ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ideas about the senses from Early China (c. 500 bce–100 ce) in ways that move beyond my first study of sense discrimination in On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (2002). Exploring a broader range of genres, it proposes new implications related to the uses of the metaphor, guan 官 (office, officials), to refer to the eyes, ears, nose, etc. It also posits an additional way of thinking about knowledge on the basis of early Chinese depictions of the eye and ear parallels that suggest a slight superiority of hearing skills over those related to sight.
