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of Universal Life. Such a theory may be called ‘Organicism’ as applied to the world at large” [Fang, The Chinese View of Life. 50]; “[f]or according to Western ideas, sequent change would be the realm in which causality operates mechanically; but the Book of Changes takes sequent change to be the succession of the generations, that is still something organic” [Wilhelm, quoted by Fang]. See also Needham’s notion of “biogenerative” (Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 281–291). See also note 14 of this chapter.

18. In Europe, for example, the concept of the self and the interest in the inward life were not the same at the time of Plato and Aristotle or in Lucretius’ work. Augustine (354–430) elaborated on the notion of liberum arbitrium, hence engendering a remarkable evolution of ideas of responsibility, guilt, repentance, and retribution.

19. Bloom (“On the Matter of Mind,” 293–327) presents the differences between Western and Chinese traditions in terms of perception of choices, ultimate values, conflictual intensity, tension between rationality, and desires as well as avoidance of distraction of the mind.

20. Ibid., 314–315.

21. Borrowing Sommer’s words, “there is no set of conditions for moral responsibility that applies universally, and therefore no theory of moral responsibility is objectively correct” (Sommers, Relative Justice, 5).

22. See note 2 of this chapter.

23. See Lackner’s discussion on the way Buglio rendered “free will” in his Chinese translation of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Summa theologica’ into Chinese (“Some Preliminary Remarks on the First Chinese Translation,” 31–32).

24. The English equivalent in parentheses are only part of possible meanings of the characters. Marchal and Wenzel (“Chinese Perspectives on Free Will”) have singled out the following key terms that may be comparable to Western concepts: (1) xin 心 (heart-mind) and zhi 志, “mind’s direction”; (2) xing 性 (human nature, characteristic tendencies, inborn capacity); (3) ming 命 (lifespan, fate, command, allotment, endowment); (4) ziran 自然 (self-so, so of itself, nature, spontaneity).

25. Sor-hoon Tan (Confucian Democracy, 50) proposes “personal commitment” rather than “will.”

26. It is impossible to cover the large corpus of works on the concept of human nature. I recommend David Wong’s “Early Confucian Philosophy” for its stimulating discussion on xing’s dynamic moral disposition in ancient Confucianism. Wong’s essay takes into consideration recent