Chinese culture is… a culture of the heart [xin de wenhua]. The heart is the root of life.
Xu Fuguan, 1993, p.242
The heart is the ruler of the body and the master of “spiritual lights” [mental activities] who issues commands but does not receive commands.
Xunzi: Dispelling Blindness
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The Chinese heart is not so much an arousing factor as a stabilizing medium.
Sun Lung-kee, 1991, p.10
When the heart is in disorder, a hundred diseases will emerge; when the heart is in quiescence, ten thousand diseases will all disappear.
A Chinese saying
Introduction
This special issue engages the notion of the heart and its role in diagnosis and healing of psychological distress. Our shared interest lies in the potential for heart, rather than the psyche, to be the ground for developing a new template of psychological care. The core of this heart-based template would be “affective,” that is, embodied, sensitive to intensities of feeling emanating from heart-related distress. A heart-based template would also be “aesthetic,” meaning artful and intuitive, because xin, the Chinese term for the heart, which is also the origin of kokoro in Japan, is both body and mind. Concepts of xin and kokoro suggest an interdependent self, rather than a bounded, individual self, such as the one we associate with tenets of Euro-American psychology and the psyche. Together, all of us who have contributed to this special issue believe that the process of tuning in, with artful judgment, to the heart—what we call “aesthetic attunement”—has both diagnostic and healing potential, and that a central role for xin/kokoro in care, or its partial role in hybrid therapies, might exceed the predominant mental health care model based on Western biomedicine.
Xin, as it emerges from the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist tradition, is the moral core and the most fundamental component of being for humans. It is autonomous, like a ruler, and sensitive, like an empathetic listener. Xin is multivalent. Paradoxically, it is both the root cause and the ultimate healing resource of ill health, including mental distress. Because of its simultaneous status as a bodily organ and the seat of cognition, virtue, emotion, and feeling, it also defies the confines of a single paradigm and the psychological bounds of psyche. In turn, heart-associated distress is ambivalent and paradigm-defying; it might elude classification and require non-judgemental openness and even neutrality to formulate appropriate care. For example, distress in China can be understood with varying degrees such as xinfan “heart agitation,” xinjie “heart knots,” xinlei “heart exhaustion,” and xinbing “heart-ache.” Heart distress of varying intensities cannot be fully explained by, and exceeds, psychiatric categories like depression and anxiety.
Theorists have sought to capture how certain terms, or reference points, operate as a nexus for linguistic, cultural, social, or epistemological value—what Williams (1976/1983) calls a cultural “keyword,” what Agar (1995) calls a “culture rich point,” and what Nichter (1981) deems an “idiom of distress.” But xin is more than any of these; it is a sensible, encompassing force that can power the emergence of full personhood, holistic connection in society, and more. We can think of it as a psycho-moral compass that orients people when they must adapt to, and navigate, moral, physical, social, and political aspects of the environment in Confucian cultural contexts. People use xin to tune into their surroundings, aligning their existence with the universe. Xin is therefore biological/psychological, social, and cosmic. This attunement, however, is mediated by cultural mores, political economy, time, and space. More than cognitive and rational, heart attunement is embodied, affective, and artful. Xin’s aesthetic attunement establishes a unique mode of existence that can become the path to health and well-being (see also Palmer & Siegler, 2017 on cosmological attunement). Conversely, lack of attunement means ill-health and social ills, though the prospect of re-orienting one’s compass always remains.
The contributors of this special issue are anthropologists and scholars of Japanese and Chinese studies. Each has conducted long-term ethnographic research on various aspects of mental health and spiritual well-being, delving deep into experiences of distress and healing. Taken together, the articles contribute to and build upon relevant conversations in multiple fields, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, religion, and comparative Asian studies. We each have our own concerns and methods, and our field interests diverge, but we share two main aims. First, we seek to analyze existing forms of counseling and psycho-spiritual care in Japan and China that hybridize local/indigenous and Euro-American approaches. Our work therefore maps a landscape of care and reveals unique, contextualized complexities of this care work. As the articles show, each care approach tells us something about China and Japan’s cultural inheritances, as well as their modes of governing and subject formation, and allows for greater comparative power between these cultural and political spaces by making plain the philosophical underpinnings, motivations, value, and limitations of these hybrid forms. We ask whether these care models work and, if so, how and for whom, and how they relate to reigning power and existing government projects. Second, taken together, the contributions offer a glimpse of something new: an emerging template, possibly giving rise to still-hybridized modes of care, but that addresses mental health care based on the indigenous concept of the heart—xin in China and kokoro in Japan—rather than on the Euro-American idea of the psyche. Readers of this issue will be aware that hybrid psychological forms and interchange between Europeans and Chinese and Japanese sources have existed for more than a century. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung incorporated various strands of Eastern thought (including from the Book of Changes, Daoism, and Tibetan Buddhism) into the development of analytic psychology (Jiang, 2006; Sgorbati, 2024). And a longstanding dialogue occurred between psychologists Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, and Zen Buddhist D. T. Suzuki (see Benedict, 2024; Harding, 2014). However, these scholarly debates remain within the Euro-American psychological paradigm. In this special issue, we start somewhere else completely: with local lifeways. We then delve into Chinese and Japanese classics for ideas of sanity and well-being. Using concepts of xin and kokoro leads to a different kind of (interdependent) self and a different, intuitive mode of care based on aesthetic attunement and a rich diversity of therapeutic practices.
The Ontological Turn, Indigenous Psychology, and Psychological Anthropology
Our special issue is located within the discipline of psychological anthropology (PA). As a subfield of anthropology, PA is interdisciplinary, drawing from and influencing fields including cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, sociology, and philosophy. PA concerns the inner worlds of individuals and can be used in tandem with other forms of social research to examine individual experience constraint (cultural or social) (Desjarlais, 1997; Ecks, 2022) or to focus entirely on mental illnesses and disorders (Estroff, 1981).
PA research is primarily done through ethnographic analysis, the premier research methodology in anthropology. Ethnography originally set out to discern how different people around the globe functioned socially and culturally, which could then help (predominantly Euro-American) researchers assess how cultures evolve over time (D’Andrade, 1995). This carried an inherent ethnocentric “othering” of non-Western cultures by placing them in opposition to Euro-American societies. PA tries to avoid this by employing person-centered ethnography (coined in 1982 by anthropologist Robert LeVine) geared toward the individual psychological processes and subjective experience within specific cultural contexts, while also addressing questions related to power, health, illness, politics, and more (Hollan, 2001).
Ethnocentrism is a significant reason for PA’s development, as psychology, too, is grounded in primarily Eurocentric paradigms. For much of the 20th century, Freud was inescapable (Beatty, 2017). Following Freud’s description of the ego, twentieth-century Euro-American psychology was based primarily on the idea that people experience an autonomous, bounded sense of self. However, the notion of “self” came under scrutiny as cross-cultural psychology and PA gained footholds in the social sciences. Even the notion of an autonomous, bounded self in Western cultures has been shown to be an illusion (Ewing, 1990). Much less can it be used to define other cultural understandings of self-experience.
