In the three centuries since the fall of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) until recently, the Neo-Confucian thought of the Ming period had been held in generally bad repute. Each of the great dynasties before the Ming had been seen as making some enduring contribution to Chinese thought—the Zhou through the profusion and profundity of thought represented by the “Hundred Schools”; the Han through its synthesis of a Chinese worldview; the Six Dynasties, Sui, and Tang through the assimilation and development of Buddhist philosophy; and the Song through the great Neo-Confucian revival in humane learning and, especially, philosophy. The Ming period, by contrast, has been seen as one of general decline and aimless drifting, in the midst of which Wang Yangming stood out alone as an independent thinker. Indeed, to praise Wang was most often to deprecate Ming philosophy as a whole; to honor him was to reject the conventionality and mediocrity of most other thinkers of his age. Finally, indignities came at the hands of modern scholarship. The Song and the early Qing (under a foreign dynasty, no less) were seen by Hu Shi as periods of renaissance in Chinese thought, with the Ming as a long trough between.1
THE “EMPTINESS” OF MING THOUGHT
The firmness of this judgment seems to have become established very early. Few would dispute the opinion of a scholar like Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), himself a survivor of the Ming and a towering figure in the world of classical scholarship, who compared the subtleties of Ming thought unfavorably to the simple truths of Confucius’s teaching:
It is a matter of great regret to me that, for the past hundred odd years, scholars have devoted so much discussion to the mind and human nature, all of it vague and quite incomprehensible.… They have set aside broad knowledge and concentrated upon the search for a single, all-inclusive method; they have said not a word about the distress and poverty of the world within the four seas, but have spent all their days lecturing on theories of the “precarious and subtle,” “discrimination and oneness.”2
Cui Shu (1740–1816), another scholar who typified the finest in critical scholarship during the Qing period, confirmed this judgment when he described the Neo-Confucian philosophy of the Song and Ming:
As scholars who valued truth none can compare with the Song Confucianists. Yet most of them concerned themselves with questions of the nature and principle of things and with moral philosophy. If one looks among them for men who devoted themselves to historical research, he will find no more than two or three out of ten. By Ming times scholarship had grown increasingly heterodox and it became so that if one hoped to write anything important he had to be conversant with Chan [Zen] doctrines and interlard his library shelves with Buddhist books.3
As a final example of this attitude, we have in the early years of the present century Liang Qichao (1873–1929). His Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period (Qing dai xueshu gailun) fixed in modern Chinese minds the authoritative interpretation of recent Chinese thought. He found much to admire in the early Qing but prefaced it with a severe condemnation of the late Ming, in terms that by now were almost a convention:
When I went on to examine the substance of its thoughts, I found that the object of its study was simply too vague and intangible. A few outstanding and sincere scholars might have followed this path and achieved a state of repose for body and mind, but only rarely could ordinary mortals imitate them. It was too easy for superficial and pretentious men to pick up abstract phrases to brag about, and consequently there was a group in late Ming known as the kuangchan (“wild Zen”) [who thought] that “every street is full of sages” and that “wine, women, wealth, and passion do not block the road to enlightenment.” Their ethics hit rock bottom. Moreover, the civil service examinations and the students’ curriculum to prepare for them engaged the attention of all the nation; students needed only to learn this kind of dubious and imitative language in order to be ready to jockey for position, wealth, and reputation. The whole nation indulged in it prodigally and one man after another neglected his learning and the use of his mind.4
Here Liang repeats the charge that Ming thought was corrupted by Chan Buddhism and adds to this an attack on the stereotyped civil service–examination system as stultifying the intellectual life of the late Ming. This too is a familiar complaint, and much support for Liang’s allegation can be found among qualified critics reaching back to the Ming itself.5
THE VITALITY AND DIVERSITY OF MING THOUGHT
Nevertheless, the very existence of such criticism belies the common stereotype of Ming thought. If evils existed, so did opposition to them. If education tended to become subservient to official recruitment, so was there a strong countertrend among individual thinkers and in the spread of private academies disavowing such purposes and nurturing independent thought. Indeed, the irony of the situation is that many of those later described as given to empty speculation on the mind and nature were precisely those who resisted the prevailing pressures toward conformity.6 They may appear to have been “escapists,” but they sought a way out of real dangers. They were not simply avoiding troubles but looking for a way to deal with them.
