a gentlemen passes, transformation occurs and where he resides is spirit-like.Footnote ¹³ This influence surpasses even that of a true king.

At 7B25, spirit is at the apex of a moral hierarchy:

In this hierarchy of excellences, when sagacity reaches a level that is impossible to understand, it is called shén. These passages clearly portray spirit as an internal quality, even sagehood. Mengzi suggests the mind’s rule over the senses, but he does not elaborate, nor does he link spirit to claims for the mind’s rulership of the body. These steps are taken by Xunzi.

2.3.1 Xin And Cognition

Xunzi considers the heart-mind the source of cognition and moral judgments; the heart-mind is the faculty that can understand dao, which allows it to make correct judgments. He attributes this faculty to the qualities of emptiness (xu 虛), unity (yi 壹), and stillness (jing 靜): “How do people know dao? I say: with the heart-mind. How does the heart-mind know? I say: it is through emptiness, unity, and stillness.”Footnote ¹⁵ He goes on to explain: “People are born and have awareness; with awareness they have intention.”Footnote ¹⁶ People are born with awareness because “The heart-mind is born and has awareness. With understanding comes awareness of differences.”Footnote ¹⁷ He explains that the heart-mind has emptiness even though having intentions means that it is always storing something. It has unity even though it is aware of differences. The heart-mind is always in motion, but – if properly cultivated – it maintains stillness by not letting its movements disorder its understanding.

He uses the metaphor of a mirror created by still water to describe this stillness: “Hence, the human heart-mind may be compared to a pan of water.”Footnote ¹⁸ If you keep it upright and still, the mud sinks to the bottom, and the water is clear enough to see your face in detail. But even the slightest movement stirs the mud and muddles the water’s clarity. “The heart-mind is just like this” (xin yi ru shi yi 心亦如是矣, Xunzi 21/104/8).

Xunzi describes the heart-mind as making cognitive judgments based on the inputs of the senses and the body: it uses the inputs of the different senses to differentiate different kinds of things. Xunzi emphasizes that these distinctions should be reflected by correct names. The passage begins with the different kinds of information that are differentiated (yi 異) by the individual senses and the body overall:

Each corporeal faculty thus engages in its own proper area of discrimination and differentiates its proper sensory input. At the end of the sequence is the heart-mind, which differentiates emotions, desires, and reason.

In addition, the heart-mind seems to have a unique power to judge its own awareness (though the meaning of this line is unclear, and any reading is necessarily interpretive): “The heart-mind has the power to judge its awareness” (xin you zhi zhi 心有徵知. Xunzi 22/109/1). Once it judges its awareness, it can understand the sounds and forms made available by the ears and eyes. But it can only do so after sensory faculties encounter their objects:

Only after this process is complete is it possible to name things (Xunzi 22/109/5). Xunzi’s moral psychology is distinctive for this new emphasis on cognition, understood as the critical and reflective understanding of the heart-mind.

Xunzi also emphasizes that, although the ability to think is a natural human aptitude, this kind of reflective thinking is not natural, and is the product of deliberate effort, which he describes as “deliberate artifice” (wei 偽):

In summary, Xunzi attributes to the heart-mind a new and unique autonomy to govern, including the ability to accept what it thinks right, choose among emotions, and approve and disapprove of desires.Footnote ²¹ He thus presents the heart-mind as the faculty that rules the body, engages in cognition and reflection, and apprehends dao: “What the heart-mind deems to be right it accepts; what it deems wrong it rejects.”Footnote ²² In his view, “order and disorder reside in what the heart-mind approves of, they are not present in the desires from one’s dispositions.”Footnote ²³

This description goes well beyond the Mengzi. Xunzi defines the heart-mind in a new way by making it the active agent of self-cultivation. It is the site of all psychological phenomena, including sensation, emotion, and desires. But for the heart-mind to engage in critical thinking, it must have a volitional power that allows it to be independent of desires and emotions. The heart-mind’s autonomy is what allows it to supervise the senses, emotions, and desires; its faculty of appropriateness is what allows it to engage in deliberate effort. On this view, human morality has a tenuous connection with Heaven, but a very close connection to the activity of the heart-mind (Lee Reference Lee2005: 37–40).

