Xin: Heart or Mind? Organ or Function?
Dualism cuts the heart in two.
The New Mindscape #6–4.
Zhang Huang (1527–1608)
© The University of Chicago Library, East Asian Collection
The Chinese Operating System of the body is a type of ontology that the anthropologist Philippe Descola has called “analogical”, and which he contrasts to the materialist ontology (which he calls “naturalist”). In the dualistic materialist ontology, humans and non-humans share material exteriority, but only humans have interiority. In the analogical ontology, there is no strong distinction between exteriority and interiority. All beings are combinations of different elements, forces, and energies in circulation. Different orders of reality all have analogical structures — that is to say, they are considered to be structurally similar, by analogy to a basic cosmological structure [1].
For example, in Chinese cosmology, the cosmos is made up of the interactions between the forces of yin and yang and of the Five Phases 五行. These forces are conceived of as analogical to the cardinal points, the seasons, the times of day, the copulation of male and female, etc. They operate at all levels, from the whole universe to the individual body. The body is a microcosm of the entire cosmos.[2]
Spiritual and religious practice, within such a system, consists in expanding one’s mindscape to the entire body, and from the body to the entire universe, seeking for the underlying unity that transcends the division between interiority and exteriority, and between all the diverse elements and forces of body and the cosmos.
In this ontology, everything is a combination of different types of energies. Force and energy are circulating all the time. Everything is changing all the time. Everything is analogical to each other. The body is a microcosm of the entire universe; it is “analogical” to the cosmos in the sense that in the body, you can find the same structure and energies as the entire cosmos. Thus, by going into the body, in a sense, we can go into the entire cosmos. While everything appears to be different in the world, underlying all these things in the world, there is one invisible reality — Dao.
There are some basic concepts in the Chinese analogical understanding of the universe. Crucially, it makes no radical distinction between the mind and the body. The naturalist ontology posits that the mind and the body are completely separate, whereas Chinese thinking postulates otherwise.
For example, in the Chinese language, xin 心is a word that is translated in English as both “heart” and “mind”. This term can barely be translated into English. The same word translated into English leads to completely different concepts. Following the naturalist ontology, in English, the “heart” is a physical organ, whilst the “mind” is where you process abstract ideas. Or, the “heart” is the seat of the emotions, whilst the “mind” is the seat of rational thinking. The naturalist ontology considers mind and body to be completely distinct and often opposed things. Another dualism considers rationality (the mind) and emotions (the heart) to be completely opposite. How is it possible to use to same word to denote two opposite things? But in traditional Chinese thinking, the same word is used, because the distinction between these concepts, while not completely absent, is weaker. This is the non-dualistic property of xin.[3]
[1] Philippe Descola, Modes of being and forms of predication. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2014 4:1, 271–280
[3] Joseph Needham and Colin Ronan, Chinese Cosmology. In Hetherington, N.S. (Ed.). (1993). Cosmology: Historical, Literary,Philosophical, Religous and Scientific Perspectives (1st ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003418047, chap. 2.
[3] Lu, Cailing. “Investigating Knowledge and Use Of Technical Vocabulary In Traditional Chinese Medicine”, https://doi.org/10.26686/wgtn.17131862;
Liu, James H., 2014. “What Confucian Philosophy Means For Chinese and Asian Psychology Today: Indigenous Roots For A Psychology Of Social Change”, Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology(8), 2:35–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/prp.2014.10;
Kim, Richard B., 2016. “Early Confucianism and Contemporary Moral Psychology”, Philosophy Compass(11), 9:473–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12341
Zhou, Shifang and Xiangyong Jiang, 2020. “A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Heart Metaphor In Chinese and English”, International Journal of Language &Amp; Linguistics(7), 3. https://doi.org/10.30845/ijll.v7n3p9;
Slingerland, Edward and Maciej Chudek, 2011. “The Prevalence Of Mind-body Dualism In Early China”, Cognitive Science(35), 5:997–1007. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01186.x
Zhou, Pin, Hugo D. Critchley, Yoko Nagai, and Chao Wang, 2022. “Divergent Conceptualization Of Embodied Emotions In English and Chinese Languages”,. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202205.0359.v1
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