Thus, whatever one’s ultimate judgment of the value of Ming thought, Liang Qichao is certainly wrong in saying that the Confucians of the late Ming “neglected … the use of their minds.” On the contrary, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may well have been one of the most creative and stimulating periods in the history of Chinese thought. In those distorted times there was no lack of challenge to thought. Evils, abuses, crises, conflicts—yes. But in the midst of such difficulties creative tensions existed such as had characterized earlier periods of social decadence and intellectual ferment. What we find, then, in the extremities of the Ming situation, is anything but a dull conformity of thought to established patterns and institutions; it is rather a picture of lively controversy and intellectual diversity.
From this point of view, whether or not one views Ming speculations on the mind and nature as “empty” depends on whether or not one understands the problems to which they sought an answer and whether or not one feels the importance and the urgency of those problems as Ming thinkers did. To the successors of the Ming, whose approach was frankly “empirical” and antimetaphysical, these speculations seemed vapid and vague. Qing thinkers for the most part turned away from questions of this sort, to some extent out of a sense of disillusionment with the general failure of the Ming. The collapse of the old order and the fall of the dynasty, first to rebels and then to the Manchus, were seen as consequences of the moral decline and disorder of thought at the end of the period. Such a causal connection, alluded to by Liang Qichao above, may be difficult to establish and no doubt reflects a typical Confucian predilection for the moralistic interpretation of history. Nevertheless, whether as cause, symptom, or both, the apparent failure of Ming thought and nerve loomed large in the minds of those who sought to explain this catastrophe.
A notable exception to this line of thinking is found, however, in the studies of Huang Zongxi (1610–1695). He had suffered as much as anyone from these tragic events and was deeply moved to comprehend their meaning. Indeed, in his Mingyi daifang lu Huang was unsparing in his exposure of the failings of Ming rulers and institutions. Loyalty to his own dynasty did not stand in the way of a most searching analysis of its weaknesses and evils. Yet when he came to compile his monumental survey of Ming Confucian thought, the Mingru xue’an, Huang sought to preserve its contributions from the neglect and indifference, if not the contempt, of the subsequent age. In his foreword, he explains:
It is often said that the literary and practical accomplishments of the Ming did not measure up to former dynasties. Yet in the philosophy of Principle it attained what other dynasties did not. In everything Ming scholars made the finest of distinctions and classifications, as if they were sorting the hair of oxen or picking silk threads from a cocoon. They thereby discovered what other scholars had failed to discover. Though the Chengs and Zhu Xi [in the Song] spent many words in refuting the Buddha, they never got beneath the surface. Buddhism’s specious reasonableness and confounding of truth they failed to point out. But Ming scholars were so precise in their analysis that the Buddhists were completely exposed and trapped.7
What is important here is not Huang’s evident hostility to Buddhism. It is true that his survey is motivated by a desire to uphold the orthodox Confucian tradition, but for the most part it is not marked by an unreasoning rejection of all things Buddhist, and in later life his attitude grew increasingly tolerant of heterodox thought. What stands out is his claim that Ming thought came to grips with the challenge of Buddhism by a more precise clarification of issues rather than by simply rejecting it out of hand. It acknowledges that Ming thinkers were concerned with the subtleties and refinements that his contemporary Gu Yanwu had so little use for but affirms that these enabled a more precise analysis of the fundamental problems at issue in the encounter of Confucianism and Buddhism. For ourselves, likewise, the mere fact that Qing scholars took little interest in such questions is not a sufficient basis for regarding the Ming attempt as vain. We must try to understand, rather, why and how these questions assumed such importance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China.
THE SITUATION OF THE MING INTELLECTUAL
From the comments above, we are aware of two problems facing the Ming Confucian scholar. One had to do with public service and the examination system. The other involved his confrontation with Buddhism and Daoism. Of the two, the former was the more pressing, for intellectually Buddhism and Daoism were in a state of relative decline and institutionally in a weakened condition. They could not have compelled his attention except that, in wrestling with his own Confucian conscience, he could not ignore what they had to say to his inner self.