2.3.2 Xunzi on Mind And Spirit

Xunzi’s third innovation is explicitly linking the heart-mind to internal spirit. Like Mengzi, he takes a pragmatic view of external spirit(s), which he understands as how the cosmos operates as it does: “We cannot see the activity, but we can see the accomplishments. This is what we call spirit.”Footnote ²⁴ But Xunzi is also explicit that humans have internal spirit. For example, he describes what he calls methods to control qi and nourish the heart-mind in order to become “spirit-like”: “In the arts of controlling qi and nourishing the heart-mind, nothing is more direct than following ritual, nothing is more important than getting a good teacher, and nothing is [more] spirit-like than single-minded liking [of these practices].”Footnote ²⁵ Elsewhere, he recommends integrity (cheng 誠) as the way to cultivate the heart-mind (yangxin 養心) and achieve spirit powers: “If, with a heart-mind of integrity, you cling to humaneness (ren) you will embody it [integrity]; if you embody it, you will be a spirit; if you are a spirit, you will be able to transform things.”Footnote ²⁶ Spirit, however, is not inherently moral; some people are “knowing but dangerous, harmful but spirit-like, skilled at deceit but clever.”Footnote ²⁷

Xunzi disagrees with Mengzi’s view of spirit as a capacity that surpasses even sagehood. As Roel Sterckx puts it, Xunzi understands shén as a spirit-like power that can transform and harmonize the world through the activity of a ruler who governs without apparent effort. His understanding of shén is thus grounded in notions of order and hierarchy, both social and cosmic (Sterckx Reference Sterckx2007: 27). The order that results from such a sage-ruler’s activity is shén: “To achieve the utmost goodness and to uphold proper order is called being spirit[- like]. To be so that none of the ten thousand things can overturn you is called being firm. One who is spirit[- like] and firm is called a sage.”Footnote ²⁸ In other words, spirit can be used to transform the people. If an enlightened lord uses power and dao to control the people, their transformation by dao is spirit-like” (ruo shén 如神, 8/31/5).

Xunzi also describes spirit illumination (shénming 神明) as a property of the heart-mind. He considers the heart-mind to be both the ruler of the body and the master of shénming:

Xunzi thus links the heart-mind’s control over the body to its mastery of spirit illumination; he thus assimilates spirit-like powers to the normative activity of the heart-mind.

Texts excavated from Guodian present views very similar to those of Xunzi, with several accounts of relations between body and mind.Footnote ²⁹ Two texts argue that the mind rules the body as a ruler rules a state. According to Five Kinds of Action (Wuxing 五行): “The ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and feet – these six are the slaves of the mind.”Footnote ³⁰ Another Guodian text, “Black Robes” (Ziyi), presents a very different metaphor: “The people take the ruler as their mind; the ruler takes the people as his frame. When the mind is fond of something the frame is at peace with it; when the ruler is fond of something the people desire it.”Footnote ³¹ Here, authority arises from mutual recognition and assent between the ruler and the ruled. These two passages present entirely different metaphors of the mind as ruler. In one, the mind governs the body in agonistic relationship of master to servant; the other presents a harmonious relationship in which a ruler’s authority comes from mutual recognition and consensus.

3.1.1 Refining Qi and Essence

The “Arts of the Mind” chapters closely link the heart-mind to jing and qi. A passage in “Arts of the Mind, 1” describes a “house” that can become the dwelling of spirit illumination (shénming): “Clean your mansion, open its gates! Once you have eliminated partiality and are without speech, spirit illumination will appear.Footnote ³⁴ An explanation of the passage, states that “mansion” refers to the mind and “gates” to the senses (specifically, the eyes and ears, Guanzi 13.1/96/16, ch. 36). The passage describes a deliberate emptying in order to allow the spontaneous entry of spirit illumination. This replacement is effected by the circulation of jing and leads to the practitioner becoming “enlightened (ming 明) and “spirit-like.” Interestingly, the passage never mentions the mind: the heart-mind is simply a dwelling place that spirit enters and inhabits if the circumstances are correct.

Descriptions of body, mind, and spirit in terms of jing and qi continue in “Arts of the Mind, 2.” It claims that “power” (de 德, a quasi-magical power or virtue, in the sense of “good at”) will only come when the physical form is correctly aligned (zheng 正). But the heart-mind can only govern if body and heart-mind are quiescent (jing 靜). “Align the form and cultivate power; then all things may be fully grasped.”Footnote ³⁵

Here the body and heart-mind work together to acquire powers associated with sages and the legendary rulers of antiquity. However, the passage turns to a potential conflict between a part of the body – the senses – and the heart-mind:

In this passage, the actions of the body (including sense perception) are distinguished from the actions of the mind, but they are not described as ontologically different. Rather they are a composite in which the mind does not rule the senses. The mind has normative functions – and a correctly ordered heart-mind affects the body – but inner power only comes when internal equilibrium prevents the senses disordering the heart-mind.

