Wang Yangming
gigatos | February 14, 2022
Summary
Wang Yangming (Yuyao in Zhejiang, October 31, 1472 – Guangxi region, January 9, 1529), born under the name Wang Shouren, was a prominent administrator during China”s Ming dynasty and an influential neo-Confucian philosopher. Whereas earlier Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi (1130-1200) emphasized that knowledge of truth and moral sense could only be acquired through study, Wang Yangming assumed that these things could be intuitively sensed and understood by anyone. People were to use this intuitive knowledge to live an active life and to increase their knowledge through this experience, not through study and book wisdom. Wang Yangming embodied this view of life like no other.
Wang Yangming was descended from a family of literates, the literate class who acquired important positions within the empire”s bureaucracy through successes in the examination system. His father, Wang Hua (1453-1522), passed the highest national examination in 1481 as the best of that year. These examinations were held once every three years in the capital. Successful candidates were given the honorary title of “presented scholar” (jinshi) and were immediately appointed to high positions in the civil service. Wang Hua moved to the capital city of Beijing and eventually rose to the position of deputy minister of the Ministry of Rites (libu).
Even at a young age, Wang Yangming showed his literary talent, but in addition he also mastered military skills, unusual for an aspiring literate administrator. At the age of twenty, Wang Yangming passed the provincial examination (juren), but his first two attempts at the jinshi degree failed. He was finally successful on his third attempt in 1499. During his years of study, Wang immersed himself in Buddhist and Taoist texts and meditation, in addition to the obligatory Confucian classics. His career initially developed with difficulty. Like many other literati, he opposed the rule of the eunuch Liu Jin during the first reign of the young Emperor Zhengde (r. 1505-1521). In 1506, Wang Yangming was arrested, sentenced to forty strokes of the cane, and exiled to the southern province of Guizhou. During this period he developed his philosophical ideas.
After the fall of Liu Jin in 1510, Wang Yangming was granted honors and appointed governor of a military district in southern Jiangxi. He climbed to the position of “Great Coordinator” of southern China within a few years. This region suffered from regular uprisings by non-Chinese minorities. Wang distinguished himself as military governor in putting down these revolts. Politically, Wang implemented a consistent policy of sinification.
In the summer of 1519, the prince of Ning, Zhu Chenhao, started a rebellion against Emperor Zhengde. Wang Yangming was the closest army commander and had to fight the rebels. He chose an offensive strategy and managed to defeat and capture the Prince of Ning at his home base of Nanchang within just six weeks. Wang delivered the rebellious prince in Nanjing to the emperor. Zhu Chenhao was sentenced to “death by a thousand cuts” (lingchi), but committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out.
In 1522, Wang Yangming”s father died. The latter resigned his positions in order to observe the customary mourning period of three years. He retired to Zhejiang where he worked out and propagated his philosophical ideas as a teacher. Wang”s original ideas won him a considerable number of followers.
However, the imperial court again called upon his political and military experience with minority issues when a crisis broke out in the southern province of Guangxi in 1527. Wang initially refused, but was nevertheless compelled to return to his old post. For a year he waged a successful campaign against insurgents in Guangxi and the surrounding area, but illness (probably tuberculosis) forced him to resign. On his way home, he died at the age of 56 in January 1529.
Wang Yangming”s successful professional career conformed to conventional notions of how a literati trained in Confucian classics should behave. In developing his philosophical ideas, however, he took different paths.
In his personal search for the source of truth, the teachings of leading neo-Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi (1033-1107) did not satisfy him. These argued that insight into truth should be gained through study of the outside world, through rational argumentation and verification. In 1508, during the difficult period of his exile in Guizhou, Wang suddenly came to the understanding that truth was not to be sought outside the individual, but that each person possessed intuitive knowledge of ethical truth (liang zhi).
In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of idealistic philosophers such as Lu Xiangshan (1139-1192). This idealistic movement within Neo-Confucianism is called xinxue, in contrast to the rationalistic lixue movement. The idealists were close to Buddhism and Taoism in terms of their views on life.
Wang coupled this insight with his view that a person should act according to what this intuitive knowledge gave him. Years of study or the approval of higher-ups was not a prerequisite for action. Moreover, acting led to the increase of one”s own knowledge. Action should not follow the acquisition of knowledge, but the two components should reinforce each other in interaction.
Wang”s ideas fell into fertile soil in the last century of the Ming Dynasty. A significant portion of the Chinese population benefited from growing prosperity and reached a higher level of education. Legitimized by Wang”s ideas, this segment of the population was able to pursue new intellectual and artistic paths.
Outside of China, Wang had great influence in Korea and Japan. In Japan, his ideas were propagated by Toju Nakae (1608-1648) and Kumazawa Banzan (1619-1691). His philosophy of life resonated especially within the samurai class.
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