The question of first priority, then, concerns the Ming Confucian in his dual role as scholar and official. With his traditional commitment to public service, it was natural that the scholar should be drawn to the business of government and that this in turn should subject him to great political pressures, if it did not actually expose him to grave dangers.8 But in the Ming, to an extraordinary degree, the Confucian found himself overshadowed by the power of the state and, whether in or out of office, felt his social conscience under great strain. Most historians, whatever their differences in other matters of interpretation, acknowledge the unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and its despotic uses by those who acted in his name. It is not for us here to review the entire question of Ming “despotism” but simply to emphasize two related points: one is that autocratic and bureaucratic power existed in the situation, and the other is that men still attempted to defend themselves against it.9
Awareness of these conditions will help us to avoid a common error. We shall not mistake the seeming introversion of Ming thought and its apparent quietistic tendency as indicating that it had strayed from the “real” problems of life or lost interest in practical matters. Nothing was more real and practical for the thinker and scholar in that age than the preservation of his life, his integrity, and his fidelity to essential Confucian values in the face of such overwhelming odds. If to withdraw into reflective contemplation or solitary pursuits helped achieve this, then, even if the withdrawal has the connotations of escapism, we must not think of it as useless or sterile. From this process of introspection and reexamination emerged not only the most deeply committed and personally effective of Confucian activists, Wang Yangming, but also at the end of the dynasty the most searching critique of political and social institutions China had ever known.
But let us consider, more concretely, the effects on Ming Confucians of the civil-service system—an old problem in a new situation. Earlier, in the late Tang and Song, there had been protests against the type of Confucian scholarship encouraged and rewarded by the examinations. The integrity of Confucian teaching had constantly to be defended against the danger of debasement through its use as an official ideology or as a mere professional qualification. But if Liang Qichao and others, like Jiang Fan, the historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, stress the particularly deleterious effects of the civil-service examinations on Confucian thought in the Ming,10 it is because during this period the system presented a more serious problem than ever before, and paradoxically so, since it was in many ways better organized and more widely effective.
The founder of the dynasty had sought to broaden the avenues of official recruitment, to extend the official school system so as to train more scholars, and to simplify the examinations so that men of practical ability need not demonstrate great erudition in order to qualify.11 A concomitant of this effort at “democratization,” however, was a further routinization and standardization of both training and recruitment. Simplification of the examinations resulted in a limiting of the scholar-official’s intellectual horizons and placed almost no value on his commitment to Confucian ideals. Little more was demanded of him than rote memorization of the classics (especially the Four Books), a mindless assimilation of the commentaries of Zhu Xi, and a technical mastery of the required essay and poetry forms.12
More thoughtful men naturally questioned whether this was true Confucian learning and whether official service on this basis could be considered a fulfillment of the Confucian sense of duty to humankind. But the much larger numbers of candidates recruited under the new system, with all the implications of social leveling and a lowering of scholarly standards that implied, greatly intensified the strain on the Ming Confucian. The tension increased between his egalitarian ideals and his elite standards, between his commitment to public service and his revulsion at careerism on a mass scale among supposed Confucians devoid of genuine intellectual and moral worth.
And, quite apart from his own interior struggles in these matters, there was the constant political and social pressure to conform, to yield his scruples and high ideals in the service of a questionable master. To refuse was to find himself in an embattled minority. What was worse, it was a minority without status and with almost no cohesion as a group. In a sense, it lacked even a raison d’etre. Within Confucianism, the concept of a “minority” had no place.13 The scholar stood alone, with comfort and support coming only from personal friends and distant admirers. He could only retire to his home ground, strive for economic self-sufficiency on the land (like Wu Yubi), or devote himself to teaching.
Under such circumstances, independence or resistance to the dominant power tended to be manifested in individualistic ways rather than through some interest group. In the early Ming, Fang Xiaoru is an excellent example of this. Rather than being a spokesman for the scholar-gentry as a class, he is representative of them in the sense of exemplifying the only kind of independence possible for them—individual heroism and individuality of thought—rather than in the conscious assertion of their interests as an opposition group.
It was among such individuals, thrown back upon themselves, that Ming thought in the true sense was born. Their inner conflicts, however, were of many sorts. It was one thing to defend one’s own sense of the authentic Confucian tradition against a debased official “orthodoxy,” as did even the Cheng-Zhu school (e.g., Wu Yubi and Hu Juren) of the early Ming in holding itself aloof from the establishment. This was a conflict between the philosopher and the state as to what truly constituted orthodoxy. This was another thing that the philosopher felt within himself: the stresses of time and change as they affected his understanding of the Confucian Way. This was a conflict with the past, and, again, even those who cherished orthodoxy experienced it. They suffered not only alienation from the established regime but also, in a more complex and indefinable way, estrangement from received tradition.