PA also shifted away from mind/body dualism, resulting in greater recognition of non-Western, non-biomedical experiences of mental illness. Particularly, research in China and India determined that mental illnesses rarely (if ever) fit into the biomedical model of the brain (Jahoda, 2016). As an intellectual movement across the globe to resist the hegemony of Euro-American psychology, indigenous psychology (IP) emerged in the 1990s as Asian academics began to question the relevance of Euro-American psychology in non-Western contexts, specifically the Philippines (Enriquez, 1993) and Taiwan (Hwang, 2005). IP has influenced how psychology and anthropology approach theoretical and empirical research related to non-Western psychologies. There are debates within the movement about the precise status of an indigenous psychology. Some psychologists argue that Western theories of psychology are “imported” into non-Western cultures and are then gradually localized or “indigenized,” whereas others insist that IPs should draw solely from the “traditional sources within one’s culture in order to arrive at an IP” (Jahoda, 2016, pp. 174–75). For K.S. Yang, the founder of Chinese psychology in Taiwan, IP consists of two major components: adapting theory and method from the West, and drawing on traditional resources from local cultures (e.g., literature, history, and philosophy) for hypothesis testing and theory construction (Sundararajan et al., 2020).
Critiques of IP include the question of whether a particular indigenous psychology has (or should have) scientific backing or replicable theoretical grounding. Another issue with IP has been the initial goal, among proponents, of developing a “universal” or “global” psychology, which would be in line with the Western tradition of a single psychology and possibly with a single set of determinants for diagnoses (Jahoda, 2016). To address these issues and chart new directions for general psychology, Pickren and Teo (2020) call for attention to the “particularization of the psychological” (p.3) and to “work drawn from indigenous, postcolonial, and critical methods outside the Global North that addresses the hegemony of Western theories of psychological experience and offers alternative constructions that hold potential to deepen and extend the psychological in humane fashion” (p. 4).
IP’s theoretical foundations and methodology seem to have gradually gained traction in anthropology. Anthropology’s cousin to IP, ethnopsychology, has often been sidelined in psychology. Ethnopsychology has historically been referred to as psychological theorization that is “folk” or otherwise “unscientific” in nature, an anti-biomedical model of analysis that takes culture into consideration first and psyche second. Ethnopsychology compels us to reevaluate the “taken-for-granted assumptions about the domain of the ‘psychological’” (White, 1993, p. 21),
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including the notion of the psyche and its limits and boundaries, as well as its impact on human experience, culture, health, and illness. This special issue, while contributing to the current IP debate, asks what psychological healing resources emerge from specific cultural contexts and might help us understand those contexts (see also Sundararajan, 2015). It is not an attempt to establish a model of care that is globally applicable but to illuminate possibilities for developing alternative or hybrid templates that are based on local and indigenous lifeways, concepts, and resources of healing.
In China, for three decades—four in Japan—imported Euro-American psychological ideas have informed the work of psychologists.
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Now, calls for a shift toward psychology rooted in Chinese and Japanese cultural values have become more urgent. In 2013, for example, China passed its first mental health law. The law reinforces Euro-American care models (specifically psychopharmacological treatment based on Western biomedicine) and partially forecloses IP practices (Philips et al., 2013). While Chinese psychologists and counselors now use hybrid therapies, which graft precepts drawn from Chinese classics of philosophy, medicine, and literature onto Euro-American modalities, we must critically assess the applicability of the imported psychology in the Chinese context, which traditionally centers xin (not psyche). When hybrids are inapplicable, a theoretical and clinical disjuncture arises that affects the quality of therapeutics. Similarly, in Japan, scholars have called for a return to indigenous concepts and emotional registers for developing local models of democracy and ways of living, for example, those based on deep emotions (Fujiwara, 2007).
This disjuncture is where the contributors of this special issue locate new opportunities to understand the worlds of people in distress. In this sense, our special issue also takes part in a shift within anthropology called the “ontological turn.” Within this turn (Heywood, 2017), informants’ concepts and indigenous categories are taken seriously. Going beyond cultural relativism, which claims that epistemologies vary but that there is only one ontology (form of being)—that is, one world, many worldviews or representations—anthropologists of the ontological turn propose that both worlds and worldviews may vary. Xin and kokoro can be treated as indigenous concepts from this perspective: with the multivalence of xin/kokoro in China and Japan, it is necessary to think about the unique modes of existence of heart-related distress and healing.
Debates related to ontology are necessarily predicated on new, in-depth studies by leading researchers who can discern, for a given indigenous psychological precept, the implications for “being” (Heywood, 2017; Holbraad et al., 2014) and, therefore, distress and care. Through their ethnographic work, contributors to this special issue take informants’ ideas, languages, and concepts seriously, combining this attention with scholarly work into the heart’s philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings in Chinese and Japanese classics of philosophy and medicine (such as Huangdi Neijing or Yellow Emperor’s Classics of Inner Medicine and works by the modern Japanese Buddhist, D. T. Suzuki) (see Benedict, 2024; Huang & Yang, 2024), and its role in life. This allows contributors to see how the heart is implicated in contemporary mental health experiences and care practices in Japan and China, and elicits new questions about the limits of Euro-American psychological precepts, while addressing indigenous lifeways. This issue thus responds to the call for a deeper reflection on the ontological turn and its applicability in Chinese and Japanese contexts.
Contributors are also aware of the argument of philosopher François Jullien (2016), who deconstructs Western “ontology” from the perspective of Chinese “life”—offering a “vitalist critique of ontology” (Lash, 2023). Jullien’s most important contention is that ontology has contained us on an inescapable path (one inherently vague and difficult) toward the comprehension of being, while living (life and world as they have always been in motion) is rendered unrecognizable in the process (Li & Lash, 2023). In striving for being, a narrowing of possibilities of life occurs. By reinterpreting Jullien’s works, Li and Lash (2023) argue against the applicability of ontology in the Chinese context and introduce “the thought of life instead of being, dao instead of ontology, efficacy instead of theology, mimesis instead of signification, and change instead of fixity” (p. 6). Our special issue moves this conversation forward by connecting xin and kokoro to the therapeutics of daily life and to modes of prevention, and by showing how local and indigenous therapies provide potential pathways for healing mental distress.
