溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is My Body Entirely My Own?
If my body was received and passed on from my parents — is it entirely my possession, or does it belong to something beyond me?
Body, hair, and skin are received from one's parents; not daring to harm them is the beginning of filial care.
The Classic's question — that the body is received from parents — sits within the lineage split over ownership of the body. Confucianism saw the body as carried on beyond the individual to lineage and ancestors, to be guarded with care. The Christian tradition reached a kindred place on other grounds — the body is a temple given by God, not to be done with as one pleases. But modernity turned the course. Locke held that "every person has a property in their own body," setting the body as private property, and this notion of self-ownership runs today into bodily self-determination. Is the body something inherited and guarded, or one's own full possession? The lineage split.
The more an age makes bodily self-determination a central value, the more this question — is my body entirely my own? — asks after the tension between freedom and inheritance.
The Classic of Filial Piety places the first step of filial care in an unexpected spot: before tending one's parents comes not harming one's own body.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
The Classic of Filial Piety places the first step of filial care in an unexpected spot: before tending one's parents comes not harming one's own body. This body was not made by me alone but received and passed on from my parents, and so is not mine alone. I read this question as cracking the modern sense of the body as wholly private property. My body is mine and at the same time comes from those before me, and perhaps to be carried on to those after. Do I regard this body as only my possession, or as something inherited? I stand before this question too.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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