THE BURDEN OF CULTURE IN THE MING
This tradition Ming scholars received largely from the Song (960–1279). Indeed, Ming China may be seen as the second phase of a farreaching cultural development that had come to its first apex in the Song. The Confucian revival in that period had been stimulated by forces that continued and were greatly intensified in the Ming—the strengthening and enlarging of the civil bureaucracy, expansion of commerce and industry, increasing urbanization and the growth of an urban culture of great diversity and refinement, the development of printing and the comparatively wide distribution of books, and the great extension of education, partly occasioned by increased social mobility and the participation of larger numbers of people in the competition for office if not in the civil service itself.14
The effect of this was not felt immediately in the democratization of learning on any large scale or in a breaking down of the traditional distinction between the Confucian educated elite and the uneducated masses—though something of this was to come. The most direct effects were felt within the educated class itself—those who carried the burden of high culture and would be most sensitive to changes in the cultural situation. Until Zhu Xi, it had been possible for the Confucian to conceive of himself as potentially a master of the arts, though even by his time signs of strain had appeared between interior moral cultivation and excessive involvement in external culture.15 The enjoyment of arts and letters—aesthetic pursuits such as landscape painting; gardening; the collecting of bronzes; the furnishing of the scholar’s studio with fine paper, brushes, and ink stones; and scholarly hobbies of an antiquarian sort—could sap completely the will of the Confucian to put the world in order. Still, somehow the Song giants had found the energy to impose order on this fascinating diversity instead of denying it. Zhu Xi’s all-embracing system had reunited the rational and moral orders; Sima Guang had encompassed all history in a sweeping panorama of recorded fact and moral example; and encyclopedists such as Zheng Qiao, Wang Yinglin, and Ma Duanlin had traced the development of social and cultural institutions from the primitive past to the complex present.
Yet they may have done their work too well for the Ming. Who could compete with such masters? Individuals found the problem too staggering; its magnitude now required large-scale cooperative effort such as was embodied in the massive Yongle Encyclopedia (1407). Printing and the dissemination of books, which made education more widely available, rendered mastery more difficult. To pursue the “investigation of things” and their principles in one thing or affair after another, in book after book, seemed an endless procedure. Indeed, the Ming scholar was already confronted by the typical modern dilemma—how to keep up with the proliferation of literature and how to cope with more and more specialized branches of learning while not losing the sense of human relevance. Was he not threatened with a loss of the intellectual and spiritual integration that had always been the aim of Confucian study?
Those who set the tone and direction of Ming thought, such as Chen Xianzhang and Wang Yangming, often voiced concern over the harmful effects of excessive involvement in book learning and belles-lettres. This was indeed a crucial issue between Wang and his great predecessor Zhu Xi. The latter, Wang believed, had even learned to regret his own overindulgence in bookish pursuits:
[Zhu] all along … directed his efforts only to intellectual investigations and writing. Naturally he would have had no time for these if he had given priority to self-cultivation with a sense of genuine and personal concern.… If he had really worried lest the doctrine not be made clear to the world, and, following the example of Confucius’ retiring to edit the Six Classics, had eliminated superfluous works and confined himself to the simple and essential in order to enlighten later scholars, in general it would not have required him to do much investigation. When he was young he wrote many books and then repented doing so in his old age. That was doing things upside down.16
Reflected in this passage is the overpowering figure of Zhu Xi as a prodigious scholar whose written work had left a monumental legacy to later generations. One might have thought that Zhu’s philosophy and his writings had been most impressive for their comprehensiveness. They had achieved the same remarkable balance of concern for philosophical inquiry, moral self-cultivation, cultural endeavor, and public service that had characterized Confucius himself. Yet it is that very comprehensiveness and complexity that disturbs Wang. He longs for the simplicity of the ancient sage and puts forward his “innate knowledge” (liangzhi) as a return to the irreducible essence of Confucius’s teaching:
In learning to become a sage, the student need only get rid of selfish human desires and preserve the principle of nature (tianli), which is like refining gold and achieving perfection in quality.… Later generations [however] … seek sagehood only in knowledge and ability … and merely cripple their spirit and exhaust their energy scrutinizing books, investigating the names and varieties of things, and imitating the forms and traces of the ancients.17
Thus, through man’s instinctive moral sense, based on Mencius’s doctrine of the goodness of human nature, Wang seeks to redress the Confucian balance in the direction of moral cultivation in practice, as opposed to cultural activity and the accumulation of learning. He is saying that the sage must be more a man of action than a scholar.
