writes:
Take, for example, the simple and familiar distinction of "heart" and
"mind." Perhaps since Galen, these two organs have been characterized
in the West as the "feeling" organ and the "thinking" organ. Modern
anatomy would seem to corroborate this specialization of function.
Chinese, on the other hand, uses the same word xin for "heart" and
"mind." Far from posing problems of exposition, there may be
something in a fusing together, not to say confusion so much as a
conflation, of the two notions; for with most acts of conation,
determination, will, perception, sensibility, the faculties of both
thinking and feeling are engaged: it is usually difficult to
determine the proportion of reason to emotion in the effusions of
xin, "heart-mind." "To think with the heart," and "to feel with the
mind," are distinctions in English that might be suggestive; in
Chinese, they would be equivalent and tautologous.
Or, to take a converse example, consider the concept of "soul" in
English: usually contrasted with the corporeal essence, with "body,"
the soul exists concurrently with the body when it is alive (either
in the same place or in different places, if one accepts certain
notions of telekinesis and mind transport), and it survives the body
after death, to wander the earth, or to enter heaven, hell, or
purgatory, or to begin a new reincarnation (depending on whether one
believes in ghosts, Christianity, or Buddhism). In Chinese, however,
there are two souls: po 魄 and hun 魄. The corporeal soul, the po,
stays with the body, and it dies with the body: it might be likened
to the vital force, the spirit of a person, his "élan vital," as
Henri Bergson might say. But there is another soul, the hun, which is
not bound to the flesh and which can roam at some distance from the
body. One trope of Chinese poetry is the transport, across vast
distances, of the hun to visit friends in dreams. If the distance is
considerable, this is usually taken to be an indication of a person's
death, since the hun is conceived of being able to roam further than
a regional distance only with the death of the body, and only when
separated from the po. A famous stanza, by one poet in the Tang
dynasty who encountered another poet in his dreams, expressing
concern that the friend may be dead, since his hun seems so
wideranging, exploits this belief:
Old friend, you appeared in a dream.
It shows you have long been in my thoughts.
Perhaps it was not your living soul:
The way's too far, it couldn't be done.
End of quote.
Eugene Chen Eoyang, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation,
Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii
Press, 1993), pp. 317-318.
The poem is Du Fu's "Dreaming of Li Bai." Du Fu lived from 712 to
770; Li Bai from 701 to762.
