Glossary

Shen

The text below is adapted from emails between Wilson Pitts and Dr. Shawn Eichman:

From Wilson Pitts to Shawn Eichman:

I am struggling with names, spellings, and correct usage in the website text for:  "shen," "shenren", "hsien", "xian," and "yuren".

Ken Cohen said, "The ancient ideogram for sage [hsien] meant "to fly" and pictured a feathered shaman dancing with a rattle."

The catalogue for the Art Institute of Chicago, Taoism and the Arts of China, said, "Both the Zhuangzi and the Liezi describe winged beings (yuren) who had transcended the bonds of yin and yang, i.e. existed beyond time and space.  They lived on sacred mountains in a numinous realm removed from the world of humans."

Both texts describe such beings as "shenren", literally "divine men" (also translated as Holy man, or realized being) using the character "shen" that usually denotes a god or spirit.  Their characteristics are similar to early descriptions of "xian" - adepts or immortals - beings that have broken the bonds of the phenomenal reality through union with the Tao.

Kosta Danaos, says in his book, Nei Kung:  The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages, that:

the word "hsien" is composed of the ideograms for mountain and man and means just that.  The perfected immortal human or "hsien" is a central figure of religious Taoism.  Through breath control and movement of one's chi they achieved immortality through the nourishment within of the embryonic "spirit body" [shen].

Response from Shawn Eichman:

A few notes on Chinese translation:

The character on the left is called the "radical" and indicates meaning.  The character on the right indicates pronunciation.

Some very tough terms to translate …

Shen is commonly translated as "spirit."

In Chinese this term consists of two parts:  on the left, the radical for "vision," and on the right, the character for "extension," also pronounced shen.

I often think of shen as meaning "extended vision" or "insight," but I don't know if that is part of the classical tradition.  The primary use of the "vision" radical is for many characters relating to spirits or the divine, rather than its original meaning of "vision."

So, shen can mean "spirit" as in "deity" or "spirit" as in "inner spirit, or a sense of insight beyond the norm", and shen is even used as the highest aesthetic standard in art (the best works are described as shen), indicating unusual insight and innate talent beyond training or technical skill on the part of the artist.

Shenren literally transates as something like "spirit person," and indicates someone who has developed their insight/spiritual energy far beyond the norm, rising to something like a divine status.

Concerning the "embryonic spirit body" you mentioned, perhaps this refers to the inner alchemical process of refining "jing" (essence, including semen) to "qi" to "shen"?

Hsien (Wade-Giles) or xian (pinyin) is often used in a similar way.  The modern character does indeed use the "person" radical on the left as a meaning indicator, and the character "shan" or mountain on the right as a pronunciation indicator ("shan" is close to "xian")  The "mountain person," or maybe ascetic or hermit as a more resonant translation, indicated by the composition of the character is intriguing, and the Chinese played with it, but "xian" could also be written with a more complex variant (the one that Ken mentions), and using the easy-to-write "shan" (mountain) on the right seems to have first been a convenient shorthand, and maybe only later contributed an extra layer of meaning.  Regardless, "xian" have always been closely associated with the mountains.  "Xian" is commonly translated as "immortal," and like shen, implies someone who has retreated from society to develop their spiritual insight to a very high degree, becoming a more divine kind of being.

Yuren literally means "feathered person."  There is an old association between birds and spirits in China (as in Egypt and many other cultures).  By the Han Dynasty, if not earlier, depictions of anthropomorphic figures with wings in funerary art were quite common.  There was a definite connection between "yuren" and "xian", with surviving accounts (see the Han stele in the Taoism catalogue) of hermits who spent years in trees, not touching the ground, in order to develop their spiritual insight.  In some contexts, "yuren" and "xian" have more of a sense of nature spirit than shen, which implies a more lofty nature, and in later Taoist hierarchies of spiritual beings "yuren" or "xian" are usually lower down than shen.

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