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8. Brindley, Individualism in Early China. 132; and Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China, 408–410. Joseph Chan (“Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties and Confucianism,” 281–310) has identified the elements of individual autonomy in the Confucian interpretation of man. See Fuehrer, “Considerations on the Question of Individualism,” 1–31. Other authors (e.g., Yu Yingshi, Zhongguo Jinshi Zongjiao Lunli; de Bary, “Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought”; de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China; and de Bary and Tu Wei-ming, Confucianism and Human Rights, 29) have also acknowledged the individual and the role of self in late Ming Neo-Confucianism.

9. See also the paragraph “Hedonism and Individualism” in Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness, 44–49; Berthel, “Language in Zhuangzi,” 562–576. The question is made more complicated by the different meanings attributed to the concepts of self, conformity, conformism, and by the value attributed to Daoist skepticism about the possibility of ever attaining true knowledge or self-realization. Brindley (Individualism in Early China, 128) acknowledges that ancient thinkers “advocated homogenous forms of social behaviors in agreement with universal laws or forces of the cosmos, and they thereby encouraged the effacement of dangerous individual or private ambitions and desires. In contrast to our own notion of conformity, which signifies the degradation of the self, conformist behaviors in early China dignified the self by helping preserve individual responsibility with respect to a universal goal and cosmic relationship. Notions of conformity encouraged all individuals to participate in the public good through a collective system of justice, ethics, or cosmic power.” The difference between conformism and “harmony-affability” is remarked also by Confucius in Lunyu, Zilu 子路, 23 (君子和而不同，小人同而不和). Moreover, Brindley points out that in Zhuangzi, “individual relationship to the Dao is characterized not by dependence on political institutions or the central figure of the sovereign, but by direct, individual access to it through one’s own person” (Brindley, Individualism in Early China, 55). On the specific individualism of Zhuangzi, see Xu Keqian, “A Different Type of Individualism in Zhuangzi.” Other aspects that cannot be discussed here concern the analogy of the Daoist “innate nature” in Neidan 內丹 self-cultivation texts and the “Buddha nature” (see, for instance, Pregadio, “Destiny, Vital Force, or Existence?,” 157–218).

10. On the “Buddha nature” in every individual, See King, Buddha Nature; and Hershock, Chan Buddhism, 49–53, 129–130.