Not much work on Jin's philosophy has been done in the West in English, although a decent amount has been done in Chinese.
[8] “However,” Zinda writes, “Jin used discursive structures borrowed from both Chinese and Western thought as modes of persuasion”.
[9] Jin's writing is intertwined with his desire to navigate the space between Chinese and Western philosophy.
[10] In contrast, he explains Chinese philosophy as having “underdevelopment of what might be called logico-epistemological consciousness”.
For example, Jin chooses not to translate the word “Dao” to English, but keeps its Chinese origin.
[16] Jin's most accomplished philosophical writings are his three principal publications written in Chinese: Logic (1935), On Tao (1940), and A Theory of Knowledge (1983).
His English publication, "Tao, Nature, and Man" draws heavily on thought from "On Dao", which he considers to be one of the most central parts of his philosophical work.
[19] Jin uses his definition of Tao to posit a universal sympathy: everything – including humans – is one and the same, and we should appreciate life as such.
[20] Scholar Hu Jun writes, “What is required in order to grasp matter [Stuff] is a sort of intellectual projection, in which recognition of the limits of one’s intellect is accompanied by a leave out of the intellectual process...”.
Hu writes, “Whether or not matter [Stuff] enters into or withdraws from possibilities, it must stay within Form”.
Jin explains that unlike Universals, it does not have “a boundary line dividing what belongs to it from what doesn’t”.
[30] Jin defines their relationship as, “Stuff as a sort of raw material and Form as a kind of mould”.
Therefore, Jin posits that humans are part of Tao, and urges us to be “conscious of the fundamental oneness at which we are with the universe and everything there is in it”.
Scholar Yvonne Schulz Zinda writes, “he established a kind of ontological certainty that integrates individuals the evolutionary process of dao, through which they are interrelated with each other”.