身 (Shēn) — The Body

Say "shen," level and flat. Twenty lines across nine chapters — and it went without an entry longer than almost any word this size, because it looked too ordinary to need one.

Locked: 身 → "body." (Never "spirit," never "soul." Never "self" either — but that one is a ruling no check can hold, and it is the rendering this character actually attracts, so it has a section of its own below.)

In the two lifespan compounds 終身 and 没身 the character marks the span of a life — "to the end of your days."

The graph: a person with the belly marked

身，躳也。象人之身。从人𠂆聲。 "身 is 躬 (gōng — the trunk). It depicts a person's 身. From 人 (rén — a person), with 𠂆 as the sound." — 說文解字

The oracle-bone graph is a person drawn in profile with the abdomen swollen, and that swelling is the entire difference between this character and 人, which is the same profile drawn plain. 說文's phonetic analysis is the part to set aside — 段玉裁 (Duàn Yùcái), whose 說文解字注 is the standard commentary on the dictionary, calls the 从人𠂆聲 reading an error. It is a pictograph. Nothing in it was borrowed for sound.

And the oldest sense the word is attested in is pregnancy. The 詩經 (Shī Jīng — the Book of Odes) has it in 大明, on the mother of the Zhou dynasty's founding king:

大任有身，生此文王 "Da Ren had 身, and bore this King Wen."

有身 — to have a 身 — was how you said a woman was carrying. The sense later migrated to 孕 (yùn — pregnant), a character coined to take it back, and 身 and 孕 are cognate.

A calibration, so the entry stays honest: we do not claim Laozi heard pregnancy in the word. By the fourth century BCE 身 was the ordinary word for a body, and 孕 had long since taken the narrower job.

What survives the migration is the shape of the thing. 身 is not a neutral word for a person. It is a person seen as something that carries, and can be burdened. 河上公 (Héshàng Gōng) reaches for exactly that at chapter 9 — 財多累身, "much wealth burdens the 身" — and again at 44, 財利不累身. And chapter 13's 為吾有身 is, character for character, the Odes' idiom: because I have a 身. The chapter's claim is that having one is how you come to be carrying 大患 (dà huàn — great trouble).

The lived person, and why the word is still "body"

身 is the physical, finite person — but a physical person as this tradition understands one, which is not a body with a mind bolted on. Chapter 54's 修之於身 (cultivate it in the 身) does not ask whether the practice is somatic or psychological, because the question has not been invented yet. 河上公 glosses the line:

修道於身，愛氣養神，益壽延年 "Cultivate the Tao in the 身: cherish the 氣 (qì — breath), nourish the 神 (shén — spirit), increase longevity and extend the years."

Read that carefully, because it is not a merger. The 身 is the site; 氣 and 神 are what is nourished in it. He runs the same structure as a political analogy right through the book — 治身 (governing the body) set beside 治國 (governing the state), at 9, 26 and 44 — and at 26 he makes the dependency explicit: 治身不重則失神, "govern the 身 without weight, and you lose the 神."

This is why the English is a plain word rather than a careful one. The lived person, the embodied self, the psychosomatic whole — each of these describes 身 accurately and none of them can go in a verse line. They are labels for the concept, and a label is not a rendering. English body is also, of the two obvious candidates, the less dualist: modern self is almost entirely interior, the mind's side of the very split this tradition does not make, while body is at least the whole organism. Context carries the rest. No reader takes "cultivate this in your body" for calisthenics.

What 身 is weighed against

Across the nine chapters, 身 is weighed against 名 (míng — reputation) and 貨 (huò — goods) at chapter 44, against 功 (gōng — merit and office) at chapter 9, and against 大患 (dà huàn — great trouble) at chapter 13. The class is everything a person could acquire — and 天下 (tiān xià — all under the sky, the world) is simply the maximum of that class.

The three chapters that put 身 and 天下 in one line — 13, 26 and 54 — are the axis at full scale, and the answer is the same every time: the body is the thing that is not worth trading, and the world is what you are offered for it. 王弼 (Wáng Bì) puts the exchange in one clause at 44: 得多利而亡其身，何者為病也 — "to gain much profit and lose your body — which of these is the affliction?"

Chapter 54 is the same axis stretched into a ladder — 身 → 家 (jiā — family) → 鄉 (xiāng — community) → 國 (guó — state) → 天下 — with the body as the first rung and the world as the last. The chapter's second stanza walks the ladder back down, and its first step, 以身觀身, is 河上公's most concrete gloss in the chapter: 以修道之身觀不修道之身，孰亡孰存也 — "observe the body that has cultivated the Tao against the body that has not: which perishes and which survives?"