It would thus be possible to interpret this development within the context of Confucian humanism alone. Wang Yangming in his own experience of life is the Confucian as the man of action, the scholar who devoted more of his life to active official service than almost any other Song or Ming thinker did, much of that activity being of the most strenuous and demanding sort. Indeed, the official Ming History, which categorizes him as a statesman rather than a scholar, credits him with the greatest military achievements of any civil official in the Ming period.18 Zhu Xi, by comparison, saw little active service. For the most part, he either held sinecures involving cultural activities and very little active administration, or else he was out of favor at court and living in “retirement” as a scholar.19 Wang Yangming complains in the quotation above that Zhu wrote too much. And it is true that he devoted his life mainly to intellectual inquiry and writing rather than to the active expression of his Confucian concerns in public service. In terms, then, of the traditional function of the Confucian as both scholar and official, or of Confucianism as upholding both culture and morality, there is some basis for saying that Wang Yangming manifests the instinct within Confucianism to restore this balance in the direction of moral action.
But what Wang expresses here is what other Ming thinkers before him had also sensed. The emphasis on interiority rather than intellectuality is already found in his predecessors, Wu Yubi, Hu Juren, Chen Xianzhang, and Lou Liang. Chen in particular had stressed the dispensability of book learning and even the obstacle it might put in the way of achieving sagehood.20 Yet their roles in life were quite different from Wang’s. They tended to be reclusive and not to engage in active official life as he did.21 Hence we know that this fundamental difference between Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming arose not simply from the former’s more scholarly way of life and the latter’s more activist approach but more broadly from a heightened awareness of the burdens of culture that was common in the Ming, as well as from that deeper preoccupation with the true nature of the self to which both political and cultural pressures drove the Ming thinker. In other words, the tensions that existed in Confucian thought between morality and culture, action and quiescence, political involvement or disengagement all focused on the underlying problem of man’s nature: was it static or dynamic, metaphysical or physical, an abstract ideal or an active force, a moral norm or a transmoral perfection? How was the individual to understand that nature in relation to his actual self and his society?
THE MING EXPERIENCE OF THE SELF
In a concrete sense, Ming thought proper originates in an experience of the self. Chen Xianzhang and Wang Yangming, generally acknowledged to be leaders and exemplars of new thought in the Ming, each underwent a personal experience that had a decisive effect on his thinking. In both cases, there is an atmosphere of intense spiritual crisis surrounding the event. Chen had returned from Peking, having failed twice in the metropolitan examinations, and entered upon a prolonged program of concentrated study and meditation, broken only by a brief period of study with Wu Yubi in Jiangxi. Extensive reading characterized the earlier phase of this program; later, the emphasis shifted to quiet-sitting in meditation as Chen became convinced that self-realization could not come from books. Finally, his solitary effort resulted in an experience of “enlightenment,” described in terms of seeing his essential self and its identity with all things and drawing from this realization a sense of unlimited power in dealing with the world. A feeling of overflowing joy and unshakable self-confidence ensued.22
Wang Yangming’s experience came after his banishment to Guizhou, a period of extreme hardship less significant for its physical difficulties than for the intellectual and spiritual isolation he suffered. A man of tremendous energy and strong commitment to public service, he found his activities severely restricted. With a brilliant mind and a fondness for intellectual discourse, he had little company among the aboriginals, exiled criminals, and emigrés of little education who surrounded him. In such circumstances, Wang was pushed to the limit of his spiritual resources. His Life Chronology (Nianpu) reports how he was driven in upon himself: “He had already given up and put behind him all thought of personal success or failure, honor or disgrace, and only the question of life and death remained to be overcome. Thus day and night he stayed in silent, solitary meditation.” Then late one night as he was pondering what a sage would do in such circumstances, he suddenly had a “great enlightenment.” In it was revealed to him the real meaning of “the recognition of things and the extension of knowledge” that earlier had eluded him as he tried to apprehend the principle of things through contemplation of the bamboo in his father’s garden. Transported by his discovery, he called out exultantly, and his feet danced for joy. His companions, awakened from sleep, were amazed at his behavior. Thus he first learned, it is said, “that the way to sagehood lies within one’s own nature.”23
