Wang Shouren

Wang Shouren a philosopher, official and general of the Ming dynasty (1472-1529), better known by his honorific title Wang Yangming, who taught the unity of knowing and acting and the inborn moral knowledge of the mind, and became the most influential thinker of the school of mind.

Life and Background

Wang Shouren was born in 1472 in Yuyao, in Zhejiang province, and his courtesy name was Boan; he is commonly known by the title Yangming, taken from a cave where he once lived and studied. He came of a distinguished family, and his early years were marked by an unusual combination of intellectual ardour, literary talent and a taste for practical and martial pursuits.

His official career was turbulent. After passing the examinations and entering the bureaucracy, he offended the powerful eunuch faction at court by defending colleagues who had been punished, and was beaten and exiled to a remote post in the southwest. It was in that desolate place, in the year 1508, that he experienced the insight upon which his philosophy was built, the realisation that the nature is complete in oneself and that truth is not to be sought outside the mind.

He was subsequently recalled and rose to high office, combining philosophical teaching with an active public life. He helped to suppress several rebellions and was noted for his skill in both strategy and administration, a rare combination of the contemplative and the practical. He died in 1529 on his way home from a military campaign, and his teachings, spread by a numerous body of disciples, shaped the intellectual life of China for generations.

The Unity of Knowledge and Action

Wang Shouren's most celebrated doctrine is the unity of knowing and acting. He rejected the view that one should first understand the good and afterwards put it into practice, as though knowledge were one thing and conduct another. To know truly, he argued, is already to be moved to act; and a knowledge that issues in no action is not genuine knowledge of the matter at hand.

He illustrated the point by the analogy of the love of beauty and the hatred of bad odours. One does not first perceive that something is beautiful and then resolve to love it; the perception and the affection are one. In the same way a person who truly knows that a thing is good already inclines toward it in his will, and one who merely applauds goodness without any stirring of the heart does not yet know it.

This teaching made moral learning a matter of the whole person rather than of the intellect alone. It condemned the scholar who discoursed upon virtue while neglecting it in his conduct, and it turned the attention of the student toward the transformation of the will. Knowledge, in this account, is measured by the life that embodies it, not by the capacity to speak of it.

The Extension of Innate Knowledge

Wang taught that every person possesses from birth a knowledge of the good, which he called the innate moral knowledge of the mind. This knowledge is not acquired but given, and it is the same in the sage and in the ordinary person. The task of self-cultivation is to extend and realise this inborn knowledge, to remove the selfish desires that obscure it, and to act upon its promptings in every situation.

He held that principle is not something to be sought outside oneself, in a process of investigating external things, but is discovered within the mind and then realised in the affairs of life. This reversed the emphasis of the older teaching on the investigation of things, and it made the cultivation of the mind the primary activity, with the study of the world subordinate to it and illuminated by it.

The famous method he prescribed was that of eradicating selfish desires and thereby restoring the proper object of the will. The struggle against the distortion of the inner light was to be conducted not only in quiet reflection but in the midst of action, so that the insight won in stillness might be tested and proved in the world. Virtue was to be attained by living, not merely by thinking.

Philosophy and Public Life

Wang Shouren's thought arose directly from his experience as an official, a soldier and a teacher. He did not separate the pursuit of wisdom from the conduct of affairs, and he argued that moral principles should guide the exercise of power in every sphere. His teaching was addressed to those who held office as much as to those who taught, and its practical orientation made it attractive to men of action.

He wrote on administration, on education and on the reform of social customs, urging rulers and officials to act from genuine concern for the people and to seek the wellbeing of all. His campaigns and his governance were, for him, continuous with his philosophy, illustrations of the principle that knowledge is realised in action and that the good must be made effective in the world if it is to be truly known.

His influence on education was profound. He held that learning should develop the whole personality, that children should be taught through interest and encouragement rather than through fear, and that the study of the classics should serve the cultivation of the mind. These ideas, advanced four hundred years ago, remain among the most humane statements of the aims of education in the Chinese tradition.

Influence and Legacy

Wang Shouren became the most influential thinker of the Ming dynasty, and his school of mind spread widely through the educated classes, gathering large numbers of disciples among officials and scholars. His teaching was carried through his native province and far beyond it, and it gave rise to a rich and contentious tradition of philosophy that outlasted the dynasty itself.

His influence crossed the seas. The thought of Wang Yangming was studied and admired in Korea and especially in Japan, where it inspired scholars and reformers and contributed to the intellectual ferment that accompanied the modernisation of that country. Interpreters of his work have found in it a philosophy of action and of personal moral responsibility that speaks to concerns beyond the Chinese world.

He is remembered as a rare union of the philosopher, the statesman and the soldier, a man whose ideas were tested in the difficulties of office and war. His doctrine that every person may become a sage, and that the knowledge of the good is written in the heart, gave Chinese thought one of its most powerful statements of human dignity and moral possibility. His name remains a rallying point for those who hold that understanding and action are one.

References

^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4]

↑ Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963.
↑ Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, Columbia University Press, 1976.
↑ Philip J. Ivanhoe, Ethics in the Confucian Tradition, Hackett Publishing, 2002.
↑ Tu Weiming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's Youth, University of California Press, 1976.

[r1-1] Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963.

[r2-2] Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, Columbia University Press, 1976.

[r3-3] Philip J. Ivanhoe, Ethics in the Confucian Tradition, Hackett Publishing, 2002.

[r4-4] Tu Weiming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's Youth, University of California Press, 1976.

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