Chapter 7, where the body is the whole point

The clearest case for the plain word is the chapter that most tempts you away from it. Chapter 7 opens on 天長地久 — the sky is long, the earth enduring — and asks why:

以其不自生，故能長生。是以聖人後其身而身先，外其身而身存。 "Because they do not live for themselves, therefore they can live long. So the sage puts their body last, and their body comes first; puts their body outside, and their body survives."

存 (cún — to remain in existence) answers 長生 (cháng shēng — long life) directly, and 身 stands four times in eleven characters. 河上公 reads it with no metaphor whatever: 百姓愛之如父母…故身常存, "the people love them as parents… therefore their body constantly survives." The chapter is an argument that the one who does not grab outlasts, on the model of sky and earth. A self does not survive. A body does.

The homophones, and the near-neighbours

Four characters sit close enough to this one to cause real trouble, and two of them are near-homophones. This is the same hazard 保 (bǎo — keep safe) carries against 寶 (bǎo — treasure); see bao-保.md.

神 against 身 is the sharpest of these. 河上公 sets them in one couplet at chapter 9 — 嗜欲傷神，財多累身, "craving harms the spirit; much wealth burdens the body" — and the distinction is doing work, not decorating. Rendered the same, his sentence says nothing twice.

What is set aside

"spirit" is 神's, and 神 is the character 身 is defined against. It also inverts lines outright: 及吾無身 becomes "if I had no spirit, what trouble would I have?", which reverses chapter 13, where the trouble comes precisely from being embodied and exposed.

"soul" imports a separable, immortal thing the text does not have anywhere. Already refused for 精 on the same grounds.

"self" is 我/吾's, and at chapter 7 it is also 私's. Put it on 身 and the four lines that make chapter 7's argument read their selves endure… they have no private self… their private self is fulfilled — three selves, two characters, and the distinction 王弼 spells out (無私者，無為於身也 — "to have no 私 is to not-do with regard to the 身") becomes invisible. There is a second cost: body and self used by turns, physical line and interior line, performs in English exactly the division between the biological and the psychological that this tradition does not make. Choosing between them chapter by chapter is not sensitivity to context. It is a dualism, imported and then attributed to the text.

"person" is the right width and belongs to 人 (rén), which stands beside 身 in six of these nine chapters.

"life" is 生 (shēng — to live), across some twenty lines, and chapter 7 needs both words in adjacent clauses.

"flesh" is narrower than the character and the register is Pauline. It fails the hymn test on sight.

"being" turns a thing you can point at into an abstract noun, and abstraction is the direction every overlay in this book travels. It is also the wrong size: 身 is finite, particular, and yours.

The one flexion, declared

In 終身 (zhōng shēn — to the finish of the 身) and 没身 (mò shēn — to the sinking of the 身), the character marks the span of a life rather than the flesh: chapter 16's 没身不殆 and chapter 52's 没身不殆, 終身不勤, 終身不救. Both compounds read to the end of your days. This is metonymy the Chinese performs, not a licence taken in the English — the body standing in for the time a body lasts — and it is stated here so that the four lines are visibly an exception rather than a drift.

What no rule can enforce

"self" is ruled out in the verse, and it is not on the forbidden: list, because it cannot be. Those are two different facts and the difference matters: the ruling holds, and the enforcement does not exist. check_locks.py gates on whether a character stands in that chapter's own Chinese, and 身 shares chapter 7 with 私 and chapters 13, 16 and 54 with 我/吾 — all of which may legitimately print self. A rule keyed to 身's presence would fire on their lines. So spirit and soul are held by the build; self is held only by this entry and by the reader.

(The list does carry "the separate self" and "the ego", which are narrower strings no other character can claim. They block the two specific overlays that have actually appeared — the Advaita reading at chapter 13, and the psychoanalytic one. They do not block the plain word.)

And the collision with 神 is invisible to every check in this repository, for the opposite reason: 神 appears in chapters 6, 29, 39 and 60, and 身 in 7, 9, 13, 16, 26, 44, 52, 54 and 66. They share no chapter at all, so the evidence gate can never see them meet. Only concordance.py --english "spirit" finds it, run by hand. This is the same two-way blindness that hid 固 and 壯 inside chapters that contained 強.

Left open

私 (sī) has no entry, and reads two ways — private self at chapter 7, the self at chapter 19. Chapter 7 cannot be finished until it is settled, because 身 and 私 share the stanza and the whole point is that they differ.

Whether 終身 and 没身 should converge. They are different compounds — 終 (zhōng — to finish) against 没 (mò — to sink under) — and the English currently treats them as one idiom. That may be right, and it may be flattening a distinction the text is making about how a life ends.