Dr. Lance H. Gracy

In Encounters of Mind: Luminosity and Personhood in Indian and Chinese Thought, Douglas Berger begins his study of various South and East Asian traditions by saying: “[I]t must be borne in mind that we are dealing with a broad array of assumptions about what constitutes human beings” (13). The various traditions Berger discusses differ in more than a few respects from each other, and as he points out, these traditions are not as clearly defined as might be presumed but are rather “overlapping ideas and arguments in dynamically developing traditions of thought” (13). The main conceptual overlap between these traditions is luminosity, luminescence, or the like, which Berger regards as the “necessary causal condition for not only the possibility of enlightenment, but for awareness in general” (113). Berger even goes so far as to say that “Without some such notion of luminosity, according to all these traditions, human experience and human personhood could not hope to be adequately explained or fully realized” (203). Thus, luminosity is a necessary feature for any attempt to understand the human person. There are two main metaphysical roles for the notion of “luminosity” according to Berger:

(a) It “provides the causal basis of awareness that arises in the multifarious physical bodies of creatures”; and
(b) It “makes of awareness a unitary phenomenon that can inhabit and integrate all of the body’s experiences and activities in order to optimize its potential powers and virtues in the sagely or enlightened person.” (202)

Of course, each of the South and East Asian traditions varies with respect to where or how “the luminous” is seated—or else, each differs with respect to what the proper organismal focus of luminosity is or should be. For example, for Ruists (Confucians), the focus of luminosity pertained to the original heart-mind; for neo-Ruists (neo-Confucians), it was ch’eng; in Buddhism, it was mind (ming xin), abode cognition, or “untainted cognition” (qing jing xin) (93-112); in Daoist thought, it was genuineness; and in Brāhmiṇical darśana-s, it was awareness or experience. In short, Berger is speaking respectively of (i) the heart-mind, (ii) spirit, (iii) soul, and (iv) body.

In early Chinese thought, the human body was thought to be enlivened by wind (feng) and vital vapor (qi) (14). The heart (xin) is one among many natural organs, but its presumed moral preeminence entered consideration as “the central mark of our humanity” (15). The heart “approves or disapproves” (shi fei) of various desires of the other organs and “tallies” (fu) the sensations of other organs (15). “Tallying” was a way for parties to form contracts and deeds in ancient China and signified trust, agreement, selection, classification, and a form of empowerment by which people were able to “tell correct from incorrect and use things for beneficial social ends” (29). The body was considered as a phenomenon of consciousness, having four characteristics:

• gong or ritualized aspect of body, which is adorned for and performs deeds of ceremony;

• shen or the body that accounts for both socially relational and individually cultivated personhood;

• xing or the form of the body, with its visible features, shape, and edges; and

• ti or the “cosubstantial” body as an organic part of the larger natural, ancestral, and social bodies to which one belongs. (16)

The atriums of the heart-mind, with its characteristics of gong, shen, xing and ti, comprise a specifically conscious body, which is “kept alive by vital powers of various sorts and are nourished by the environment as well as one’s conduct” (17). In classical Confucian fashion, music was identified as one of the chief expressions or animating principles of vital breath (qi) and has “palpable effects” on human psychology and behavior (17). When music expressed the “correct sound” of qi, it causes a spirit of obedience (shun qi) in man (18). Like the forming of harmony through music, qi is intentionally cultivated and produced by “accumulated righteousness,” not by a “seizure of righteousness” (19). An accumulation of disorder in one’s heart-mind, whether through having neglected one’s qi or by trying to force that which rectifies one’s qi, can cause “weeds” in the heart-mind to sprout, choking a person’s character, a person’s “original heart-mind.” According to Ames and Rosemont, early Chinese thought (i.e., Ruist/Confucian) grasped personhood as “an achievement of moral development and not a status conferred by mere virtue of one’s bodily form” (41). Order and righteousness belong to a person’s qing (condition, disposition) and nature, and so a love for goodness too, but this must be cultivated (21).

