Wang Yangming

Wang Shouren, known by his literary name Wang Yangming, was the most influential Chinese philosopher of the Ming dynasty and one of the most remarkable figures in Chinese history — a scholar, poet, statesman and victorious general. Rejecting the dominant teaching of Zhu Xi, who held that one must investigate the principle of external things one by one, Wang taught that “the mind is principle”: moral truth is not to be found outside but is fully present in the mind of every person as innate knowledge of the good (liángzhī). He further taught the unity of knowing and acting (zhī xíng hé yī): true knowledge of the good is inseparable from doing it. His “School of the Heart-Mind” (xīnxué) swept late Ming China and, as Yōmeigaku, profoundly influenced Japan (Neo-Confucianism).

Life

Wang was born on 31 October 1472 in Yuyao, Zhejiang, the son of a high official who had placed first in the national examinations. As a youth he studied military strategy, archery, Daoist and Buddhist practices, and the Confucian classics. Trying to follow Zhu Xi’s instruction to “investigate things”, he and a friend sat before a bamboo grove for days, trying to grasp the principle of bamboo; his friend fell ill after three days, Wang after seven, and both concluded that they lacked the capacity to be sages. He passed the jìnshì examination in 1499 and entered government service.

In 1506 he protested against the arrest of officials who had criticised the powerful eunuch Liu Jin; he was flogged forty strokes before the court and exiled to Longchang, a remote post-station in the mountains of Guizhou, among the Miao and other peoples, where he lived in a cave, grew his own food, and cared for his sick servants. One night in 1508, pondering what a sage would do in his situation, he had a sudden awakening — “the great enlightenment at Longchang” — and cried out: “My own nature is, of course, sufficient for me to attain sagehood. I was mistaken in searching for principle in things and affairs.”

After Liu Jin’s fall, Wang held a series of posts and proved an outstanding administrator and military commander. He suppressed banditry in Jiangxi, and in 1519 defeated the rebellion of Zhu Chenhao, Prince of Ning, in about five weeks, before imperial forces arrived — only to be slandered by jealous courtiers. He taught disciples throughout his career, and his conversations and letters were collected as Instructions for Practical Living (Chuánxí lù). Sent in 1527, though ill, to put down a rebellion in Guangxi, he succeeded, and died on the journey home, on 9 January 1529. His last words were: “This mind is luminous and bright. What more is there to say?”

The mind is principle

For Zhu Xi, principle exists in all things, and the mind must investigate things one by one to know it. Wang objected that this splits mind and principle in two, and sends the mind chasing outside itself. The principle of filial piety, he argued, is not in one’s parents, to be found by studying them; it is in one’s own mind. “If the principle of filial piety is in my parents, then after they die, does my mind lack the principle of filial piety?” “There is no principle outside the mind, and nothing outside the mind.” When asked about a flowering tree on a mountain, which blooms and falls on its own, he replied: “Before you look at these flowers, they and your mind are both in a state of silence. When you come to see them, their colours become clear. So the flowers are not outside your mind.”

He reinterpreted the Great Learning’s “investigation of things” (gé wù) as “rectifying affairs”: correcting the intentions of one’s mind as they engage with things, so that each act becomes right.

Innate knowledge

The centre of Wang’s mature teaching is liángzhī, “innate knowing” or “good knowing”, a term from Mencius: “the ability possessed by men without having been acquired by learning is innate ability, and the knowledge possessed by them without deliberation is innate knowledge” (7A15). Every person, Wang held, has this knowing of right and wrong, fully, from birth. Even a thief, called a thief, feels ashamed. A disciple once caught a thief at night and lectured him on liángzhī; the thief laughed — until he was told to take off his clothes, item by item, and refused to remove his last garment: “There,” said the disciple, “is your sense of shame.” The task of moral life is “extending innate knowledge” (zhì liángzhī): clearing away selfish desires that obscure it, as one polishes a mirror, and acting on it in every situation.

Knowing and acting are one

Wang’s most famous doctrine is the unity of knowledge and action. A disciple objected that people know they should be filial to their parents, yet are not; surely knowing and acting are two things. Wang replied that such people do not truly know. “There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who ‘know’ but do not act simply do not yet know.” Knowing the good is like loving a beautiful colour or hating a bad smell: one loves it as soon as one sees it; one does not first see it and then decide to love it. “Knowledge is the direction of action, and action is the effort of knowledge; knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge.”

One body with all things

In the Inquiry on the Great Learning, Wang wrote that the great person “regards Heaven, Earth and the myriad things as one body”. When he sees a child about to fall into a well, he feels alarm — so his humaneness forms one body with the child. When he sees birds and animals cry before slaughter, he cannot bear it; when he sees plants broken, he feels pity; when he sees tiles and stones shattered, he feels regret. The small person, separated by selfish desire, divides himself from others; the great person recovers the original unity.

Legacy

Wang’s teaching spread rapidly. His followers split into schools, some emphasising quiet cultivation, others — the “Taizhou school” of Wang Gen, a salt-worker — taking his teaching to commoners, insisting that “the streets are full of sages”, and producing radical individualists like Li Zhi (1527–1602), who was imprisoned and died by his own hand. Critics blamed the school’s emphasis on the mind for the moral laxity and fall of the Ming. In Japan, Yōmeigaku inspired men of action, from the rebel Ōshio Heihachirō (1837) to leaders of the Meiji Restoration; in modern China, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong all admired him, and his thought has enjoyed a wide popular revival.

In conversation

• The bamboo grove — the failed investigation of things.
• The thief’s last garment — innate knowledge of shame.
• “Those who know but do not act do not yet know” — the unity of knowing and acting.