Wang Yangming was a Chinese scholar-official whose idealistic interpretation of neo-Confucianism influenced philosophical thinking in East Asia for centuries. Wang was the son of a high government official. In1492 he obtained the civil service degree “a recommended person.” Having failed in the metropolitan civil service examinations in 1493 and 1495, he shifted his interest to military arts and Daoist techniques for longevity. In 1499, however, Wang passed the “advanced scholar” (jinshi) examination and was appointed a Ministry of Works official. He recommended to the emperor eight measures for frontier defense, strategy, and administration, which earned him early recognition. In 1500 he was appointed a Ministry of Justice secretary and in 1501 was ordered to check prisoners’ records near Nanjing. He corrected injustices in many cases.
A critical event occurred in 1506, when Wang defended a supervising censor who had been imprisoned for attacking a powerful, corrupt eunuch. For his actions Wang was beaten with 40 strokes, imprisoned for several months, and banished to remote Guizhou as head of a dispatch station, where he lived among aborigines and often fell sick. The hardship and solitude led him to realize, suddenly one night at the age of 36, that to investigate the principles (li) of things is not to seek for them in actual objects, as the rationalistic Zhu Xi had taught, but in one’s own mind. Thus he brought Idealist (xinxue) neo-Confucianism—as first taught by a 12th-century philosopher, Lu Xiangshan— to its highest expression.
A year later he pronounced another epoch-making theory: that knowledge and action are one (zhixing heyi). One knows filial piety (xiao), he argued, only when one acts upon it, and correct action requires correct knowledge. As a magistrate in Jiangxi in 1510, he carried out many reforms, including a novel “joint registration system” whereby 10 families shared responsibility for security. An imperial audience followed and then appointments as Ministry of Justice secretary, Ministry of Personnel director (1511), Imperial Studs vice minister (1512), State Ceremonials minister (1514), and assistant censor in chief and governor of southern Jiangxi and adjacent areas (1516).
In 1521 the new emperor appointed him war minister and awarded him the title of earl of Xinjian. His father died in 1522, and he remained home to mourn his loss. For more than five years he stayed home and discussed doctrines with his followers, who came from various parts of China and numbered in the hundreds. These conversations and those earlier constitute his main work, Chuanxilu (“Instructions for Practical Living”). In 1521 he had enunciated his doctrine of complete realization of the innate knowledge of the good.
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