Such experiences were common in the Ming, but recent historians have treated them with considerable reserve. Those of a rationalistic and critical bent tend to dismiss such accounts as conventional hagiography, and others who find that they do not fit the picture of Wang Yangming as a “pragmatic” philosopher or man of action have preferred not to emphasize the religious overtones. The similarity to Chan experience was also disturbing to find in a supposedly proper Confucian. But a phenomenon so widespread, or even a convention so well established, requires some explanation. No doubt, the lingering influence of Chan helped to produce an atmosphere in which some extraordinary experience of “enlightenment” lent authority to one’s views. In Wang Yangming’s case, the references to his confrontation of “life and death” and his prolonged absorption over many years with “recognizing things (gewu),” almost as if this were a kōan for him that awaited some flash of illumination, lend some plausibility to this interpretation. But if Wang was not unfamiliar with the ways of Chan and Taoist meditation, he had long since repudiated his own experiments with it, and while feeling no compulsion constantly to attack Buddhism, he made clear his rejection of it as incompatible with Confucian principles.24 There are, moreover, indications that his experience and that of other Confucians in the Ming falls into a broader category of mysticism that need not always be labeled “Chan.” Indeed, the possibility of a distinctive Confucian mysticism can by no means be ruled out.
On this particular occasion, Wang Yangming was preoccupied not only with the problem of apprehending “the principle of things” but in an intensely personal way with the question of how to become a sage. In his pioneering work, Chūgoku ni okeru kindai shii no zasetsu (The Frustration of Modern Thought in China), Shimada Kenji has drawn attention to the special urgency with which Ming thinkers felt this need.25 What for Zhu Xi and the Song school had been seen as an ideal for all, though achievable in fact by only a few, had become for them—and this includes Chen Xianzhang, his teacher Wu Yubi, and Wang’s teacher Lou Liang, as well as Wang Yangming himself—an overriding necessity. It was, one might say, as if their salvation depended on it. Men had become persuaded that sagehood should no longer be thought of as a remote, lofty, and awesome ideal exemplified by a few great figures in the past. It must be something realizable here and now by anyone.
THE EXPERIENCE OF ONENESS WITH ALL CREATION
One key to the Ming experience of the self and of sagehood is the Neo-Confucian doctrine that “the humane man forms one body with Heaven-and-earth and all things.” A development from the earlier Confucian idea of the unity of Heaven and man, this doctrine had been put forward by Cheng Hao and was often associated with Zhang Zai’s mystical vision of man’s essential harmony with the universe expressed in his celebrated Western Inscription.26 According to this view, man in his essential nature (xing) is identical with all nature (tiandi) and of the same substance as all things. Theoretically, this identity is based on the equation of humanity or man’s nature with life itself. The fundamental characteristic of the universe or Way is seen as its creativity or productivity, and man too is seen as creative in his very essence.
It was especially in relation to Buddhism that Neo-Confucians stressed the importance of this doctrine. As they saw it, Buddhism identified life with suffering and illusion; it insisted that man could discover his true identity only by negating and then transcending his ordinary humanity, that is, recognizing it as an illusory distinction in a transient world. For the Neo-Confucian, on the other hand, self-transcendence should be attained not by denying one’s humanity but by affirming it, by overcoming selfishness in one’s daily life, identifying with others, and coming to an awareness of man’s ethical and cultural activity as participating in the creative process of Heaven-and-earth.
In the Ming, the importance of this conception is evident in the frequency with which it is employed to describe both man’s role in the world of action and his experience in the life of contemplation.27 Overtones of it are found in Professor Ren’s discussion of Chen Xianzhang, particularly in the lines “Standing between Heaven-and-earth, what dignity this body of mine possesses,” and “This body of mine, small though it is, is nevertheless bound up with ethical principles. The pivot is in the mind.”28
Man’s bodily self and his moral mind are at the center of the creative process and therefore play an exalted role. “Man forms one body with Heaven-and-earth,” Chen says. “Hence the four seasons proceed and all things are produced. If one gets stuck in one place how can one be the master of creation?”29
To be a sage, then, was to be the master of all creation. For Wang Yangming and many of his followers, the sagehood to which any man might aspire was no less cosmic in its significance. With a belief in the direct attainment of sagehood and a vision of man standing at the center of creation, the ingredients of a spiritual revolution were at hand. In some ways, this development is comparable to the proclamation of universal Buddhahood through the Mahāyāna in China, Japan, and Korea centuries earlier and especially to those forms (Zhenyan and Chan) that emphasized the attainment of Buddhahood in this life and this body. There is a difference, however, in the Ming exaltation of life, creativity, and the potentialities of the human individual.
