Instructions for Practical Living

Records of conversations with Wang Yangming and letters he wrote to students, compiled by his disciples in three parts, the first published during his lifetime. It is the main source for the learning of the mind (xinxue), which challenged Zhu Xi's orthodoxy. Wang holds that the mind is principle: moral principles are not out in things waiting to be studied but present in the mind's own response to situations. Hence his famous unity of knowledge and action: no one who truly knows filial piety fails to act on it, just as seeing a lovely colour and loving it are a single event. He recounts how, as a young man, he tried to investigate the principle of bamboo by contemplating it for days until he fell ill, and he reinterprets the investigation of things as rectifying the mind's intentions. Later records develop the extension of innate knowing (liangzhi).

It is the most influential challenge to Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, and its claim that knowing and doing are one is a live provocation for anyone who has known the right thing and not done it.