Philosopher · Early modern
Wang Yangming
1472–1529 · Neo-Confucianism; School of Mind (Lu–Wang)
The founder of the School of Mind; the late-Ming literati whom Ricci befriended were formed by his school, and Nostra Aetate 2 commends what is true and holy in the Chinese traditions.
Wang Shouren, called Yangming, was a Ming official, general and philosopher who suppressed the rebellion of the Prince of Ning in 1519 and, banished to Longchang in Guizhou in 1508, had the enlightenment that turned Neo-Confucianism toward the mind: principle is not to be sought in things, as Zhu Xi taught, for “there is no principle outside the mind.” Every person possesses innate knowing (liangzhi), the mind's immediate sense of right and wrong, complete even in the thief, and sagehood is the extension of that knowing to every affair; knowledge and action are one, since to know filial piety without practicing it is not yet to know it; and the great man “forms one body with Heaven, Earth and the myriad things,” so that another's suffering is felt as one's own. His teachings survive in the Chuanxilu (Instructions for Practical Living), recorded by his disciples.
Why he matters: He is the Confucian doctrine of conscience, the inner light that judges even the classics, and the Jesuits arrived in a China whose literati had been shaped by his school; Ricci's hosts were its heirs, and its radical wing (the Taizhou school) prepared the openness that made the mission possible. Julia Ching's To Acquire Wisdom reads him beside the Christian mystics, and his unity of knowledge and action is a Chinese form of the Thomist teaching that prudence is a virtue of the practical intellect.
Where to be careful
His innate knowing is the mind's own and finally answers to nothing above the mind, so that conscience tends to create rather than witness to the law (Veritatis Splendor 54–64), and his “one body” with all things leans toward a monism in which Heaven and the mind are not distinct; there is no personal God, no sin and no grace. His insistence that virtue must be practiced to be known, that the humblest person carries the moral law within, and that the good man feels the pain of all beings is common ground with the Gospel.
Reading
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Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian WritingsWang Yangming (trans. Wing-tsit Chan) · The Chuanxilu and the “Inquiry on the Great Learning,” his whole doctrine in his disciples' record.
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To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-mingJulia Ching · A Catholic sinologist's study of his thought and its affinities with Christian mysticism.
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The True Meaning of the Lord of HeavenMatteo Ricci, SJ · Ricci's dialogue with a Confucian scholar of the generation his school had formed; read it for where the Jesuit met and corrected the doctrine of mind.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.