Because they are a composite, the state of the heart-mind is visible in the body. Correct alignment and quiescence are outwardly visible in firm muscles and sturdy bones. “A complete heart-mind within cannot be concealed. Outwardly it can be seen in the bearing, and it can be observed in the complexion.”Footnote ³⁶ This combination of correct alignment and quiescence strengthens muscle and bone, and also manifests in bearing (xingrong 形容) and coloration (yanse 顏色), emphasizing how pervasively body and mind affect each other. Here, self-cultivation depends not on textual study but on physical and possibly meditative practices.Footnote ³⁷

3.1.2 Spirit in “Inner Workings”

The view that shén is an intrahuman capacity is prominent in the Guanzi chapter “Inner Workings” (Neiye, ch. 49). It makes three claims about the development of spirit. First, essence (jing) is the basis of both physical life and sagacity; it is what constitutes both human internal spirit and external spirits are composed of the same stuff (essence). Second, essence can only lodge in a mind that is stable or settled (dingxin), and that cultivating the heart-mind (xiuxin 脩心) and making one’s thoughts tranquil makes it possible to attain dao. However, third, the senses must be keen and the body must be strong (Guanzi 16.1/116/2–3, ch. 49). In other words, body and mind must cooperate to refine qi into essence.

The discussion of the heart-mind in “Arts of the Mind, 2” (Section 3.1.1, above) addressed the need for a “settled heart-mind” before jing and qi could be circulated and cultivated in the body. As the self-cultivation proceeds, attention shifts to the circulation of jing in the body and the entry of spirit. The Neiye begins by identifying essence (jing) as highly refined qi that is identified with life: “It is always the case that the essence of things is what makes them be alive.”Footnote ³⁸ Jing is also linked to both external spirits and the development of internal spirit and sagacity: “When it flows between Heaven and Earth, we call it ghosts and spirits; when it is stored within a person’s chest, we call that person a sage.Footnote ³⁹

In other words, sages contain the same jing as external spirits (spirits are pure jing; humans are a mixture of jing and form), and jing is clearly identified with both spirit and sageliness. It is stored in the heart-mind, and eventually transformed into spirit. This can only happen if the heart-mind is settled:

The text then turns to spirit, understood as an internal faculty that can unify and transform. But the prerequisite for the entry of spirit illumination (shénming 神明) is the correct alignment of the body:

The passage concludes with a warning to not allow things to disorder the senses or to allow the senses to disorder the heart-mind.Footnote ⁴⁰ The text then turns to spirit, which naturally resides in the body: “There is a spirit that of itself is present in the person, sometimes going, sometimes coming.”Footnote ⁴¹ Its loss results in disorder, and its presence ensures good order. If one carefully cleans its lodging place, essence comes of itself. This preparation involves the activity of the heart-mind:

These passages offer a picture of complex interactions between body, heart-mind, essence, and spirit. The process begins with aligning the body and settling the heart-mind: correct alignment of the body is a prerequisite for both an ordered heart-mind and spirit illumination. Spirit (shén) is described as naturally present within a person (shēn) and key to internal order. (The Guanzi never warns against “losing” one’s mind, but repeatedly warns against losing spirit.)

The heart-mind is the lodging place of spirit, but also of a “mind within the mind” that seems to be linked with spirit:

This “mind within the mind” seems to operate before sensory input; in contemporary terminology, it is precognitive. It is not explicitly identified with spirit.

The end of “Inner Workings” reiterates the importance of correct interactions between the body and heart-mind in order for spirit to arrive. First it is necessary to concentrate one’s qi and align the body correctly: “Concentrate your qi like a spirit and the myriad things will all reside within.”Footnote ⁴² It also reiterates the importance of the body:

The procedures described in the chapter start with aligning the body, which in turn aligns the heart-mind. The heart-mind in turn regulates the body and senses. The result is that spirit enters spontaneously, with powers normally ascribed to external spirits. This process clearly requires three elements – body, heart-mind, and spirit – that cannot be reduced to two. As a result, it does not fit dualist descriptions of body and mind (or body and spirit).

A difficulty in this account of spirit is how it arises in a person and why it is so important to retain and not deplete it. It clearly is not part of a person at birth, as it seems to be in the Zhuangzi and clearly is in the Huainanzi (discussed in Sections 3.2 and 3.3), and requires deliberate and sustained effort. Nor is it an “external” spirit or entity that is “invited” or that moves in from outside and can come and go at will. The distinction is that, after the preparations described in “Inner Workings,” spirit arises internally, rather than coming in from the outside. At that point, this internal capacity or power becomes an important part of the person who has cultivated it, and depleting or losing spirit would cause the loss of the powers it entails.Footnote ⁴³

3.2.1 Zhuangist Critiques of the Heart-Mind

The Zhuangzi’s attitude toward the heart-mind is complex. Several passages appear to belittle its activity, but other accounts of skills and practices clearly rely on it. The Zhuangzi appears to have two objections to the heart-mind. The first is to oppose the – by now – conventional view that it should be the ruler of the body.

A passage in the second chapter of the Zhuangzi seems to ridicule the view that the heart-mind should rule the body: “There seems to be a genuine commander, except we find no sign of it.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Which, the text asks, of the hundred bones, nine orifices, and six viscera present and complete in the body should we consider as closest to us? Do we have a favorite?

