1. Several scholars (from Elvin to Munro, from Ames to Du Weiming and de Bary, just to name a few) have dealt with the concept of the self in Chinese culture. On the concept of self, see the first part of this volume.

2. There is no agreement among modern scholars on definitions and scope of personality, and this lack of consensus is across several disciplines, including neuroscience, anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Gordon Allport, who has done an in-depth inquiry on this field, describes personality as a dynamic organization of psychophysical systems including behavior, thinking and feeling as manifested “inside” the subject. D. W. MacKinnon defines personality by the following attributes: a) the role one assumes or the status one has achieved in society; b) one’s external appearance (including one’s attractiveness); c) the reactions of others to the individual as a stimulus—the so-called person’s “social stimulus value.” The self is a category centered on the internal investigation which the subject makes from a first-person perspective. For an examination of the elements of personality in Chinese traditional culture, see Materials for an Anatomy of Personality in Late Imperial China (Santangelo); and for a pioneering cross-cultural study, Culture and Self: Asian and Western Perspectives (Marsella, Devos, and Hsu) and Personality and Person Perceptions Across Cultures (edited by Lee, McCauley, and Draguns, 3–22). Controversial too is the concept of “identity,” which has been studied from psychological, anthropological and social perspectives. For a recent attempt of a critical rethinking of “identity” and its ideological constructions, see The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah. In his enquiry in “Finding the Self in the Analects,” Lo Yuet Keung, by analyzing the concept of the self through various terms in the Analects, demonstrates the full cognition of an authentic identity of the self (ji) and its full expression (shen) in pre-imperial China. Ji is the true self, can be controlled and guided so that desires and determination are morally positive.

3. J.S.M. Lau, “Duty, Reputation, and Selfhood in Traditional Chinese Narrative,” 367.

4. For a general survey, see “Cultural Influences on Personality” by Suh and Triandis. Markus and Kitayama (“The Cultural Psychology of Personality” and “The Cultural Construction of Self and Emotion”) focus on