Body and Mind in Early China and Greece

This article surveys several early Chinese and Greek representations of the self, with particular interest in relations between body and mind. I begin with Edward Slingerland’s application of recent research in conceptual metaphor analysis to early Chinese texts, his arguments on early Chinese root metaphors for self and an important study of mind-body dualism in early China. Next I introduce metaphors of mind and body in texts from technical expertise traditions that Slingerland’s survey does not cover. The last section introduces three apparently comparable sets of early Chinese and Greek metaphors: (1) analogies between mind and body and ruler and subordinates; (2) metaphors of the body as a container in which the mind is somehow contained; and (3) the notion that a person is a set of balances between constituent elements.