The text suggests that it is there is no inherent reason for the mind to rule and the rest of the body to be its servants, and asks, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, whether all the parts of the body should rule by turns.

The second objection is that the heart-mind actually obscures our ability to apprehend dao. In Chapter 4, a very Zhuangist Confucius instructs his student Yan Hui on a process of “fasting the heart-mind” (zhai xin 齋心):

The phrase “the heart-mind stops with the tallies” indicates that what the mind grasps is the signs or symbols – the tallies – that it uses, but these tallies may not correspond well to actual circumstances. So the recommendation is to “listen,” not with the heart-mind but with our actual constituent qi. Unlike the mind, it is “empty,” open, and fluid (Fraser Reference Fraser2024: 255).

David B. Wong usefully explains this difference between attending the mind and attending the qi in terms of the difference between “top-down” and “bottom-up” thinking. The mind works by selecting and by making distinctions, both in empirical judgments that something is “so” or “not-so” (shifei 是非) but also that something is “right” or “wrong” (also shifei). Selection is necessary to get through the day, but it results in a partial and mediated access to the world. Contemporary theories of perception understand the mind to work both top-down and bottom-up. Perception is an interaction of bottom-up processes of receiving sensory input and top-down mental processes of both interpreting it and predicting future sensory inputs based on past assumptions and experience. But this process deprives us of much of our sensory input. The problem is that the perceptions and predictions of a “complete heart-mind” (cheng xin 成心) are insufficient to apprehend the varieties and divigations of dao. The text’s point is that the more we attend – “listen” – to bottom-up sensation from the world, and the less we follow the top-down dictates of the mind, the better we will truly understand things. Seen in this way, “listening with the qi” suggests that it is possible to still the over-eager, top-down heart-mind and enhance the bottom-up processing of sensory information (probably through meditative practices). This approach to “listening with the qi” suggests the importance of the body not only in physical interaction with the world but in “thinking” (Wong Reference Wong2024: 5–6).

Nonetheless, the heart-mind seems to be essential to many attitudes or practices the Zhuangzi praises or recommends. While the Zhuangist authors seem quite critical of the completed heart-mind, other passages refer more positively to a xin that is not fixed, and some of the skill masters (for example, the wheelwright Lun Bian) use their heart-minds in ways the Zhuangist authors endorse. These include the mastery of skill (discussed in Section 3.2.3) and the complex analytic activity that characterizes the arguments of several chapters, Chapter 2 especially.

3.2.2 Concentrating Spirit and the Body

In contrast to its ambivalent or critical view of the heart-mind, the Zhuangzi seems to view spirit in entirely positive terms. (The Zhuangist authors do not share the Xunzi‘s warning that some people are “knowing but dangerous, harmful but spirit-like,” discussed in Section 2.3.2.) The Zhuangist focuses on spirit in two contexts. One is accounts of the importance of “concentrating shén” and of spirit “dwelling within.” The other is the use of spirit in the exercise of certain kinds of skill.

The Zhuangzi repeatedly presents the attitudes and behavior of a “spirit person” (shénren 神人) as different from – and superior to – the judgments and responses of the heart-mind. In Chapter 1 a “spirit person” makes grain ripen and protects animals from plagues by “concentrating shén” (shén ning 神凝, 1/2/16). Chapter 2 praises “realized persons” as “spirit-like”(zhi ren shén yi 至人神矣, Zhuangzi 2/6/17).

Other passages refer to spirit “inhabiting” the body in terms reminiscent of “Inner Workings.” After its description of fasting the heart-mind (discussed in Section 3.2.1), Chapter 4 describes the entry of spirit as a consequence of pushing out the knowledge of the heart-mind:

Several passages in Chapter 11 describe self-cultivation practices that nourish spirit by a – perhaps counter-intuitive – combination of aligning the body by withdrawing from sensation: “Don’t look, don’t listen; Enfold your spirit in stillness; The body will correct itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It continues:

The passage concludes with the advice to “carefully guard your embodied person” (shen shou nü shēn 慎守女身 11/27/27). Another passage in the same chapter describes similar practices as “nourishing the heart-mind” (xin yang 心養):

These passages privilege spirit over the heart-mind, but also assert a strong relation to the body. On the one hand, they repeatedly urge putting the body or senses at a distance, but they also describe the body aligning itself correctly as a result.

3.2.3 Spirit and Skill

Chapter 3 and several passages in the Outer Chapters links spirit to the exercise of skill in depictions of hyper-aware individuals who excel at the performance of a craft or skill. In Chapter 3 the skilled butcher Pao Ding 庖丁 explains that he relies on spirit, rather than technical expertise in carving oxen:

Pao Ding emphasizes that what he values is dao, not simple skill. As the scene concludes, the Lord Wenhui (whom he has been instructing) exclaims that Pao Ding’s words have taught him how to nurture life (yang sheng 養生, Zhuangzi 3/8/11).

