"O Soul, Come Back!" A Study in The Changing Conceptions of The ...

376 YING-SHIH YUIn order to clarify the term hun-ch 'i, a word may be said about thecomplex and difficult concept of ch 'i as the " source of life. " The concepthas a broad as well as a narrow meaning. In its broad sense,ch 'i is a primal and undifferentiated life force which permeates theentire cosmos. However, when the ch'i becomes differentiated andindividuated to form all the things in the universe, it then varies inpurity. Thus, as succinctly summed up by D. C. Lau, "the grosserch 'i, being heavy, settled to become the earth, while the refined ch 'i,being light, rose to become the sky. Man, being half-way betweenthe two is a harmonious mixture of the two kinds of ch /i. X 128 It is inthis broad sense that a Taoist philosophical treatise of the secondcentury B.C. says that the hun is made up of the refined, heavenlych 'i and the p'o the grosser, earthly ch 'i.29 But in its narrow sense,the ch'i refers specifically to the heavenly ch'i. It is in this narrowsense that the hun-ch 'i or the breath-soul is distinguished from the hsing-p'o or bodily soul.We have seen that it was a general belief in Han China that thehun owes its existence to the refined ch 'i from heaven while the p 'o,being always associated with the body, is composed of the coarse ch 'ifrom earth. But how are the two souls, hun and p'o, distinguishedfrom each other in terms of specific functions? According to ChengHsiian (127-200), ch'i or hun-soul forms the basis of a man's spiritand intelligence whereas the function of the p 'o soul is specifically definedas "hearing distinctly and seeing clearly."30 In other words,the hun governs man's spirit (shen t including hsin, mind or heart)28D. C. Lau, "Introduction" to his translation of Mencius (Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks, 1970), p. 24.29Liu Wen-tien WIJ[3ZC, Huai-nan hung-lieh chi-chieh '(KHCP), 9.2a.30 Li-chi chu-su 47.14a-15a. In this connection I wish to call the reader's attention to Mencius'famous distinction between the ta-t 'i )t. and hsiao-t 'i dMIR ("The parts of greater importanceand the parts of smaller importance of the person of a man.") According to him(Mencius, 6A/14, D. C. Lau's translation), the hsiao-t'i consists of "the organs of hearing andsight" which "are unable to think and can be misled by external things" whereas the ta-t 'i isidentified as "the organ of the mind or heart" whose function it is "to think." Menciusspecifically singles out this thinking organ of the mind or heart as the gift that man alonereceives from Heaven. Therefore, he defines "a great man" as one who is guided by the interestsof his ta-t 'i (i.e., the thinking mind) and "a small man" as one who is guided by the interestsof his hsiao-t 'i (i.e. the organs of hearing and sight). Moreover, Mencius further holdsthat there is a "flood-like ch/i " ("hao-jan chih ch/'i" _t A) in the cosmos that is, in thehighest degree, vast and unyielding. It is this ch'i that provides the mind or heart with thevery source of moral power. (Mencius, 2A/2) Clearly, then, Mencius must have shared thecosmological view current in the fourth century B.C. that man's body consists of the grosser,