Cognitive Linguistics 14–2/3 (2003), 141–165 0936–5907/03/0014–0141 © Walter de Gruyter Chinese metaphors of thinking NING YU* Abstract This article studies two of the four special cases, namely THINKING IS MOVING and THINKING IS SEEING, that constitute the metaphor system THE MIND IS A BODY in Chinese. An analysis of linguistic data suggests that these two con- ceptual metaphors are grounded in our common bodily experiences of spatial movement and vision. It shows that the conceptualization of mind and mental activities is fundamentally structured by metaphors consisting of mappings from the domain of body and bodily experiences. It is found that, while the Chinese expressions under analysis largely conform to the conceptual map- pings originally derived from linguistic evidence in English (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), there exists a difference between these two languages that reflects a significant difference between the related cultures. That is, West- ern cultures’ binary contrast between the heart, the seat of emotions, and the mind, the locus of thoughts, does not exist in traditional Chinese culture, where the heart is conceptualized as housing both emotions and thoughts. It is a case in which different cultural models interpret the functioning of the mind and the body differently. Keywords: thinking; conceptual metaphor; linguistic manifestation; bodily experience; cultural model; embodied mind. 1. Introduction During the past two decades, cognitive science has seriously challenged the fundamental assumption that most of our thinking about the world is lit- eral, directly corresponding to an external reality. The results of cognitive linguistic studies show that human minds are embodied, and thinking and reasoning are largely metaphorical and imaginative, shaped by the human body (e.g., Gibbs 1994; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson