Abstract
In the study of world religions, the English term soul appears to be one of the primary concerns, yet its various meanings overlap considerably in different religions. In order to understand what soul may mean in a given culture, we need to let the religious idea speak for itself in its native context, without presuming a lexical and philosophical commensurability between the English term soul and its counterparts in other cultures. In the case of early China, scholars have often rendered a family of Chinese terminology as soul without any explanation or justification. Such practice not only fails to note the specific context in which a particular terminology was used, but it also implicitly presumes the unidimensional meaning of soul and its universal usage in all human cultures.2 Different contexts in this case often involve different speakers for the beliefs related to the human soul, and it is not always true that two identical terms for soul used by different speakers were always lexically commensurable, whether they lived around the same time, or they came from the same region, or they shared a similar social
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