Chapter 19 describes several individuals of paramount skill, whose expertise requires a kind of concentrating that distances sensory input and focuses attention. A hunchback cicada catcher describes how he “empties his person” (xu shēn 處身) like a tree stump and holds out his arms like the branches of a withered tree; “for all the vastness of the world and the multitude of the myriad things, I am only aware of the cicada wings.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although this is not a description of fasting the heart-mind, the cicada catcher uses the same technique for a different purpose. Similarly, when asked about his skill, the woodworker Zi Qing 梓慶 describes his preparations for making a bell stand as “fasting to still the heart-mind” (zhai yi jing xin 齊以靜心): “I forget that I have four limbs and a body.”Footnote ⁴⁷ He describes how “the skill concentrates” (qi qiao zhuan 其巧專) and outside distractions fade away (wai gu xiao 外骨消); only then does he go to the mountain forest to observe the inherent nature [of the trees]. “Only if there is [wood of] such perfect form that I completely see the bell stand in it, only then do I put my hand to it.”Footnote ⁴⁸ These passages do not use the term spirit, but nonetheless, these accounts all seem to describe a process of cultivating internal spirit by fasting or minimizing the influence of both the body and the heart-mind.

The last chapter of the Zhuangzi describes spirit as able to influence things outside the body. It describes realized individuals of antiquity as “complementing spirit illumination, nurturing the myriad things, harmonizing with all under heaven, and benefiting the hundred clans.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Despite apparent similarities in their attitudes toward spirit, the Zhuangzi and Guanzi have very different views of the heart-mind. They agree on the need to stabilize (ding 定) it. However, “Inner Workings” associates dao with a “mind within the mind,” located in the heart-mind. And elsewhere, the Guanzi describes internal spirit – lodged within the heart-mind – as the ruler of the senses, a view the Zhuangzi pointedly rejects. In the Zhuangzi by contrast, spirit is concentrated through the fasting of the heart-mind.

In summary, the Zhuangzi seems to consistently recommend concentrating and stabilizing spirit, both in “spirit persons” and also in exemplary individuals of skill.Footnote ⁵⁰ This account of realized spirit goes well beyond any kind of purely intellectual mastery.

3.3.1 Qi, Essence, and Spirit

Like “Inner Workings,” “Originating in Dao” (Yuandao 道原, Chapter 1) describes the physical body, qi, and spirit as the formative elements of a human being. Quoting Daodejing 41, it stresses that they all must function properly:

The passage continues that each can be destroyed or lost: the form if it inhabits an unsafe place, the qi if more is used than replenished, and spirit if it acts in a manner it ought not (Huainanzi 1/9/16–18). But for this correct alignment to take place, spirit and the body must be interdependent: spirit must control the form, and the form must provide a lodging place for spirit: “Thus, if one takes spirit as the master, the form will follow and will benefit. If one takes the form as controlling, spirit will follow and be harmed.”Footnote ⁵³ Otherwise, essence and spirit become depleted over time. Eventually, “the form closes its openings and spirit has nowhere to enter.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Here, spirit controls the body but, unlike texts that assert the rulership of the heart-mind – which is not mentioned in this chapter – spirit’s control is effortless and not antagonistic: “Therefore sages nourish their spirits, harmonize and soften their qi, and pacify their forms.”Footnote ⁵⁵

This and other chapters of the Huainanzi offer the now familiar claims that humans and spirits have the same composition and humans can become spirit-like by practicing self-cultivation techniques.

“Essence and Spirit” (Jingshen 精柛, Chapter 7) describes the origin and nature of human beings composed of refined qi:

Essence and spirit are necessary to survival, but tend to dissipate. The “Essence and Spirit” chapter argues that self-cultivation practices can not only retain them in the body, but that essence and spirit (jingshén) are the basis of sagehood.

It begins with the origins of spirit and the body during the development of the human embryo. During gestation, yin and yang qi gradually acquire differentiated physical form, and a person emerges, composed of both physical form (received from Earth) and spirit (received from Heaven):

The process of ontogeny culminates in the formation of the five yin viscera: the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and spleen: “In the tenth month, birth occurs. In this way, the form and frame are thus complete, and the five zang [yin] viscera take form.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The Huainanzi is explicit about the analogies between the human microcosm and a cosmic macrocosm. The head is round like Heaven, the feet square like earth. The four limbs, five yin viscera, nine orifices, and 366 joints of the human body correspond to Heaven’s four seasons, five phases, nine regions, and 366 days. Human taking, giving, happiness, and anger correspond to Heaven’s wind, rain, cold, and heat:

