The way of water and sprouts of virtue
By: Sarah Allan.
Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 181
Subjects: Philosophy, Chinese.; Philosophy of nature.
Description: "This book maintains that early Chinese philosophers, whatever their philosophical school, assumed common principles informed the natural and human worlds and that one could understand the nature of man by studying the principles which govern nature. Accordingly, the natural world rather than a religious tradition provided the root metaphors of early Chinese thought. Sarah Allan examines the concrete imagery, most importantly water and plant life, which served as a model for the most fundamental concepts in Chinese philosophy including such ideas as dao, the "way," de, "virtue" or "potency," xin, the "mind/heart," xing, "nature," and qi, "vital energy." Water, with its extraordinarily rich capacity for generating imagery, provided the primary model for conceptualizing general cosmic principles while plants provided a model for the continuous sequence of generation, growth, reproduction, and death and were the basis for the Chinese understanding of the nature of man in both religion and philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-164) and indexes.