Abstract Efforts to understand unfamiliar philosophical and religious traditions are often constrained by hermeneutical limitations rooted in the dominance of Western conceptual frameworks. This paper advances embodied hermeneutics as a general model for intercultural understanding—one that grounds interpretation in lived and material expressions of meaning rather than in textual or theoretical abstraction alone. It develops two interrelated and mutually reinforcing strategies: reasoning through exemplary lives, which approaches understanding through imaginative engagement with figures who embody a tradition's ideals; and object‐based understanding, which interprets the material artefacts that give those ideals visible and tangible form. Drawing on Chinese traditions as a test case, the paper shows how these two modes of embodiment illuminate and sustain one another, revealing the unity of moral cultivation and material expression in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist contexts. The Chinese example demonstrates, in concrete terms, how an embodied hermeneutics can bridge cultural divides by transforming both understanding and the self. The resulting framework offers a model that extends the methodological resources of comparative philosophy, intercultural education, and museum practice in a pluralistic world.
Victoria S. Harrison (Thu,) studied this question.