ABSTRACT
If Oriental psychology has evolved a highly attuned and articulated sense of the forms of human life (individual and collective) it has done so, unwittingly perhaps, at the expense of human representation. Society abounds in rituals to live by, in relational engagements, marriage, family life, community affairs, politics, religion. One presents the self in these forms and in so doing will inevitably find idioms of formal being that are valid hybrids of conventional forms. As discussed, The Book of Rites is a manual on how to behave, but it must be read along with The Book of Songs if one is to appreciate how the Chinese see form – the form of a poem, the form of behaviour – as strikingly similar projects. There is no such sense, or depth of comprehension, of the formal presentation of self in the Occidental world.