QUIETISM AND ACTIVISM
If the mystical quality of Ming thought is inspired by this sense of man’s oneness with all creation, it has important implications for both self-cultivation and man’s proper activity in the world. This is an ethical mysticism, of which the natural expression is an impulse toward action on behalf of all mankind. As we have seen in the case of Wang Yangming’s experience of sagehood, there has been a tendency to interpret such mystical phenomena, especially where they involve the cultivation of “quiescence” (jing) or the practice of “quiet-sitting” (jingzuo), as showing the influence of Buddhism and Daoism. Nor can there be much doubt that, in a general way, Buddhist ideals of non-attachment and peace of mind along with Taoist meditative practices exerted a strong attraction on Neo-Confucians of both the Song and Ming. Quiet-sitting was approved and encouraged by Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, and Zhu Xi. Though a practice without precedent in earlier Confucian tradition, its sanction by these Song masters was sufficient to justify and encourage its use among orthodox scholars from Wu Yubi in the early Ming to Gao Panlong in the late Ming. Thus it seems indisputable that the Buddhist-Daoist example exerted a magnetic pull on the growth of Neo-Confucianism, causing it to develop along lines that would have been improbable except in a climate permeated by such influence.
On the other hand, as we have just seen, Neo-Confucianism from the start had felt compelled to reject the basic assumptions of Buddhist nonattachment or Daoist vacuity. A detached attitude toward things might be admirable, but the Confucian conception of human life and the self did not allow the individual to be seen in isolation from his social environment or the moral imperatives of Heaven. It was unrealistic, wrong, and selfish to conceive of human existence apart from the concrete relationships and obligations inescapably involved in the production and sustaining of human life. One could not renounce these obligations and cares even if to do so brought peace of mind. Anxiety, as Fan Zhongyan had implied, might be a higher state of mind than the peace of Nirvana.30
Confucian detachment, therefore, was sought in another direction. Virtue, humaneness, love, in their fullness and perfection, could express detachment in the midst of human involvement. Unselfish performance of duty to others was a discipline of ordinary life leading to both self-transcendence and self-fulfillment. An example of this is found in the case of Chen Xianzhang. The latter is said to have abandoned the wearing of silk after the death of his mother, to whom he had been deeply devoted. One might have taken this as a sign of utter desolation over his loss: Chen had become so identified with his mother and emotionally dependent upon her that the rest of his life was overshadowed by his sense of mourning. Yet Chen’s own explanation was of another sort. His preference in dress, he says, had always been for the utmost simplicity. He had put on finer robes only to please his mother and, though he continued for years to humor her, with her passing he was free to please himself. We may have doubts today as to how well Chen understood what he was doing or the extent to which hidden compulsions operated here. Yet such doubts are in one sense irrelevant. In his own mind, he had no consciousness that subordination of self to filial duty involved the loss of his own identity. His own preferences, though submerged in hers for so long, remained intact and unimpaired, awaiting the proper time for their expression.
Thus, in most Neo-Confucian methods of cultivation, even those characterized by “quiescence,” the object was to root out not desire itself but only selfish desires—desires that set one apart from others, from things, from the world, from Heaven. Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription is the most eloquent statement of this ideal, and its enduring popularity suggests how central to later Confucian thought was this mystical vision of man harmoniously united to all forms of life.
In the formulation of this view, Neo-Confucians could draw upon the legacy of classical Confucian teaching for most of the essential ingredients, if not for the practice of quiet-sitting. Among these is the idea that involvement in life, the active cultivation of moral man, can lead to true repose. As we have seen in Confucius’s memorable summation of his own experience of life:
At fifteen, I had my heart set on learning.
By thirty, I had established myself (in its pursuit).
