The word's field
Xìng names the nature a thing has from birth. The graph joins the "heart-mind" element (see xīn) to a phonetic that also writes shēng, "to be born, to grow," and the etymology holds the two senses together: xìng is what grows out of a living thing's constitution, the heart-mind's given tendency before instruction shapes it. In the earliest usage the word stays close to the biological — the nature of an ox to be an ox, of water to run downward — and the philosophical career of the term is the long argument over whether the human case is more than biological.
That argument is the central debate of the classical Chinese tradition. Mencius holds that xìng is good, that the tendencies toward benevolence and rightness are native sprouts requiring cultivation, not manufacture. Xunzi answers that xìng is raw, and that goodness is deliberate artifice worked upon it. The received Analects records Confucius saying little about xìng directly, and later Confucians built their systems in the space that reticence left open. In the Daoist register the accent falls differently: xìng is what the sage protects from interference, the given grain that flourishes unforced and is damaged by contrivance, so that the word aligns less with a program of cultivation than with the argument against tampering. The commentarial tradition, above all the Neo-Confucian synthesis of the Song, would fuse xìng with the cosmic pattern lǐ, making inborn nature the local presence of a universal order — but that fusion reads back into a word whose classical range is narrower and more contested.
In the corpus
Our corpus records xìng 60 times across 3 works. The distribution is steeply weighted toward one text: the Mencius carries 37 of the 60 occurrences, more than the other two works combined. The Daodejing in the Wang Bi recension follows with 21, and the Analects trails with only 2.
The shape of that distribution matches the shape of the tradition's memory. Xìng is a Mencian keyword: the Mencius is where the doctrine that human nature is good receives its sustained defense, and the concentration of the lemma there reflects a text organized around the term. The scarcity in the Analects is equally telling — the tradition itself preserved a remark that the Master's words on xìng were rarely to be heard, and the corpus count of two bears that out. The strong Daodejing presence shows the word was live in the Daoist register as well, though, as the citations below show, it surfaces there inside a different set of concerns.
Canonical moments
The corpus citations for xìng land in the Daodejing, and they gather around the text's argument about what happens when the given nature of things is left alone or forced.
At Daodejing 32 the word stands in the chapter on the uncarved simplicity of the Way, the register in which xìng means the native condition that needs no naming or shaping to be complete. Daodejing 25 sits in the chapter that names the Way as prior to heaven and earth and models itself on what is so of itself; here the surrounding argument places inborn nature within the larger claim that the Way's own conduct is to follow what is naturally so.
The clustered occurrences at Daodejing 29 — the lemma surfaces three times in this chapter — fall in the passage warning against trying to take the world and act upon it, where the sage removes excess and forcing. This is the Daoist counter-position to a cultivation program: the given nature is not raw material to be worked but a grain to be spared. Daodejing 36, where the word appears twice, stands in the chapter on the subtle logic by which the soft overcomes the hard, locating xìng inside the text's account of how things move by their own tendency rather than by imposition.
These loci show xìng doing Daoist rather than Mencian work in our corpus record: not the seed of virtue to be cultivated, but the native disposition to be protected from interference. The heaviest concentration of the lemma — the 37 occurrences in the Mencius — is not itself indexed to stable citation surfaces in this packet, so the Mencian doctrine that gives the word its fame stands behind the corpus counts here rather than in the walkable loci.
The word's world
Xìng is the Chinese tradition's word for the given, and it sits at the center of a family of soul-terms that divide the person into what is native and what is achieved. Against the heart-mind xīn, the seat where nature is felt and deliberated upon, xìng is the constitution the heart-mind starts from; against the vital breath qì, which flows and can be cultivated, xìng is the settled disposition that breath animates; against shén, the spirit or numinous clarity, xìng is the humbler biological floor. It pairs most often with mìng, the mandate or allotment, in the standing phrase that couples inborn nature to what heaven decrees, and it stands in a constant relation to tiān, heaven, as the source from which nature is received. Where dào is the way things go and dé the power a thing has by conforming to it, xìng is the particular grain each creature is given to conform.
The word's problem — whether the native disposition is already good, or merely raw until worked — is a problem other traditions pose in their own vocabularies. It rhymes with the Buddhist analysis of citta, the mind luminous by nature yet defiled by adventitious afflictions, and with the Upanishadic ātman, the self that one most fundamentally is prior to all becoming. It shares a horizon, too, with the Greek psychē and the ancient argument, common to Greece and China alike, over whether excellence is native or trained. Xìng names the site of that argument in Chinese: the birth-given nature, contested ground between those who would cultivate it and those who would only keep it from harm.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). Cross-references: xīn, qì, shén, mìng, tiān, dào, dé, citta, ātman.