Persons, Roles, and Minds where some literary cases, like those of Pu Songling’s Wang Liulang, Dong Yue’s Wukong, Tang Xianzu’s Liu Mengmei and Kong Shangren’s Li Xiangjun, are extensively examined (1–15, 63–73, 125–126, 165–184, 290). Other aspects of self perception are discussed by Nakatani (“Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan),” 73–94), focusing on portraits and self-encomia (zizan 自贊)，which involve the ethical tension of self-cultivation, identity and image, contrast between selfish perspective and the objective selfless perspective of self, the Ming evolution with the flutter of the self’s unstable boundaries, the fluidity of the sense of self.

19. The debated question if the self is to be dissolved or valued is parallel with the lack of consensus on the Daoist concept of selfhood. To put it simply, the (natural) self to be valued is not the same (conventional and artificial) self to be dissolved. The ethical, political and historical selves are little more than dead ashes of an “empty potential” (Chai, “Nothingness and Selfhood in the Zhuangzi”). In the sentence “Now I have lost myself” (wu sang wo 吾喪我), as Xu Keqian (“A Different Type of Individualism in Zhuangzi,” 458) observes, there are two different “selves”: “The first is the original and innate self, which is as free, open, and spontaneous as the Dao itself; the other is the socially constructed self, which is fixed, closed, and constrained by his or her worldly existence” The apparent paradox leads to the specific language of each system and to the difficulty of a comparative analysis of a concept within two different civilizations. The problem of comparative analysis is not only linguistic—the semantic value of words and their equivalents do not correspond—but involves categorization discrepancies; a concept in a culture and its “corresponding” concept in another culture are not overlapping, and each concept is interacting with a chain of other concepts. As David Wong (“Comparative Philosophy: Chinese and Western,” quoted by King “Rudimentary Remarks on comparing ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman ethics,” 3) notes, comparing different systems is to bring together different “traditions that have developed in relative isolation from one another and that are defined quite broadly along cultural and regional lines.” This difficulty is evident for instance in the case of the concept of “self.” Analogous difficulties concern the understanding of the individualism and spontaneity of the ‘eccentrics’ of the Wei-Jin period, their commitment to freedom of their true-self (renshi 任實), giving free rein to naturalness (ren ziran 任自然), that implied a concept of freedom and autonomy by envisaging both “following one’s inclinations”