Hun and
po are types of
souls in
Chinese philosophy and
traditional religion. Within this ancient
soul dualism tradition, every living human has both a
hun spiritual, ethereal,
yang soul which leaves the body after death, and also a
po corporeal, substantive,
yin soul which remains with the corpse of the deceased. Some controversy exists over the number of souls in a person; for instance, one of the traditions within
Daoism proposes a soul structure of
sanhunqipo 三魂七魄; that is, "three
hun and seven
po". The historian
Yü Ying-shih describes
hun and
po as "two pivotal concepts that have been, and remain today, the key to understanding Chinese views of the human soul and the afterlife."