The concern of the chapter is how to maintain the alignment of the human body relative to the cosmos. This is done through the activity of the heart-mind, but ultimately through the activity of spirit. If the heart-mind can control the five yin viscera, attention is not distracted and the movement of qi does not go awry. As a result, “Essence and Spirit will be abundant and qi will not dissipate.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The individual functions in accordance with underlying patterns (li 理) gains impartial equanimity (jun 均) and develops penetrating awareness (tong 通):

The chapter then turns to “Perfected Persons” who “embody their foundation and embrace their spirit in order to wander in the confines of Heaven and Earth.”Footnote ⁵⁸ But they gain spirit by distancing themselves from both their bodies and their heart-minds: “Their bodies are like withered wood; their heart-minds are like dead ashes. They forget their viscera and lose their bodies.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Like the Zhuangzi’s spirit person, their spirits roam free: “They possess essence but do not give it orders; they possess spirit but do not make it move.”Footnote ⁶⁰

3.3.2 The Heart-Mind

What is the role of the heart-mind in these processes? In the description of human ontogeny, it is the heart-mind that forms a triad with Heaven and Earth. But the person described here is literally a newborn child, not a realized individual.

As in the Guanzi, the heart-mind is essential to the process of self-cultivation because its activity is necessary for the entry of spirit. It is the heart-mind that controls the five yin viscera, ensures the correct movement and preservation of qi, and ensures that essence and spirit are abundant. So the heart-mind is essential to the process but is a means, not an end. As “Essence and Spirit” puts it: “The heart-mind is the ruler of the form; spirit is the treasure of the heart-mind.” Part of the heart-mind’s function is to guard against depletion of both the body and of essence and spirit. Just as the body can become exhausted by excess labor, if essence and spirit are used unceasingly, they too run out.Footnote ⁶¹

The chapter goes on to contrast practitioners of what elsewhere have been called “guiding and pulling” exercises with those who cultivate the heart-mind. However, the real contrast is with those who cultivate spirit: “they make their spirit overflow and do no lose its fullness”; that is, they do not permit it to dissipate.Footnote ⁶²

In summary, the Huainanzi combines the now familiar claim that correct self-cultivation practices can give humans the powers of spirits with an account of humans as microcosms of the cosmos. As a result, self-cultivation methods can link a realized person with the patterns of the universe. This connection is accomplished through the correct cultivation and alignment of body and spirit through the activity of the heart-mind. But the more spirit-like one becomes, the less the body and heart-mind come to matter.

4.2.1 Spirit as the Foundation of Life

Lingshu 8 immediately asserts the importance of shén: “For all methods of needling, it is first necessary to consider shén as the foundation.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The text continues that the five zang viscera store six constituents of the body, but excess or indulgence causes them to leave the viscera. The six components are: blood (xue 血), the vessels (mai 脈), camp qi (yingqi 營氣), guard qi (weiqi 衛氣), essence (jing), and spirit (shén).Footnote ⁷⁸

The text identifies spirit with the emergence of life. By contrast, the heart-mind simply “manages things”: “Therefore the origin of life is called essence; the clash of two [kinds of] essence is called shén. What comes and goes following spirit is called hun; what enters and leaves along with essence is called po.Footnote ⁷⁹ What is responsible for things is called the xin.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The central role of spirit in maintaining life also appears in discussions of natural lifespan. Suwen 1 describes the long-lived sages of highest antiquity as “able to keep form and spirit together and to exhaust their years allotted by heaven.”Footnote ⁸¹ It also describes sages who did not exhaust themselves with either physical labor or reflection and worry: “their form and frame did not deteriorate and their essence and spirit did not dissipate.”Footnote ⁸²

“The Years Allotted by Heaven” (Tiannian 天年, Lingshu 54) explicitly associates shén with an allotted life span, elsewhere described as “mandate” or destiny (ming 命). It describes the storage of shén in the heart as part of normal ontogeny, beginning with the developing embryo: “The [qi of one’s] mother constitutes the basis; that of the father serves as shield. Loss of spirit results in death; those who keep spirit survive.”Footnote ⁸³ It adds that a person is only complete when: blood and qi are in harmony, camp and guard qi penetrate the body, the five yin viscera (including the heart) are complete, and spirit qi has settled in the heart.Footnote ⁸⁴ This passage makes clear that spirit is stored in the heart as spirit qi, and the completion of that process is essential for the formation of a person. Life span can be limited by depletion of qi associated with the viscera over the course of a normal lifetime. At the age of sixty, heart qi starts to weaken; by eighty, lung qi weakens and the po soul departs. By one hundred, “all five zang are depleted, spirit qi entirely left” and death follows.Footnote ⁸⁵

Several Suwen passages discuss the importance of correct seasonal activities for preserving spirit qi, such as “collecting spirit qi” in autumn (SW 2.45, Unschuld and Tessenow Reference Unschuld and Tessenow2011: 1: 48–49); and preserving it in winter (SW 3.82, Unschuld and Tessenow Reference Unschuld and Tessenow2011: 1: 78). The Suwen also gives technical instructions for needling to preserve and balance spirit qi (SW 27.625 and 62.1214, Unschuld and Tessenow Reference Unschuld and Tessenow2011: 1:452, and 2: 105–106).