Xin and Kokoro
In the Chinese language, xin refers to the heart organ and the ground of human will, desire, emotion, intuition, reason, thought, and virtue. The term xin is usually translated as “mind,” “heart,” or “heart-mind.” The latter translation, “heart-mind,” reflects a blending of belief and desire (thought and feeling, ideas, and emotions) into a single complex dispositional potential (Hansen, 1992, p. 20). The Euro-American distinction between “heart” as the seat of desires and emotions, and “mind” as a site for beliefs and ideas does not exist in Chinese philosophy. Difficulties in translating xin into English apply equally to the unsatisfactory translation of the Japanese concept kokoro. Kokoro constitutes the core of the concept of humanity in Japanese socio-cultural discourse (Benedict, 2022; Katsuno, 2011). It refers to the inner self, pointing to “sensation, feeling, emotion, desire, as well as thinking” and can be roughly translated as the “embodied mind or heart-mind” (Lebra, 2004, p. 186). The Japanese terms shinshin “mind-body” and shinshin-ichinyo “mind-body unity” incorporate the Chinese characters xin and shen for heart/kokoro and body (Traphagan, 2000). While the body is the social aspect of self, presented to the outside world, kokoro points to “the internal, embodied aspect of self that animates a body… The inner, uchi, kokoro contains the intimate elements of the person, which are only exposed in limited ways usually at the discretion of the individual” (Traphagan, 2000, p. 140).
Xin is a major topic in traditional Chinese philosophical discourse, which also laid the groundwork, historically, for the concept of kokoro in Japan. Chinese culture is regarded by many as a culture of xin (Ku, 2018; Xu, 1993). Xin has been constitutive of, for example, Chinese selfhood, language, and politics. This can be difficult to grasp, as xin involves complex configurations of our sense-making process with space and time. Xin can also be used in scholarship to examine the ontological and epistemological features of the Chinese society, and therefore, as an entry point for understanding the society’s social issues. It reveals how culture is experienced within both the Chinese and Japanese traditions.
Xin’s central place can be traced back to its role in the foundational philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism. Chinese traditional philosophy and medicine have a documented and time-honored system of health care based on life nurturing. This dates back at least to the era of Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor’s Classics of Inner Medicine), in which xin is both the monarch, the ruler of the body (junzhu zhi guan) and the master of “spiritual lights” (xin zhu shen ming, which roughly refers to the heart governing all mental activities). As a sensible and vital force, xin commands, and exists in relation to, self, society, and the cosmos. While Confucius did not directly elaborate on “xin” in the Analects, his disciple, Zengzi, saw xin as the starting point of everything. For Zengzi, one's moral character is developed through cultivating one's xin. Only a person with sincere and honest xin (chengxin) can hope to achieve the qualities of junzi “a gentleman,” who should not be perplexed or distressed. In Confucianism xin is understood as, at once, part of the body and its ruler. To the body, xin is what the emperor, monarch, or sovereign is to the country, with the power and autonomy of the heart mapped onto the supreme political power of the ruler. Xin centrally processes and stores the information received from the sensorial organs, which interact with the external world; it also commands them. There is also a correspondence between the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the universe (Yu, 2009). The physiological or mental is social, and vice versa. Arguably, the philosophy of xin also emerged from a particular power structure of the time that already had an embedded hierarchy. Blending the personal, the political, and the cosmic made xin an appealing concept to people in leadership positions and, perhaps partly for this reason, China’s ruling class has adopted Confucianism as an orthodox philosophy since the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220).
In this tradition, xin, as the organ of cognition and moral intelligence, plays a fundamental ethical role, distinguishing between right and wrong, and guiding action, conduct, and behavior (Hansen, 1992). For example, Mencius (c. 372–289 B.C.), a fourth generation disciple of Confucius, distinguished xin (as the locus of thinking, judging, and feeling) from the organs of ears and eyes, which do not think and can be deceived by external things that come into contact with them.
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But it was in the Neo-Confucianists’ novel thinking about the universe that xin was elevated to its apex position, especially in the school of the “Learning of the Heart” 心学 from the Song (960–1279) to the Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. For example, Wang Yangming (1472–1529) defines humans as the “heart” of the universe, and the heart as the most fundamental component of, and the “mirror” of, the universe, which refers to “Heaven and Earth and the ten thousand things” in between.
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Like Mencius, Wang attached prime importance to knowing the Dao (the Way) through understanding one’s own heart. Following Confucianism, the Neo-Confucian doctrines “asserted self-cultivation as the basis of rulership and then rectification of the heart as the basis of self-cultivation” (De Bary, 1981, p. 116). That is, governance should be based on the Dao, and the Dao is rooted in xin. If the heart—the ruler of the self—is bright, laws and systems will operate unhindered and the world will be at peace. If xin is obscured by desires (yu) for personal gain, it is deluded. Desire is associated with the individual, not with artful (aesthetic) attunement to other people or things. Allowing desire to obscure the heart can affect one’s cognitive abilities and sensory knowledge, leaving us detached from the world. Distress and craziness follow. In this issue, for example, Matthyssen considers Zhuangzi’s notion of xinzhai, “fasting the heart,” which resonates with Benedict’s (2024) analysis of the Buddhist notion of mushin (no mind) and its applicability in Japan’s spiritual care. Sgorbati looks at the notion of xixin “cleansing the heart” in the Yijing (the Book of Changes). These techniques seek to keep xin clear and unclouded by impediments. If negatively affected by desires or self-centered, xin can lose control over other parts of the body and can see its rule or power reduced—possibly leading to sickness.
Xin/Kokoro and Chronotopes of Emergence
The Chinese culture of xin and the lifestyle associated with a life of the heart is a living tradition in China today (Sun, 1991).
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Xin permeates people’s attempts to feel good and to be ethical. Simultaneously and, at times, paradoxically, it is central to everyday appropriation, by various actors, of elements of Chinese cultural tradition to address contemporary issues. For example, xin is invoked amidst the challenge of obtaining wisdom in a fast paced, fragmentary, and technology-mediated society. Tensions between political and health-related invocations of xin illustrate Herzfeld’s (2004) concept of cultural intimacy.
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There are “ironies, inversions, and paradoxes” in how actors, including governments, companies, and psycho-spiritual counselors, invoke the shared and felt connection to xin/kokoro. Disparate groups use the same rhetoric to justify contradictory actions, revealing the ease with which tradition can be instrumentalized.
In Chinese thought, the smallest analytical unit is not a singularity, but a doubleness—much like the image of two people in the character for humanness in the Analects of Confucius (ren 仁) or two elements (yin and yang) giving rise to the cosmos (Li & Lash, 2023; Sun, 1991). This doubleness is not dichotomous or oppositional but is in a constant and dynamic interaction (Jullien, 1995). Our special issue illustrates how xin, through its aesthetic attunement (including neutral positions) toward people, events, and the cosmos, which are already in constant motion, makes the dynamism of such doubleness possible. This process involves unique chronotopes (time–space configuration).
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The almost default invocation, in counseling and self-help genres, of Chinese cultural tradition and the implications of tradition for current governance and subject formation, can be partly interpreted through Bakhtin’s notion of a “chronotope of emergence.” Bakhtin defines chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that is artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 84) to discuss the different ways that the literature has used temporal and spatial features to express diverse world views. Scholars have used chronotope theoretically beyond literature. The chronotope in culture can be defined as a “field of historical, biographical, and social relations” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p.371). The chronotope of xin is a process of becoming, or emergence, an aspect of people’s “becoming” in context. The time and space xin conveys is fluid. The chronotope of xin in different philosophies creates pathways that position human beings differently vis-a-vis Heaven, Dao, people, and their bodies. Thus, a chronotope is a critical tool for understanding how xin is used by various actors and how new ways of caring and preserving the body and well-being emerge.
