Wang Yangming

Wang Shouren
Viceroy of Liangguang
In office 1527–1529
Preceded by	Yao Mo
Succeeded by	Zhang Jing
Minister of War in the Southern Capital
In office 1521–1527
Grand coordinator of Nangan
In office 1472–1529
Preceded by	Wen Sen
Succeeded by	Nie Xian
Personal details
Born	(1472-10-26)26 October 1472 philosopher, politician, and writer
Philosophy career
School	Confucianism
Notable ideas	Yangmingism, Unity of knowledge and action, the streets are full of saints [simple]
Chinese name
Hanyu Pinyin	Xīnjiàn Bó
Yue: Cantonese
Yale Romanization	Sān'gin Baak
Jyutping	San1gin3 Baak3

Wang Shouren (

, or the School of the Mind.

In China, Japan, and Western countries, he is known by his honorific name rather than his private name.^[2]

Life and times

Wang was born in

, a eunuch.

Wang earned the

Military exploits

Wang became a successful general and was known for the strict discipline he imposed on his troops. In 1517 and 1518, he was dispatched in response to petitions to suppress peasant revolts in Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong. Concerned with the destruction that came with war, he petitioned the court to allow amnesty, and successfully destroyed rebel military forces.

Suppressing the Prince of Ning rebellion

In 1519 AD, while he was governor of Jiangxi province and on his way to suppress the revolts in

, Wang actively prepared for battle to prevent that possibility, while engaging in deception to convince the prince that armies were moving to surround him. The prince, deceived by this, hesitated and gave time for Nanjing to be reinforced. Eventually, forced to engage governmental forces, the Prince of Ning was defeated and captured.

In this campaign, Wang also made one of the earliest references to using the fo-lang-ji in battle, a

Thirty-eight years after his death, he was given the titles

Philosophy

Wang was the leading figure in the Neo-Confucian

(Li) treated gaining knowledge as a kind of preparation or cultivation that, when completed, could guide action.

Innate knowing

Out of Cheng-Zhu's Neo-Confucianism that was mainstream at the time, Wang Yangming developed the idea of innate knowing, arguing that every person knows from birth the difference between good and evil. Wang claimed that such knowledge is intuitive and not rational. These revolutionizing ideas of Wang Yangming would later inspire prominent Japanese thinkers like Motoori Norinaga, who argued that because of the Shinto deities, Japanese people alone had the intuitive ability to distinguish good and evil without complex rationalization. His school of thought (Ōyōmei-gaku in Japanese, Ō stands for the surname "Wang", yōmei stands for "Yangming", gaku stands for "school of learning") also greatly influenced the Japanese samurai ethic.

Integration of Knowledge and Action

Wang's rejection of the pure investigation of knowledge comes from the then traditional view of Chinese belief that once one gained knowledge, one had a duty to put that knowledge into action. This presupposed two possibilities: That one can have knowledge without/prior to corresponding action or that one can know what is the proper action, but still fail to act.

Wang rejected both of these which allowed him to develop his philosophy of action. Wang believed that only through simultaneous action could one gain knowledge and denied all other ways of gaining it. To him, there was no way to use knowledge after gaining it because he believed that knowledge and action were unified as one. Any knowledge that had been gained then put into action was considered delusion or false.

Mind and the world

He held that objects do not exist entirely apart from the mind because the mind shapes them. He believed that it is not the world that shapes the mind, but the mind that gives reason to the world. Therefore, the mind alone is the source of all reason. He understood this to be an inner light, an innate moral goodness and understanding of what is good.

In order to eliminate selfish desires that cloud the mind's understanding of goodness, one can practice his type of meditation often called "tranquil repose" or "sitting still" (靜坐

.

Influence

Wang Yangming is regarded one of the greatest masters of Confucianism in history along with Confucius, Mencius and Zhu Xi (孔孟朱王). He founded "

), which went left of Wang Yangming's thought. During the late Ming period, Wang Yangming's thought became notably popular and influential in China. Wang's interpretation of Confucianism has been influential in China into modern times. The twentieth-century Chinese warlord Yan Xishan attempted to revive Confucianism in Shanxi largely on the model of Wang's philosophy.^[5] The teachings of Wang Yangming were credited with inspiring many Japanese reformers and revolutionaries during the nineteenth century. This led to a great increase in interest in his thought in Japan at the end of the

The Japanese Admiral of the

Nakae Tōju

. Toju Nakae is regarded as the founder of Japanese Ōyōmei-gaku.

Memorials

Chiang Kai-shek named a national attraction in Taiwan, Yangmingshan, after Wang; and a road in Nanchang is also named Yangming Road after Wang by Chiang-influenced local officials. Additionally, National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan is also named after the philosopher. People in Guiyang, provincial capital of Guizhou Province, dedicated a statue to Wang Yangming as well as a museum and theme park; a robot version of Wang Yangming is in the city.^[7] The city government in Wang's hometown, Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, named a middle school after his honorific name.

Translations

• Henke, Frederick (1916). The philosophy of Wang Yang-ming. London: Open Court.. Public domain. Considered a poor translation by Chan.
• Ching, Julia (1972). The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press. Sixty-seven letters and annotations.
• Chan, Wing-tsit (1963). A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Excerpts only.
• Chan, Wing-tsit (1963). Instructions For Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-Ming. Columbia University Press. Full translation of 傳習録 and 大學問, Wang's two major works.
• Ivanhoe, Philip (2009). Readings from the Lu-Wang school of Neo-Confucianism. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.
  ISBN 978-0872209602
  . Excerpts, but including the first translations of some of Wang's letters.

References

Citations

Sources

• Chang, Carsun (1962). Wang Yang-ming: idealist philosopher of sixteenth-century China. New York, NY: St. John's University Press.
• Gillin, Donald G. (1967), Warlord: Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province 1911-1949. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  LCCN 66-14308
• Ivanhoe, Philip J. (2002), Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mengzi and Wang Yangming, rev. 2nd edition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Кобзев А.И. Учение Ван Янмина и классическая китайская философия. М., 1983.
• Nivison, David S. (1967). "The Problem of 'Knowledge' and 'Action' in Chinese Thought since Wang Yang–ming," in Arthur F. Wright, ed., Studies in Chinese Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 112–45.
• Nivison, David S. (1996), "The Philosophy of Wang Yangming," in The Ways of Confucianism, Chicago: Open Court Press, pp. 217–231.
• Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Part 7. Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd.
• Oleg Benesch. "Wang Yangming and Bushidō: Japanese Nativization and its Influences in Modern China." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (3):439-454.

External links

• Media related to Wang Yangming at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Wang Yangming at Wikiquote
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Wang Yangming
• Wang Yang Ming in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Works by Wang Yangming at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Wang Yangming at Internet Archive