Sarah Allan (Dartmouth College)

In The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (1997), Sarah Allan argued that water and plant life provided root metaphors for some of the most important early Chinese philosophical concepts and that understanding how natural imagery informed these concepts sheds light on their relationships and range of meaning as abstract ideas. These concepts included yin 陰, yang 陽, and qi 氣. Yin and yang were terms associated with mountainous landscape; yin was the shaded side of a river valley; yang was the sunny side of a mountain slope. Qi, originally water vapor, became an abstract concept modeled on water in all its manifestations, from vapor in the atmosphere to running water to ice. (read more at event page)