Bakhtin conceptualizes several types of chronotopes. However, he devotes his most sustained analysis to novels of emergence. In his essay on the bildungsroman—a coming of age novel, or “man in the process of becoming” (1987, p. 19)—Bakhtin notices the importance of a specific locality, space, or time in the hero’s process of becoming or emerging. The novel of emergence stands in opposition to a static unity in the characteristics of both the hero and time–space (or epochs):
He [the hero] emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other (1987, p. 23).
In chronotopes of emergence, having both dynamic epochs (time–space) and a dynamic hero paves the way for future potentialities.
Turning back to xin, the unique time–space configuration of the heart is also one of emergence. In developing the heart’s capacities—that is, avoiding impediments to aesthetic attunement—each of us gains connection to others and the universe. For example, we can see an invocation of the xin as a chronotope in the thinking of one popular master of guoxue “National Studies” (who interprets and advocates for Chinese classics), named Guo Jicheng. In a series of teachings, Guo discusses the importance of dingli “the strength of stillness” in an era of digital information. Guo illustrates dingli with an idiom: shui qing yue xian (水清月现)—“only when the water is still can the moon be reflected on it.” In one session, pointing at his water bottle on the table, Guo says:
If you put a basin of water in the yard at night, only when the water is clear and still can we see the moon reflected in it. If you move the water recklessly, you can’t see the moon in the water [shaking his water bottle]. Our heart is like water. A reckless heart cannot see clearly what happened outside. Without understanding what exactly happened, you can’t make a wise decision. Without dingli, you cannot think to have a clear picture of things. This is exactly what [the Neo-Confucianist] Wang Yangming said—ci xin bu dong—[cultivate the stillness of the heart]. For Wang, the heart [and its dingli] is the source of all such wisdom.
Other masters of guoxue or psychomoral counselors attributed the origin of dingli to Zhuangzi for his metaphor of xin as a mirror or water. Zhuangzi says: “The heart of the perfect man is like a mirror. It does not move with things, nor does it anticipate them. It responds to things, but does not retain them” (Zhuangzi, Responding to Emperors and Kings).
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The psychological mechanism embedded in this message is to develop a still and sensitive xin. Such teachings, and other Chinese cultural traditions, are chronotopic in that tradition, including the role of xin, and objects, like the mirror, are invoked to serve in the emergence of individuals from pain and distress.
Several contributors in this issue explore the stabilizing power of xin/kokoro as one’s psycho-moral core to regulate bodily impulses, heal emotional distress, and complete the self in relation to others in both Japan and China (though Huang & Yang [2024] offers a case of xin’s arousing power in the revival of China’s traditional music therapy via an ancient music instrument, guqin). For example, in this issue, Matthyssen studies Zhuangzi’s idea of xinzhai, “fasting the heart” and its application in psychotherapy in China today, arguing for xinzhai’s healing potential, as this work places the therapist and client into a “dialogue of qi.” Matthyssen argues that such dialogic interactions creates a deep exchange and allows non-judgment on the part of the therapist. The client can then clear their heart and resolve personal issues. Benedict (2024), meanwhile, critically engages the theory of kokoro and spirituality as presented by the eminent modern Buddhist D. T. Suzuki, particularly the concept of mushin (no mind) care. Benedict looks at the evocation of mushin in end-of-life hospice care in Japan. In that context, achieving the state of mushin does not mean to have no mind but to have no attachment to the mind, thought, or self. Far from giving up feelings or senses, to be no-minded is to achieve a state in which these are unmanipulated and arise naturally. Benedict finds a deep connection between caregiver and patient who cultivate mushin—even a shared kokoro. Paradoxically, their work can ameliorate existential anxiety in patients and allows spiritual caregivers to tend to patients without letting their own thoughts and feelings get in the way.
This chronotopic approach to xin—and its anchoring and facilitating power—cultivates new subjectivity: culturally and historically rooted and psychologically and morally attuned. A chronotopic approach is both a way of describing the heart’s emergence and a critical lens to study how people invoke cultural tradition about xin/kokoro in contemporary practices.
Still other counselors in China today invoke Sunzi’s Art of War to illustrate the notion of dingli anchored in xin and its chronotope. In a Zoom chat on August 12, 2022, a counselor surnamed Hou, who specialized in Confucian moral psychology, echoed the emphasis on dingli in Guo’s teachings. In thinking about this concept, Hou recalled the classic work of Sunzi and his Art of War in reference to US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi’s August 2, 2022 visit to Taiwan.
He [Guo Jicheng] could also trace dingli to Sunzi. […] Give an example of President Xi. He did not shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s airplane, as enthusiastically drummed by Chinese media before her [Taiwan] visit. There had been widespread nationalist indignation and humiliation among the Chinese population at the moment when Pelosi’s plane landed safely at [Taibei’s] Songshan Airport. People stared at the live stream of the landing and expected from the Chinese government some form of military intervention. However, much to people’s surprise, there was no action taken at the moment.
For Hou, the government’s inaction was an application of a stratagem outlined by the Art of War to impress the population. In this view, Xi had dingli to let Pelosi’s airplane land safely in Taiwan. Xi made sure Pelosi unequivocally violated the Sino-American agreements of the One-China policy, which forbids official visits to Taiwan from other governments. China then used this breach as a pretext for retaliatory measures, thereby appeasing a deflated and disappointed patriotic populace. Dingli encompasses the use of a unique chronotope—reconfiguration of time and space. For most people in China, Taiwan is perceived as Chinese territory. The Chinese government retaliation started immediately after making sure Pelosi’s airplane indeed landed in Taiwan, a perceived intrusion into the Chinese territory, giving the government the moral high ground. This moved the hearts of those witnessing an unfolding political event. The citizenry’s collective heart’s attunement was based on a combination of a specific chronotopic emergence and sense-making. The heart’s stillness does not mean it is not reactive but determines the desirable time–space of such reactions.
China’s official discourses, including press briefs from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, cited ideas and strategies from the Art of War to justify the government’s reaction, including “cautious to launch a war” 慎战 and that not fighting can be the ultimate strategic move, “breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” (Sunzi, the Art of War, Chapter III, p. 2).
Given the popularity of Sunzi’s work in China, invocation of the Art of War serves to re-orient people’s hearts, including in the areas of cognition/emotion, virtue, and feeling—effectively, conducting mass anger management. Hou’s remarks highlight the value of strategic dingli, which prescribes caution and regulation of emotion through the heart in crisis management by tapping into specific time–space configurations. The Chinese government’s assessment of the situation and the reaction of the populace to Pelosi’s entry drew on tradition and, arguably, manipulated space and time through Chinese hearts, a chronotopic action.