However, whether the heart-mind together with the ritualized, social aspects of the body suffices for a complete metaphysical anthropology is questionable and we must go further. In doing so, it is appropriate to discuss the Daoist view of dethroning the heart by spirit. Heart-mind and spirit comprise a conceptual template for understanding the unique dimensions of human personhood; but in the Daoist view, it was not “the consistency of words and deeds, nor the ordinary reliability of the body and its senses, nor even the orientational and moral capacities of the heart that could lead one to consummate personhood” (16). Instead, it was spirit (shen). Shen is likened to a nourishing power that makes the superior ruler “pure and tranquil” (qing jing) (52). The spirit dethroning the heart-mind is analogous to musical improvisation: The natural music of da he (or the wind of harmony of qi) is likened to human music, such that if heart-mind is that by which one is usually in a state of harmony (as if by a conventionally approved hymn that brings contentment), then spirit is that which allows the heart-mind to return to a state of harmony when it becomes too fixated on a particular way of doing things (as if by an improvisation of such a hymn, such that spirit introduces a “new sound”). Xunwu Chen likens Zhuangzi’s shen to flexibility and existential competence in his analysis of fate and contingency:

While humans are condemned to live in contingency, they are condemned to face challenges of contingency. It is more important for a person to adjust himself or herself to contingent and changing
contexts and environments. This is called flexibility and creative adjustment…Zhuangzi thus advised us to…[understand flexibility and creative adjustment].

Xunwu Chen, A Reading of a Dream of Red Mansions, 168

The Daoist critique of ‘heart-mind’ is that a “fixated heart” is a heart troubled and unfinished (50). It may lack an existential capacity of flexibility. But the Daoist’s “finished heart” is likened to a heart that not
only allows for shen to emerge, but also goes beyond skills of the heart, such as “tallying,” to a knowledge of genuineness (52). In the Zhuangzi, the focus of human identity with respect to shen is laid more extensively on the form (xing) and substance (ti) aspects and not the socially relational and cultivated aspect (47). The famous story of “Horsehead Humpback” illustrates that a Daoist position on shen could be altogether unbound from the social and remains at the “behest of a power (de)”—even a fundamental power (49). But if clarification cannot be provided to understand what de is, shall the Daoist view on human nature be consigned to a cosmology of Unlimited Mystery, as we find, for example, in Anaximander’s apeiron? A better rebuttal to the Daoist conception of shen would be to argue that shen lacks emphasis on the social, relational aspect of the body. More must be said about the body and how the body relates to spirit, as the relation between materiality and immateriality is the sort of relation informing the essence of human identity and the human as a social being.

Berger’s study, drawing from the Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi, reveals that many Chinese philosophers regarded the human body as, in a sense or to a degree, surrounded by its natural and social environments, and is conscious (24). How is the body conscious? To what extent is sociality necessary for making the body conscious?
What ultimately is the ritualized body with respect to spirit (shen), energy (qi), and the like? Is it the ritualized body little else than a resonance of shen or qi and does it possess this resonance prior to ritual acts? Relatedly, is shen a particular resonance of the act and form of the body? In any case, we feel at home with Latin scholastics who regarded the soul as in the body as containing the body, not as contained by it and as something “metaphysically surrounded by the spiritual soul, which informs it ubiquitously” (see Lemna, Apocalypse of Wisdom, 58). But perhaps that great Franciscan doctor, St. Bonaventure, should have the last word:

“Since the soul as capable of beatitude is immortal, it is so united to the mortal body that it may be separated from it. Hence the soul is not only a form, but also a ‘this something’; it is united to the body, not only as a perfection, but also as a mover, so that it perfects through its essence what it moves through its power. And since the soul imparts not only being but also life, sensitivity, and intelligence, it must have a vegetative, sensitive, and intellective power.”

St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, 2.9.5.