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

370 YING-SHIH YUproceed to trace the evolution of the Chinese concept of soul fromantiquity to the Han times.Before the dualistic conception of hun and p 'o began to gain currencyin the middle of the sixth century B.C., p 'o alone seems to havebeen used to denote the human soul. The character p'o M (or itsvariant pa i) means "white," "bright," or "bright light," derivingoriginally from the growing light of the new moon. The earliestform of the character has recently been found on a Chou oraclebone inscription datable to the eleventh century B.C. It is used in theterm chi-p 'o a which, according to Wang Kuo-wei, stood for theperiod from the eighth or ninth to the fourteenth or fifteenth of thelunar month. The term chi-ssu-p'o RERTh may also be found onanother piece of oracle bone indicating the period from the twentythirdor twenty-fourth to the end of the month.'4 These two termswere later used repeatedly in early Chou historical documents aswell as bronze inscriptions in the standard forms of chi-sheng pa a3td and chi-ssu pa which may be translated, respectively, as "after thebirth of the crescent" and "after the death of the crescent.''15Since the ancient Chinese took the changing phases of the moonas periodic birth and death of its p'o, its "white light" or soul, byanalogy they eventually came to associate, by the early sixth centuryB.C. if not earlier, the life or death of a man with the presenceor absence of his p'o."6 Two examples from the Tso chuan IE, the14See "Shensi Ch'i-shan Feng-ch'u ts'un fa-hsien Chou ch'u chia-ku wen," RNOOAXlt8;t8!,101t1 X