4.2.2 Storage of Psychological Faculties

Several accounts of spirit indicate that it is stored in and associated with the heart. Some occur in fivefold correlations between the five yin viscera and five psychological faculties stored in them. Both the Suwen and Lingshu describe the yin viscera as storing five psychological faculties. According to the Suwen: “The heart stores spirit; the lungs store po; the liver stores hun; the spleen stores thought; the kidneys store will.”Footnote ⁸⁶ An almost identical passage occurs in the Lingshu; the only difference is that the kidneys store essence and will.Footnote ⁸⁷ A different correlation occurs in Suwen 62, which focuses on the completion of the physical form: Here, heart stores spirit, the lungs store qi (instead of po), the liver stores blood (instead of hun), the spleen stores flesh (instead of thought), and the kidneys store will: “Will and thought penetrate [everything], in the interior they link up with bones and marrow, thereby completing the form of the person and the five zang viscera.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This passage undermines claims for a radical distinction between the physical body and a separate mind or consciousness because there is no clear distinction between “containers” (the yin viscera) and their contents: both psychological attributes (spirit, will) and “physical” attributes (qi, blood, flesh). SW 18 also describes the heart as storing qi (SW 18.407, Unschuld and Tessenow Reference Unschuld and Tessenow2011: 1:305).

These two different accounts are reconciled in a passage in Lingshu 8, which describes a system of storage of both psychophysical and material aspects of a person in the five yin viscera. Each yin organ stores (zang 藏) a material component which “hosts” (she 舍) a psychological capacity. In addition deficiency or excess of the qi associated with each organ generates a state of strong emotion, in the following pattern:

The full correlations are (LS 8.199–201, Unschuld Reference Unschuld2016: 152–153):

Table 0.1

Table 0.1Long description

The table includes the substances stored in liver, spleen, heart, lungs, and kidneys, psychological faculties linked to them, and the emotional effects of depletion or excess of the qi associated with each of them.

The context appears to be diagnostic: the manifestations associated with each type of qi excess or deficiency can be used to diagnose the cause of the imbalance.

4.2.3 Protecting Spirit from Emotional Excess

The association of spirit with survival implies the need for therapeutic practices to protect it. Several passages focus on the emotions as a source of potential harm to spirit and therapeutic techniques for protecting and enhancing spirit.

Lingshu 8 explains in detail how emotional excess can injure spirit. It specifically correlates five key emotions with the five yin viscera and the five psychological capacities they govern. Fear (chu 怵), excess caution (ti 惕), excess reflection (si 思), and worry (lü 慮) harm spirit; when spirit is harmed, fear flows in excess and does not stop. Grief and sorrow (bei’ai 悲哀) exhaust the qi in the center and can cause death. Joy and pleasure (xi le 喜樂) cause spirit to scatter and disperse, so it cannot be stored. Worry and sadness (chou you 愁憂) cause closure and blockage of the qi, so it cannot move. Raging anger (sheng nu 盛怒) causes confusion and cannot be cured or regulated. Fear and dread (kong ju 恐懼) make spirit disseminate, so it cannot conserved (LS 8.195–96, Unschuld Reference Unschuld2016: 149). As a result, those who understand how to nurture life (yang sheng 養生) understand how to regulate and harmonize their emotions (LS 8.194, Unschuld Reference Unschuld2016: 149). As these passages make clear, all emotional excess is harmful, but some particularly affect the heart or spirit. When fear injures spirit, people lose their sense of self (LS 8.196–198, Unschuld Reference Unschuld2016: 150).

4.2.4 Xin as Ruler of the Visceral Systems

The Huangdi neijing consistently describes spirit as being stored in the heart, sometimes along with statements that the heart is the ruler of the other viscera. For example, Suwen 8 makes an analogy between the five yin viscera and five key offices of government. Here the heart is the ruler of eleven other officials in both the yin and yang viscera: (1) lungs (minister and mentor), (2) liver (general), (3) gall bladder (rectifier), (4) dan zhong (minister and envoy), (5) spleen and (6) stomach (grain storage), (7) large and (8) small intestines (transmitter and recipient), (9) kidneys (operator with force), (10) triple burner (opener of channels), (11) urinary bladder (regional rectifier).Footnote ⁸⁹ These twelve officials (including the heart) work together to maintain the life of the body, which dies if they do not perform correctly.