Guo and Hou both apply dingli in a way that gives shape to a Chinese version of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): here, a steadfast xin, which transcends the body, along with its philosophical and historical roots, plays a central role in shaping people’s understanding and emotions. The power of dingli, anchored in the heart with its unique chronotope of emergence shaping people’s consciousness and emotions, arises from the interrelated perspectives of Daoism (Zhuangzi), Neo-Confucianism (Wang Yangming), and the Art of War (Sunzi). The former two schools of thought treat xin as water or mirror reflecting social reality more accurately when the heart is still and clear, while the latter emphasizes the power of xin as the moral core and its stillness as the source of wisdom and a resource for healing. Indeed, xin regulates bodily impulses and emotions that can be affected by external things. These interpretations treat xin not as an arousing agent but as a stabilizing force that gives people understanding and wisdom, transcending sensory information and bodily impulses (though see Huang & Yang, 2024). Contributor Fisher (2024) considers the stabilizing power of xin in his ethnographic study of beliefs about xin among lay Buddhist practitioners. While Fisher finds lively debate among Buddhist followers about its specific use and value, the practitioners agree that xin is a means of cultivating an authentic self with “clear, rational thought and enable[s] well-being.” Still, chronotopic appropriation of Chinese cultural tradition is only partial, and can be strategic, often serving political or commercial purposes, with mixed ramifications (see Teo, 2023 on possible effects of deglobalizing mentality).
We argue that the chronotope of emergence associated with xin connects individual becoming with historical becoming, so that both the person and the world can emerge anew. This is the case with the application of xin in transforming the present through encounter (historical and philosophical) and emergence (temporal, spatial, and inter/subjective) so that the transition of today’s world and subjective reality mutually influence one another to enable creativity in both. Xin encompasses the linkages with temporality and locality and the interplay between the inner cosmos of the body and the outside society. That is, xin lies in the interconnectedness between and among the past, the present, and the future, while at the same time, something new emerges from concrete, specific contexts and demands of quotidian life that cannot be confined by the past. Thus, the individual becoming encompassed in the appropriation of xin in the current psychoboom is not fully determined by historical becoming but must co-emerge with the world and surprise the world as it changes as well (see Huang & Yang, 2024).
Also in its formulation as a chronotope, xin constitutes a tool for scholarly inquiry—a methodological tool. The editors of Bakhtin’s essay assess his use of “emergence” as “becoming,” “the process of development that is never complete in the life course of an individual” (McGee et al., 1987, p. 55). A chronotopic analysis allows the subject to introduce their own space–time conception. Chronotope as method runs parallel to the ontological turn—that is, accepting people’s modes of existence (Heywood, 2017). For example, Cresswell and Sullivan (2020) argue that current discursive psychology does not have sufficient tools to capture human experience through dialogue and that a chronotopic analysis would provide more in-depth and nuanced analysis. For Peter Raggatt (2014), chronotopic analysis can be used in conjunction with “I-positions,” which include an internal self, external ideals that are internalized, and outside positions (p.107). He argues that chronotopic analysis is useful for psychological analyses of life histories, as they allow for understanding subjective experiences of time–space.
In China and Japan, we can ask: what would be a chronotopic approach to studying xin or kokoro? One chronotopic “axis” is time. The temporal aspect of the analysis is recent history, the historical backdrop to contemporary experience. Post-1989, when the Chinese state sought to reestablish its legitimacy and stabilize the country, one move was to endorse a renewed focus on cultural tradition. A state-sponsored “Confucianism Craze” (Zhang & Schwartz, 1997) arose, through which people sought comfort and guidance from Confucian doctrines and precepts. Simultaneously, this movement helped renew a political order based on family, hierarchy, and patriarchy. State-supported masters of National Studies (guoxue) have since popularized and psychologized Confucianism and Daoism in order to reach a broader audience (Yu, 2006; Zhang, 2014), ushering in “National Studies Fever.” Concurrently, there has been a grassroots Dujing Yundong “Reading Classics Movement,” which originated in Taiwan and has spread throughout Mainland China since the early 1990s (Gilgan, 2022). The revitalization of Chinese cultural tradition has been part of the official discourse of the “China dream” since 2014 and, more recently, has been re-emphasized in President Xi Jinping’s goal to build “a common spiritual homeland for the Chinese nation” in order to “heighten a sense of national identity” and “realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.”
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Alongside these movements, Euro-American psychology has infiltrated the Chinese and Japanese contexts like never before, contributing to a boom of psychotherapy, self-help culture, and greater access to psychopharmaceutical drugs in China (Huang, 2018; Kleinman, 2010; Yang, 2018); similar trends have been observed within Japan’s healing boom beginning in the 1980s (Katsuno, 2011).
A chronotopic approach to xin in China can also incorporate spatial considerations. If we think of discourse as establishing an ideological terrain, we can see that the instrumental use of cultural tradition in China can shrink its dynamism. Instrumentalization of xin can cause rigidity and fixation in the self, which prevents people’s artful attunement, possibly flattening or freezing them in themselves (Yang, 2023). Huang & Yang (2024) treat a commercial example of this flattening: xin manipulated instrumentally to stimulate consumption, specifically consumption of music on the popular platform NetEase. NetEase explicitly references therapeutic precepts connected to xin and traditional philosophy, like guqin (an ancient music instrument for self-care and self-cultivation) and life nurturing, to compel users to interact with their offerings and other users, increasing traffic and revenue. However, this strategy has led to a greater craving for individual fulfillment and negative feelings among users.
In the hands of governments, this individualizing self-focus serves as a mode of control. It can cause forms of heart-related distress that are difficult to characterize in non-xin–based terms, but that also constrain emergence. The contribution by Yamaguchi (2025) to this issue examines the distress—and distrust—bred in Japan after a longstanding concept from hospice care, kokoro no kea (care of mind) was retooled within a biomedical framework to encourage solidarity and mental health support within a disaster relief framework. Japanese people were suspicious of the new form of kokoro no kea counseling, preferring more social, interdependent activities to promote recovery. Yamaguchi frames the more instrumentalized version of kokoro no kea as a form of “therapeutic governance” that sought to manage emotions but actually pathologized women’s distress, including their fears and anxiety related to nuclear contamination after the Fukushima disaster.
Xin and the Neutral
While instrumentalizing xin can block flow, natural flow in a Confucian-influenced context is essential. It is an aspect of xin’s connection to the cosmos and the Dao—the primordial principle and generative force of everything that exists. Flow begins with each of us. Unlike in Western cultures, where the individual is seen as a system with clearly defined boundaries and an emotional component supposedly regulated by rationality, in China, an individual is perceived largely as a “body” (shenti) to be made whole by the exchange of xin/heart between two such bodies (Sun, 1991). Xin can also link up many bodies to form a “collective body” (jiti). A heart that grows beyond self-interest to a broader concern for community is “to know the greater body” (shi dati) (Sun, 1991). Sun (1991) argues that the Chinese “two-person” matrix—an interdependent self—not only forms the core of the Confucian notion of humanness (ren仁) but also contributes to the image of the pair (dui) underlying Chinese human relations. Thus, sharp distinctions that keep the self isolated from others cannot be maintained in xin. That is, xin goes beyond the binary of inner and outer, micro and macro, private and public, presenting an epistemological challenge for Euro-American psychology.
