ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Confucian ren ai is a corporeal and living human love that involves emotion and desire, and that Confucian ethics are the formative-exemplary ethics of virtue based on moral exemplification. The core of the intimateness lies in the interactive caring and loving, including different types of convergence, influence and communication among individual entities or ti. According to Confucian understanding, the intimateness involves aspects of physical nearness connected to the human body. The concept contained in the Confucian idea of body is that of bodily-based "gradated area" such as "intimate relations" and "regions" that extend accordingly outward to others. According to Roger Ames, the most common conception of body in Western traditions is that of a vessel, but in Chinese tradition the body is seen as characteristically organic. In terms of philosophy, the general understanding of "body" arises from the traditional Chinese cosmological understanding of the world as an organic whole.