Claims that the heart-mind is the ruler of the body are part of dominant narrative in Warring States and Han philosophical texts such as Guanzi, Mengzi, Xunzi, and other texts (discussed in Section 2).Footnote ⁹⁰ Similar claims in the Huangdi neijing stand in strong contrast to early second-century (BCE) medical texts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan. The Huangdi neijing reflects the importance of a new model of corporeal/political relations, including the need for harmony between ruler and officials (Lewis Reference Lewis2006: 37; Unschuld Reference Unschuld1985: 79–83).

However, some of the Huangdi neijing descriptions of the heart as ruler of the other viscera seem to be in the service of something else. For example, Lingshu 36 describes the heart as ruler over both the other viscera, and also over the senses:

Here the context is an explanation of the movement of fluids in the body. Liquids from the viscera normally pour into the eyes, and when the heart feels grief, they flow as tears. The point of the passage is to explain tears, not to assert the rulership of the heart. Another passage makes clear that the importance of the heart is its domicile for spirit:

Here, the heart is important, not for itself but as the site of spirit, which is essential for survival.

In summary, several points are noteworthy about the heart and spirit in the Huangdi neijing. First, the heart is closely associated with spirit and its essential role in maintaining the life of the body. Second, the Huangdi neijing identifies five distinct psychological capacities associated with the heart. In these passages, there is no separation between mind and body: the material organ (e.g., the liver) cannot be detached from the hun stored in it. Third, these texts are striking for the extent to which they describe what in contemporary terms might be called distributed cognition by both decentralizing and “corporealizing” consciousness, effectively removing psychological control from the heart and distributing it among the viscera.

4.2.5 “Corporealizing” Consciousness

The Huangdi neijing repeatedly links spirit to essence (jing) and qi in the constitution of a person. Several passages combine shén with clearly material aspects of the body in their accounts of yin and yang, shén, jing, and qi. Lingshu 5 describes proper storage of spirit in the body as the union of corporeal form and qi:

Here, storage of shén occurs through the union of the clearly corporeal xing and qi. There is no contrast between a corporeal body and a noncorporeal spirit.

Lingshu 18 also describes shén as a component of the body: “Camp and guard [qi] are essence qi. Blood is spirit qi. Hence blood and qi may have different names, but they are the same in kind.”Footnote ⁹¹ The context is an explanation about why blood and qi have different names but are “the same in kind” (tong lei 同類). Camp and guard qi are defined as essence qi and blood as spirit qi. Both are identified with the physical body.

Lingshu 47, “Taking the Zang Viscera as the Foundation” (Ben zang 本藏) also describes the zang viscera as storing psychological faculties: “The five zang viscera are what stores essence, spirit, blood, qi, hun and po.” Will and thought (zhi yi 志意) regulate essence, spirit, hun, and po and harmonize joy and rage. As a result, essence and spirit are focused, hun and po do not dissipate, regret and rage do not emerge, and the five zang viscera are protected from external invasive qi.Footnote ⁹² In this account, will and thought, psychological faculties associated with the kidneys and spleen, regulate the other psychological faculties stored in other viscera.

Two Suwen passages suggest some kind of spirit-body dualism in a contrast between a clearly material body and a possibly immaterial spirit. They mention four corporeal (“form”) viscera (xing zang 形藏) and five “spirit viscera” (shén zang 神藏), identified with the five yin viscera: heart, lungs, spleen, liver, and kidneys: “Thus, the corporeal zang viscera are four, the spirit zang viscera are five. Together this makes nine zang viscera to correspond to them.”Footnote ⁹³ A second passage mentions that there are five spirit viscera (shén zang 神藏) and four “corporeal viscera” (xing zang 形藏).Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet other than these two passing references, neither the Suwen nor the Lingshu discuss “corporeal” or “spirit” viscera, nor do they appear in two other early sources, the Nanjing or Jiayi jing. By contrast, they appear repeatedly in Tang-dynasty sources.Footnote ⁹⁵ In other words, there may well be an argument for spirit-body dualism in later medical sources, but not in the Huangdi neijing.

In summary, in the Huangdi neijing, the key role of the heart (xin) is its role as the storehouse or dwelling of spirit (shén). As such, it is one of five yin or zang viscera that store five psychological faculties liked to preserving health, and longevity, but shén is unique insofar as it is necessary for life itself. Because it is vulnerable to the injurious effects of emotions, protecting the heart and spirit from harmful emotions is essential to life, health, and longevity. In the context of the therapeutic perspective of medical texts, spirit is the basis of life and health, rather than—associated with xin—the locus of cognition and moral judgment, as in many philosophical texts. Thus the Huangdi neijing tradition reflects what may be fundamental differences of genre in treatments of the relation between shén and xin in medical, as distinct from philosophical literature. Thus shén is of central importance in both genres, but for different reasons.

What then do we make of accounts of xin as ruler of the body or the senses in medical texts? They tend to occur in accounts of the heart as the lodging place of spirit, including in fivefold correlations between viscera and psychological faculties.