Roland Barthes’s notion of the Neutral (le neutre) can help us grasp xin-based selfhood and, by extension, the possibilities of therapeutics anchored in xin. Barthes’s neutral escapes, or undoes, paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. The neutral “outplays paradigm” and speaks to “everything that baffles the paradigm” (2005, p.6). While paradigms are tense, taut, and stubborn, the neutral is (externally) calm, blithe, and subtle.
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The paradigm is dualistic in that it requires a choice between one option over another. Conversely, the neutral chooses neither option nor both. For psychiatrist Henry Schwartz, the neutral’s lack of closure offers an exciting therapeutic method: “… only through a lack of resolution of conflict can there be genuine peace, where peace means an acceptance of both sides, not the elimination of one side and domination by the other” (2013, p. 501). By positioning the neutral as paradigm-defying, Barthes did not mean that this position is literally neutral (i.e., sterile, ambivalent, and passive). Rather, he argues, “my Neutral – can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states” (Barthes, 2005, p. 7).
Barthes’ aim in The Neutral is to “unthread” “the nuances” of human experience, morality, language, power, and more (2005, p. 11). He also describes the neutral as a desire, as something that is not necessarily achievable or solid. For Schwartz (2013), this offers a new angle on the neutrality that therapists are supposed to maintain toward their clients, one that entails removing oneself from judgment. He argues that Barthes’s neutral can be used to better understand the relationship between therapists and their patients, as well as how both the therapist and the patient creatively shape the path forward: it is not about achievable goals but the creative journey through the neutral. Barthes helps us perceive the non-binary nature of xin-focused selfhood: the neutral position allows us to withhold the choice between assertions of self, others, and the universal. This neutral position can be used to partially explain the no-attachment of caregivers in Japan (Benedict, 2024) and the practice of xinzhai (Matthyssen, 2024).
Another paradigm-defying example Barthes offers is weariness vis-a-vis depression. “Depression is increasingly recognized as a nosological reality…: one can have sick leaves for ‘depression’… but weariness?” (Barthes, 2005, p.17). He argues that weariness exists outside of illness paradigms as it comes in degrees; one can experience different levels and forms of weariness throughout life. This resonates closely with Chinese portrayals of different degrees of heart distress, including “heart agitation,” “heart anxiety,” “heart-knots,” “heart exhaustion,” and “heart-ache.” Each captures a state that, while real, can slip through the cracks of biomedical diagnostics. Barthes states that weariness is a mode that presents at different levels of “intensity” and “society doesn’t recognize intensities” (2005, p.18). In the Western biomedical paradigm of health, one can be either healthy or ill, not both. But in China, there is a culturally embedded awareness that one can be in a less clear third state—indeed, many local or indigenous therapeutic modes address precisely that state (e.g., ya jiankang, “subhealth,” Bunkenborg, 2014).
Relatedly, whereas Euro-American psychotherapy grapples with the feelings of a bounded, masterful self, which arises from intrapsychic processes, many Chinese counselors pay greater attention to the body–heart nexus, leading to the conceptualization of a relational self (Hsu, 1985), interdependent self (Sun, 1991), or a diffuse sense of “self” (Hall & Ames, 1987, p. 16). More emphasis is placed on the social context and less on the concept of privacy. Li Geng’s (2024) contribution to this issue touches on this important feature of xin-focused culture, as well as the primacy of relationships in xin-based society in an ethnographic study of divination among Chinese fortune tellers. Diviners must be willing and able to touch their customers’ hearts, according to Li, through excellent communication skills, often beginning from as neutral a position as possible.
However, current trends in therapeutic care tend to wed awareness of the interdependent self to biomedicine. This is also reflected in policy and government funding, which tend to be directed toward biomedical solutions, leading to a divide between experiences of distress (such as varying degrees of “heart exhaustion”) and solutions (e.g., hospitalization and anti-depressant prescriptions). To pay attention to the flow of selfhood and other xin-associated ambiguities through a kind of neutral stance, or what we can call aesthetic attunement, is a step toward investigating subjectivity, health, and sanity in China and Japan.
If the flow with xin connects us to others, xin is also the vehicle to manifest one’s care for others. This suggests different etiologies of mental distress and models of care in Japan and China. Traditional Chinese medicine, which was adopted from ancient Chinese philosophy, conceptualizes the heart as the ruler of the body and the master of “spiritual lights” (all mental activities). In Huangdi Neijng, xin is regarded as the “monarch” of the body, governing various emotional, physical, and intellectual activities performed by the five zang (organs). In Chinese medicine, emotional regulation and qi unblocking are key to adjusting and attuning one’s body because emotions are formed through qi circulation (Zhang, 2007). One goal of Chinese medical practitioners is to achieve harmony between xing (physical constitution) and shen (shenming, “spirits”). The spirits, which include all mental activities, are classified as five different types, known as the “five spirits” (wushen五神). The five different spirits are stored separately in the five zang but are all commanded by xin as the “grand master” of the five zang and six fu organs.
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The five zang organs produce five qi, which results in five emotions: nu 怒 “anger” associated with the liver, xi 喜 “joy” with the heart, si 思 “overthinking” with the spleen, you 忧 “sorrow” with the lungs, and kong 恐 “fear” with the kidneys (Zhang, 2007).
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While these emotions arise from the functions of their corresponding zang organs, any excessiveness will hurt each of them accordingly. Sudden excessive joy can hurt the heart by making the spirit inside unsteady or dispersed, so that the person can hardly concentrate. Of all the organs, the heart is the most sensitive to emotional changes. This is because emotional changes, as dynamic “forces” that “move” around, originate in xin but affect other zang organs. For example, when anger stirs in the heart, it will affect the liver; when fear shakes the heart, it will affect the kidneys. In this sense, xin is considered both the root cause and ultimate cure of distress and diseases (Zhou, 2013). It is both diagnostic and prescriptive: one must know how xin affects all else to understand the trouble, and one must remediate or attune xin to get better.
