Xin

Xin, originally a picture of the heart, means both “heart” and “mind”, and is often translated “heart-mind” to keep both senses. Chinese thought did not sharply separate thinking from feeling: the xin is where one perceives, judges, wills and feels.

Mencius located the four “sprouts” of virtue in the xin: compassion, shame, deference and the sense of right and wrong, the beginnings of humaneness, rightness, propriety and wisdom. To exhaust one’s heart-mind, he said, is to know one’s nature, and to know one’s nature is to know heaven. Self-cultivation is the nourishing of these sprouts and the recovery of the “lost heart”.

In the Neo-Confucian debates, Zhu Xi held that the mind contains principle but must investigate things to know it, while Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming taught that the mind is principle: there is no principle outside the mind. The Chan Buddhist teaching that the mind is the Buddha shaped and sharpened these debates.