Abstract

Whether human nature is good or bad and how this is related to self-cultivation was a subject of debate among thinkers in early China. This essay analyses the interrelationship of the key concepts human nature, human emotions/feelings/affective tendency as manifested xing, and heart-mind in the Guodian manuscript Nature Derives from Endowment discovered in 1993 in Hubei province. The intellectual engagements evident in this Guodian text emerge as more syncretic and dynamic than those that can be found in the discourse of any single tradition, such as Gaozi, Mencius, or Xunzi. Its theory of human nature and moral cultivation reveals the existence of a possibly more diverse intellectual discourse from which the different foci of philosophical debate represented by later thinkers developed.