Wang Yangming

Wang Yangming, born Wang Shouren, was a Chinese philosopher, official and general of the Ming dynasty, and the most influential Confucian thinker after Zhu Xi. He taught that moral truth is found not by studying the principles of external things but within one's own mind, which possesses an innate knowledge of good, and that true knowledge and action are one and the same. He was also one of the most capable military commanders of his age, and his "School of Mind" shaped Chinese thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and inspired reformers in Japan and Korea.

Wang was born on 31 October 1472 in Yuyao, in Zhejiang province, into a family of officials. His father, Wang Hua, came first in the national palace examination of 1481 and rose to be a vice-minister. The name by which he is known comes from the Yangming Grotto near Shaoxing, where he later lived for a time.

Like every educated young man of his time, Wang memorised the Four Books with the commentaries of Zhu Xi, which formed the curriculum of the civil service examinations. He was a restless student, drawn at different times to archery and military strategy, literary composition, Daoist techniques of longevity and Buddhism. A famous episode from his youth shows his early doubts about the orthodox teaching. Taking literally Zhu Xi's advice to "investigate things" to grasp their principle, he and a friend sat in front of some bamboo in a courtyard, trying to discover its principle by concentrated thought. The friend fell ill after three days, Wang after seven, and he concluded that sagehood could not be reached this way.

Wang passed the highest civil service examination, the jinshi, in 1499 and held a series of posts in the capital. In 1506 he submitted a memorial defending officials who had been imprisoned for opposing the powerful eunuch Liu Jin. In return he was beaten with forty strokes of the bamboo at court and banished to Longchang, a remote post station in the mountains of Guizhou, among the non-Han peoples of the southwest.

There, in 1508, living in harsh conditions and facing illness and isolation, he had the experience that later tradition calls his "enlightenment at Longchang". He realised, as he put it, that his own nature was sufficient for sagehood, and that he had been wrong to seek principle in external things. From this insight his philosophy developed.

Wang's thought belongs to the Neo-Confucian tradition, but he sided with the twelfth-century thinker Lu Jiuyuan against Zhu Xi on a central point. Zhu Xi had taught that principle exists in all things and must be investigated patiently, one thing after another. Wang held instead that "the mind is principle": there is no moral principle outside the mind. The principle of filial piety, for example, is not found in one's parents, but in the heart of the child who loves them. To seek it in external objects is to look in the wrong place. He reinterpreted "investigating things" as rectifying the mind's own intentions.

At the centre of his teaching is liangzhi, "innate knowledge" or "pure knowing", a term taken from Mencius. Every person, he argued, has from birth an unerring sense of right and wrong. Sages and ordinary people differ only in how far selfish desires have clouded it, as dust dulls a mirror. Moral cultivation consists in clearing away those obstructions and extending this innate knowledge into every situation. Because liangzhi is present in everyone, Wang and his followers could say that the streets are full of sages, an egalitarian claim that appealed to merchants, farmers and others outside the scholarly elite.

Wang's best-known doctrine is the unity of knowledge and action. Ordinary people assume that one can know what is right and fail to do it. For Wang, such "knowledge" is not real knowledge. Seeing a beautiful colour and liking it, or smelling a foul odour and disliking it, happen together; in the same way, really knowing filial piety means already acting filially. Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge. He intended this as a criticism of scholars who spent their lives studying texts and commentaries without changing their conduct.

His sayings, letters and dialogues were collected by his disciples in the Instructions for Practical Living (Chuanxi lu), which remains the main source for his thought, along with his Inquiry on the Great Learning, written down in 1527 as a primer for new students.

After Liu Jin's fall in 1510, Wang returned to office and rose quickly. From 1517, as a regional commander in the south, he suppressed bandit and rebel forces in the borderlands of Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong, combining military campaigns with amnesties, new local administration, schools and community compacts for the pacified areas.

His most celebrated feat came in 1519, when Zhu Chenhao, the Prince of Ning, rebelled at Nanchang and threatened to sail down the Yangtze to take Nanjing, the southern capital. Using deception to delay the prince, and raising local troops on his own initiative, Wang defeated and captured him in a little over a month. Instead of reward he met suspicion and envy at the court of the Zhengde Emperor, and some even accused him of having conspired with the rebel. He was eventually made an earl. In 1527 he was sent to put down a rising in Guangxi. On the way home, ill with tuberculosis, he died on 9 January 1529 at Nan'an in Jiangxi. His reported last words were that his mind was bright and clear, and there was nothing more to say.

Soon after his death opponents at court condemned his teaching as heterodox and his hereditary title was revoked, but his honours were restored in 1567, and in 1584 he was enshrined in the Confucian temple, the highest honour for a scholar. His disciples formed several schools, some of which, such as the Taizhou school, pushed his ideas in a radical and popular direction. In the late Ming his thought was among the most widespread in China; critics of the early Qing dynasty blamed its emphasis on inner intuition for the moral confusion that had preceded the Ming collapse.

In Japan, where his teaching was known as Yōmeigaku, it inspired thinkers such as Nakae Tōju and the official Ōshio Heihachirō, who led a rising in Osaka in 1837, and was admired by figures of the Meiji Restoration, including Yoshida Shōin and Saigō Takamori. In Korea it remained a minority current alongside the dominant school of Zhu Xi. Wang is now considered, with Confucius, Mencius and Zhu Xi, one of the great masters of the Confucian tradition, and one of the most original figures in Chinese philosophy.