A Tripartite Self

Chinese philosophy has long recognized the importance of the body and emotions in extensive and diverse self-cultivation traditions. Philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body are often described in terms of mind-body dualism and its opposite, monism or some kind of "holism." Monist or holist views agree on the unity of mind and body, whereas mind-body dualists take body and mind as essentially different. Debates about mind-body dualism have become important in Chinese and comparative philosophy because of claims that there was no mind-body dualism in early China, in contrast to Western traditions. This book argues that there was an important divergence in early China between two views of the self. In one, mind and spirit are closely aligned, and are understood to rule the body as a ruler rules a state. But in the other, the person is tripartite, and mind and spirit are independent entities that cannot be reduced to a material-non-material binary. In some…