Because of the traditional emphasis on xin as the moral core that stabilizes, rather than arouse emotions (though see a case study in Huang & Yang, 2024), people in China are often perceived as less emotionally expressive as those in the West, if not “depressive” (Sun, 1991). These distinctive features of Chinese emotionality need to be considered in the diagnosis and treatment of mental distress in China’s mental hospitals today. Similarly, the heart’s stabilizing role should also be considered in understanding the Chinese notion of empathy, which focuses more on restraint than reaching out. This can be manifested in Confucius’s saying “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not like.” In terms of care, this could mean focusing more on prevention than treatment. This echoes what is advocated in Huangdi Neijing: zhi weibing, prevention is primary over treatment. Thus everyday aesthetic attunement, which nurtures life by using artful judgement, has preventive potential and is more valued than treating diseases. Empathetic and xin-centered models of care diverge in this way from the Western biomedical model based on rationality and individual autonomy. Since xin is key to the interdependent self (i.e., individuals longing for belonging to a group and supposedly living in a network—the heart’s chronotopic attunement to a certain space and time), the notion of fulfillment may also not be the same as the kind of self-fulfillment generally valued in the West by individuals with clear personal boundaries (Sun, 1991). The psychological effects of interdependence may also manifest unique characteristics in counseling and subject formation (see Teo, 2018).
Aesthetic Attunement and Maintaining the Aesthetic Order
Xin/kokoro’s possible neutral position and chronotope of emergence are attributed to and contribute to its aesthetic orientation. An aesthetic turn has occurred in political thought and international relations (Kompridis, 2014). Unlike the reductionist approach to world events, the aesthetic approach seeks a more holistic understanding of events, one that recognizes the inevitable disjuncture between the represented and its representation as the location of politics (Bleiker, 2001). Psychologist Thomas Teo (2017) calls for a more expansive and critical study of aesthetics, which needs to engage not only debates about art-related themes, including appreciation, disinterested pleasure, and beauty, but also “discussions about totalitarian structures, the nexus of economic injustice, a lack of recognition, and subjectification” (p.58). In the Kantian tradition, attunement through the aesthetic is a means to capture the abyssal, nonexhaustiveness of political subjects. Aesthetic attunement is a stance for a rational construct that thinks (Jackson, 2016). However, xin-focused attunement reflects a different cosmology, a unique form of attunement indigenous to cultures that place the heart at the center of experience. It suggests artfully (meaning with empathy and propriety) aligning one's existence and position with the cosmos. We can think of xin as a psycho-moral compass that orients people when they adapt to, and navigate their surroundings. Encompassing both cognitive and affective processes, xin-focused aesthetic attunement encourages dynamism or flow. The heart is naturally aligned with the cosmos. If this alignment is as it should be, the individual moves in tandem with time and space, and through different physical, social, and moral landscapes, creating holistic connectivity. Attunement is thus healing. However, the heart also attunes toward diverse forces, undertaking fraught and contradictory tasks in the name of both self-interest and ethical duty to the collective. This can constitute a source of distress. Paradoxically, heart-focused aesthetic attunement is both a source of distress and a resource for healing. In this special issue, contributors highlight the embodied, affective, and intuitive processes of attunement anchored in the heart and show how xin takes part in larger movements toward aesthetic political engagement (see Huang & Yang, 2024).
In China, aesthetics has always been central to culture and society (Li, 2009).
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Hall and Ames (1987) conceptualize an “aesthetic order” that considers xin as it underpins a unique harmony of Chinese thinking, sociality, and being—a distinct ontological starting point. Within this schema, the role of the xin is primary: xin is not exact or scientific but an intuitive guide that maintains a delicate, sensitive balance (Ku, 2018). The foundation of aesthetic order lies in individual aesthetic judgment of “rightness” or “appropriateness” (Hall & Ames, 1987). People sense the optimal way of ordering various elements of society through xin.
By focusing on xin as the ground for thinking, judging, and feeling, we also add the affective dimension—to aesthetic perception and judgement (see Schindler et al., 2017 on aesthetic emotional assessment in the West) in analysis of this aesthetic order. Xin is both affective and aesthetic. With xin, one cannot think with the same exactness as with the head or intellect. Xin is often associated with other Chinese aesthetic practices, like using a Chinese pen with a soft brush, which draws with a gracefulness and fluidity that one cannot achieve with a hard steel pen (Ku, 2018, p. 10). Similarly, in the Confucian tradition, si 思 “reflecting”—one of the three processes of thinking—is perceived to be aesthetic articulation, which does not involve the reduction of particulars in accordance with a conscious act of judging but “the nonmediated appropriation of potentialities for ‘rightness’ with respect to a given situation” (Hall & Ames, 1987, p. 267). It requires artfulness and measured action, a form of aesthetic attunement combining both emotion/affect and intellect.
Since the heart is essential to aesthetically attune to the cosmos for the maintenance of harmony and order, heart-related distress or exhaustion cannot be entirely encapsulated in psychiatric categories that are based on Euro-American psychology. We ask: How does the heart and its aesthetic attunement in life constitute both the root cause of distress/ill health and the ultimate resource for healing? How does this heart-focused artful attunement template help enrich people’s subjectivity rather than narrowing people’s life experience and reducing subjectivity through biomedical psychological care? Our contributors offer ways forward. In looking closely at non-attachment in end-of-life care through the practice of mushin (no mind) in Japan, Benedict reveals the rich potential of beginning therapeutic work with kokoro/xin. Matthyssen bears witness to similar effects of xinzhai “fasting the heart,” where therapeutic attention begins with xin, and evolves when a therapist non-judgmentally allows the client to empty the heart of distractions. Li sees the expansive and intersubjective power of xin through “reading the heart” within Chinese divination. And Yamaguchi reveals the costs of ignoring a cultural need for interdependent, kokoro-based mental health care, such as that offered in traditional iterations of kokoro no kea (care of mind). All these articles suggest a form of artfulness and the potential healing effects of aesthetic attunement in contexts where the self is not so clearly bounded.
These writings also allow us to reevaluate Chinese and Japanese subjectivity: if the social order is aesthetic, what are the impacts of economic and social changes that embed Euro-American approaches to society based on a rational social order? Sgorbati tackles a version of this question in his contribution to the issue. Sgorbati critically evaluates Carl Jung’s importation psychological tools from the Yijing (the Book of Changes). He identifies Jung’s ethnocentrism in relegating Chinese xin to an emotional counterpart to the European mind and wrestles with Jung’s subsequent (and lasting) influence on Chinese counseling. Sgorbati argues that new approaches to the concept of xixin (cleansing the heart) and the Yijing among Chinese practitioners are compelling them to rethink that influence by refocusing their efforts on an ethical commitment to more culturally contextualized, xin-focused counseling.
Xin’s Contemporary Implications for Healing
At least two interrelated trends in China today engage Chinese cultural tradition and draw on the psycho-moral dimension of xin as healing resources. One is the so-called virtue healing, used to eliminate both psychological and physical illnesses. Virtue healing is practiced by those who continue to live out Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist doctrines. For example, Fisher (2024), in this issue, finds consensus that the heart contributes to healing, but there are similarities and differences among present-day Buddhist practitioners in their views of just how it does so.
