Thinker · TH-0430
Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming was a Ming-dynasty Chinese philosopher, official and general, the most influential critic of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism. During exile in Longchang, Guizhou, he…
王陽明
Also known as Wang Shouren, Ōyōmei (Japanese reading)
1472 – 1529 · Yuyao (Zhejiang); Longchang (Guizhou); Beijing; Jiangxi
Traditions: Chinese
Schools: Neo-Confucianism
Wang Yangming was a Ming-dynasty Chinese philosopher, official and general, the most influential critic of Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism. During exile in Longchang, Guizhou, he concluded that principle is not to be sought in external things but in the mind itself. He taught that everyone possesses innate moral knowing (liangzhi), which does not depend on study, and that knowledge and action form a unity: to know the good truly is already to be moved to do it. His school spread widely in China and Japan.
Key ideas
- Every person has innate moral knowing (liangzhi), not dependent on study.
- Knowledge and action are one: real knowledge is already action.
- Principle is not outside the mind; the mind itself is principle.
- Moral cultivation means extending innate knowing in daily affairs.
Major works
- Instructions for Practical Living (Chuanxi lu 傳習錄)
- Inquiry on the Great Learning (Daxue wen 大學問)
In the conversation
- Question I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
- Question What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
- Discussion Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
- Question Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
- Discussion Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
- Question Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo
- Question “You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
- Question Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
- Debate Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
- Discussion Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing