Sidelights of Xin “Heart, Mind” In the Shijing

Michael Carr, Proceedings of the 31st CISHAAN, 1983, 824-825.

Excerpt: The Shi is the most linguistically important text of archaic Chinese. It is a collection of songs and odes that are believed to have been composed from approximately the eleventh to the seventh centuries B.C. Can the Shi be considered as a set of psycholinguistic evidence? How was the ‘mind’ described in these ancient Chinese poems? The Shi‘s descriptions of human thoughts and feelings nearly three thousand years ago are important in connection with a revolutionary thesis about the evolution of consciousness: the bicameral mind.

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