Giulio Aleni was an Italian Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century China, whose many Chinese publications included a substantial work on human nature, modestly, and disingenuously, entitled Xingxue cushu (A brief introduction to the study of human nature). The book's contents consist mostly of adaptations of two of Aristotle's works in Latin translation, De anima and Parva naturalia, as commented on extensively by the Jesuits at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. While scholars have long been aware of the source of this intercultural translation, Meynard and Pan have for the first time established the intertextuality of the Latin and Chinese texts, and the position of Aleni's translation in the larger context of Jesuit publications in the China mission. While careful textual work was undertaken by Meynard and Pan, two professors of philosophy at Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, their work has benefitted from the collaboration of Mario S. de Carvalho, an expert on the Jesuit Conimbricensis. The Aristotelian division of the soul (vegetative, sensitive, intellective), his ideas of the body and above all, the Christian notion of the immortality of the soul, identified by Aleni as the intellective soul, are introduced to a Chinese public, with supporting quotations from Confucian texts and Chinese medical classics.

In an informative introduction, the translators discuss Japanese adaptations of European discourses on the soul, the controversies over this subject among Jesuits in China, and the different projects for translating Aristotelian commentaries in China, including Aleni's Lingxing pian, a short precursor to the later work. They analyse the relationship between the 1646 edition of the Xingxue cushu and the Coimbra commentaries, and offer original insights into the relationship between Aristotelian/Greek and classical Chinese medical thought. The body of the text itself is presented with parallel Chinese text and English translation, following the chapter (juan) order of the 1646 edition with three prefaces written by Chinese scholars – Chen Yi, Qu Shisi and Zhu Shiheng – the latter two Christian converts. Aleni's Chinese text is rendered into fluent and accurate English, with quotations, names and Greek, Christian and classical Chinese references identified and explained by Meynard and Pan. The only minor blemishes are several obscure metaphors and usages in the prefaces, a literary practice favoured by the late Ming writers, which the translators failed to translate literally. Six tables are appended at the end of the text, in which the passages between Aleni's work and the Conimbricenses and an accompanying Portuguese commentary by the Portuguese Japan missionary, the Jesuit Pedro Gois are identified. With an extensive bibliography and annotations in Latin and Chinese, this bilingual edition of Aleni's work represents a major contribution to the study of Sino-western cultural exchange; it elucidates the transmission of Aristotelianism to seventeenth-century China, and offers a fascinating picture of the encounter between European and Chinese thoughts on medicine and the human body and psyche.