A diagram of the “Heart” (心) from the Han Kitab tradition, a classical Sino-Islamic intellectual heritage. The Arabic word for Allah is written within the Chinese character for “heart” (心).
At its core, East Asian thought may be understood as a sustained reflection on the harmony of the Three Powers (三才): Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Heaven signifies the transcendent, the divine order; Earth, the macrocosmic field in which that order unfolds; and Humanity, the microcosm in which it is received, embodied, and realized. The task of human life, therefore, is not merely to exist within this triadic structure, but to bring it into alignment within oneself.
This alignment is not achieved through abstract speculation alone, but through practice. In the classical vocabulary, it is cultivated through li (ritual propriety), which disciplines the body, refines perception, and ultimately purifies the heart. Through this process, the human being becomes an ethical subject, one whose inner state resonates with the order of Heaven and Earth. This is what is called the Way (Dao): not simply a path to be followed, but a mode of being in which the human stands in right relation to the totality of existence.
Muslim scholars in China inherited this conceptual world and did not reject it; rather, they rearticulated it from within the horizon of Islamic revelation. The harmony of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity came to be understood in light of divine unity (tawḥīd), and the cultivation of the heart was expressed through practices such as remembrance (dhikr). The ethical and cosmological language of the Chinese tradition thus became a vessel through which Islamic metaphysics could be expressed without rupture.
What emerges from this synthesis is neither a simple translation nor a superficial adaptation, but a deeply rooted intellectual tradition: one in which the purification of the heart is at once Confucian self-cultivation and Islamic remembrance, and in which the center of the human being is understood as the locus where the divine order is reflected.
The following passage offers a concise yet profound exposition of the “heart” from a classical Chinese Islamic text of the Han Kitab tradition.
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All that belongs to the subtle and the numinous
comes into being by reliance upon the inner center, the hidden core.
Yet the heart itself abides not as a fixed and enduring substance.
In man there is but one heart.
This is the true heart of man.
This true heart enfolds the Three Powers:
it contains Heaven,
and within this interval, it also contains Earth.
At its very center stands the Throne of the Lord.
The seal of the heart is that by which it is praised and brought to light;
and in truth, it is none other than the heart itself.
This seal is established upon the Way as its foundation.
Existence is governed according to how it is taken up and how it is set aside,
and in each moment, it turns in reverence toward the myriad unveilings of the True.
All the holy ones—the prophets—receive this, uphold it,
and guard the Center.
For the one who attains its essence,
the prophets and the friends of Allah are his guides and teachers.
And the essence of guarding the Center is, in the end, this alone:
to hold ever within the heart and upon the tongue the testimony,
“La ilaha illa Allah,”
and to abide therein without ceasing
this is what is meant by “to keep it ever in mind and ever to dwell therein.”