Virtue healing is also active for generations of disciples of Wang Fengyi (1864-1937) in the rural areas of Northeast China, and we can think of it as a window onto indigenous psychology. Wang is the founder of a healing system roughly deemed “virtue healing” or “five-element healing through the emotions” (xing li liao bing, 性理療病, literally “treating disease through human nature principles”). Drawing from Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese medicine, Wang’s system of healing through emotional release, moral cultivation, and virtuous actions has persisted in China over the past century and spread to Taiwan and overseas. It continues to be practiced in rural northeastern China by local healers who successfully employ storytelling, lectures on virtue, personal confessions, and a set of five chanted affirmations modeled on the five elements to reverse any kinds of disease processes in patients. The “five elements” (wu xing 五行) consist of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, relating to one another in cycles of control or generation. In Chinese medicine, these five elements are associated with the liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and kidneys respectively, and their associated emotions. According to Wang, whose ideas diverge slightly from those of standard Chinese medicine theory, these five elements are also associated with the five virtues of empathy (ren仁), ritual and propriety (li禮), integrity and trust (xin 信), justice and righteousness (yi 義), and wisdom (zhi 智), as well as with the five vices of anger (nu 怒), hatred (hen恨), blame (yuan 怨), irritation and judgment (nao惱), and annoyance and disdain (fan煩). Wang argues, for instance, that people should embrace their roots in the service of xiao (“filial piety,” 孝loving service to one’s parents) as the foundation of self-cultivation and highest expression of the Dao in his system of healing (Zhou, 2013). Virtue healing embodies the interdependent self and aesthetic order, challenging the existing psychiatric diagnostic categories or instrumentalized co-opting of tradition by the government.
The other trend is loosely called “third-force psychological self-help” in China (Zheng, 2009), and within the healing boom and psycho-spiritual care in Japan since the 1980s (Benedict, 2024; Katsuno, 2011). Third-force integrates elements of (Chinese and Japanese) philosophy and other cultural and religious traditions into therapeutic practices to help people cope with distress and trauma. Most of the articles in this issue examine this trend but start with indigenous categories related to xin or kokoro and then engage matching Western concepts or theories. For example, Huang and Yang (2024) discuss the centrality of xin in classic music therapy through analysis of the revitalized interest in guqin as an example of holistic relationality and holistic psychological care, which however has been increasingly commercialized in China today.
This trend for psycho-social-spiritual care often adopts a psychomoral approach to address distress of varying intensities, for example, the ambiguous ya jiankang “subhealth”—a third state that is neither wellness nor sickness in China (Bunkenborg, 2014), akin to Barthes’s (2005) notion of weariness, defying the dyad of disease and health. This trend is most evident in a popular book entitled 《病由心灭》 “Diseases Are Eliminated by Xin” (Zhou, 2013). Drawing on ideas and principles from traditional Chinese medicine, Zhou highlights the significance of xin in both developing and curing diseases and distress. He pays particular attention to xin as a ruler of the body and master of one’s spirituality and morality, while adopting a spiritual and psychomoral approach to illness and distress. While xin is viewed as a stabilizing medium by Daoists and Neo-Confucianists, in third-force, we are reminded that this stillness cannot be too stagnant. Xin should flow like water. The flow of heart water is necessary to unmoor people from certain fixed objects (i.e., dwelling on “symptoms”) and allow them to follow the dynamic stream of life. This flow—or a chronotope of emergence—can be illustrated through a case of Morita therapy practiced in China.
Morita therapy, a Japanese therapeutic approach adopted in China to manage distress, arises from the understanding of the true self anchored in xin (based on Zen Buddhism). In my own research, a Morita counselor surnamed Wan pointed to fixation as the cause of distress, and flow as the solution, when illustrating the etiology and treatment of neurosis:
When we are flying a kite, if we only look up at the flying trace of the kite and don’t pay attention to the movement of our feet, we will be tripped over by obstacles on the road; if we only look down at the road and worry too much about falling, then we will miss the beauty of kite flying. The psychological state of natural coordination should be to look up to the sky from time to time while also paying attention to your feet from time to time.
A “heart” that is bound by the two at the same time and can switch back and forth is free—similar to the therapeutics of the neutral (Barthes, 2005; Schwartz, 2013)—ensuring the orderly flow of life, a form of aesthetic attunement. Wan even used the Buddhist conceptualization of wu chu sheng xin, “The heart has no place to dwell on,” to illustrate that one's attention should not be bound by any point but should be anchored to all the points of life.
Xin in a Hybrid Chinese-Western Model: Assessment and Ways Forward
Contributors of this special issue explore the understudied realm of “heart,” including its role in psychotherapeutic practices and its potential as the basis of a new affective and aesthetic template of care for contexts where heart has traditionally been centered—and beyond. In tracing the genealogy of xin and its aesthetic and affective orientation to its roots in classic works of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist philosophy, we open original research trajectories on mental health, subject formation, modes of governing using psychological tools, and responses by people seeking care. This work places psychology into a thoroughgoing dialogue with philosophy and anthropology. It showcases how philosophy and other elements of cultural tradition can be both the subject of ethnographic work and a critical tool used in its analysis, as well as a resource for healing (see Yang, 2022). That is, heart-focused psychological care may encourage people to treat their own cultural traditions as both a subject of study and resources for healing. However, the efficacy of healing is uncertain as the social structures that generate distress are embedded in the cultural traditions.
Yet the deeply embedded, malleable, and aesthetic characteristics of xin I have described here also interact with recent attention to the psyche and an individualistic ethos in China’s psychoboom. This mishmash has rendered psychological practice in China multivalent and chaotic. While the integration of Chinese cultural traditions in psychotherapies de-medicalizes counseling, it also popularizes psychology as part of everyday ethics and practice. In other words, there is no end in sight for the psychoboom. As tradition is revitalized for political and social ends, the populace appears to be compelled to get to know itself. There are multiple ways that xin both obliges people to know themselves better and opens the door to hybrids of Chinese and Euro-American psychology.
While many scholars have criticized the dominance of Euro-American psychological care, we contribute to the humanities and social sciences by developing a template for possible alternative care derived from a specific cultural tradition (that values an “aesthetic”—artful, affective, non-linear—order more than rational thinking). Revitalizing tradition taps into the aesthetic order associated with the Confucian tradition—that is, the ontological specificity of the Chinese situation that focuses on particulars and their optimal orientation to appropriate orders in order to form unity or harmony. It also goes further by stressing xin-focused vitality and dynamism and by invoking both aesthetics and affect. People respond to new therapeutic offerings within revitalization because of xin, but also because xin is the foundation for the way they are already operating in the world through its unique chronotope of emergence. When therapies mix xin with Euro-American biomedical approaches, it is like adding sugar to the medicine. The sweetness of xin provides open-mindedness, or critical and rich neutrality, and the option not to choose between entrenched dyads of “psyche” and “soma.”
This special issue provides new perspectives and new tools to assess hybrid Chinese/Japanese–Western healing methods. Whether there should be a move to augment heart-focused therapies and/or reject the incursion of Euro-American treatment modalities is a question all of us involved in this special issue are eager to discuss, as we grapple with the centrality of the heart in China and Japan’s healing boom. We look forward to keeping this lively conversation going.