By forty, I had no perplexities.
By fifty, I knew the will of Heaven.
By sixty, I was ready to listen to it.
By seventy, I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing.31
Here we find a confidence that human life can follow a meaningful pattern and by ordered stages of growth and maturity attain a freedom wherein one’s spontaneous desires are naturally in accord with Heaven, the moral order and vital power in the universe. This is a freedom in which one’s own desires have been brought into perfect relation to the means of their fulfillment, the desires and needs of others, and the creative purposes of Heaven as the source of all life. In the Ming, it is an ideal and an aspiration intimately bound up with sagehood, and, as the latter came to be thought more readily attainable, so did this freedom. What it meant, however, to be able to “follow one’s heart’s desire without transgressing” depended greatly on one’s understanding of the heart-and-mind of man. Hence the lively discussion of this problem—the mind and nature—throughout the Ming and especially of this freedom among the existentialist followers of Wang Yangming.
At the same time, the ideal of freedom-in-action implied that active involvement in the world and personal commitment to doing Heaven’s will need not require constant and compulsive action in the world. Obedience to Heaven’s will called for quiet acceptance and resignation as often as it did for effort in behalf of right. The Book of Changes proffered a kind of moral science in which the conditions for “advancing” and “withdrawing,” engaging and disengaging, were specified. Here too Ming scholars were more attracted by these “signs” as a guide to action than they were to the Changes as a cosmological system, as is shown, for example, in Professor Huang’s study of the utilitarian thought of the late Ming statesman Ni Yuanlu. The essential notion, however, is quite implicit in the Analects and Mencius. Mozi saw it and condemned it as fatalism, but (as Professor Tang Junyi has brought out in his studies on the Will of Heaven in early Chinese thought) the Confucian conception was far more profound than Mozi appreciated.32 The decree of Heaven manifested itself in various forms and on different levels. One could not identify it wholly with a single course of action. One’s moral nature, which was the endowment of Heaven, might prompt one to take action in a good cause, but Heaven’s decree, as made known through the circumstances surrounding this action, might nevertheless thwart the accomplishment of one’s objective or force a redirection of one’s efforts before success could be achieved. Alertness was required to all the promptings of Heaven, whether internal or external, in a constant process of reexamination. There were times for action and times for quiescence.
Beyond this, moreover, there was a need for quiescence in action. This was an attitude of mind that not only took into account the circumstances favoring engagement or disengagement at any given time but also accepted the necessity for continual striving in the face of continual disappointment. Confucius described himself as one who kept on trying even when he knew it was of no use. In other words, he could be engaged in what he thought to be right yet disengaged so far as his own expectations were concerned.
To sum up, then, Confucian cultivation was alert to the external signs that suggested whether to “advance” or “withdraw” and sensitive to the promptings of one’s heart as to what was right in some circumstances, but not necessarily in all, or what one must hold to under any circumstances. Thus there could be stability of purpose and composure of mind in the midst of action, and there could also be active mental or spiritual contact with the world even when circumstances dictated a period of inactivity.
As applied to the Ming, therefore, or indeed any other period in Chinese history, we cannot expect from the Confucian active involvement only of a kind that is highly visible or outwardly effective. Wang Yangming was outstanding as an active statesman and general, and some see this as exemplifying his doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action. Others cite it further as illustrating the more dynamic and active spirit of the Ming. But Wang was a most exceptional figure for his or any other age. For many Ming thinkers confronted by difficult political choices, right action consisted in political disengagement. They chose deliberately to live in what would be known as official retirement, pursuing a life not dissimilar to that of Confucius as a teacher and scholar. Thus, if the spirit of Ming thought is to be considered “active” and “dynamic,” the basis for it must be an involvement with life not exclusively political in character.
MIND, BODY, AND SELF
In the Ming, as its critics complained, there were as many ways of viewing the mind and nature as there were schools and thinkers. There were differences, for example, as to whether the substance of the mind (the nature) was static or dynamic, whether its cultivation should be active or passive, and, if active, whether the effort at cultivation (gongfu) should be applied to the substance of mind (benti) or to its functioning (yong). Most Ming thinkers agreed, however, that Confucian teaching in these matters differed from Buddhism in taking actual life as its starting point. For the Neo-Confucian, life (sheng) is the basic value. He is ever conscious of the intimate connection between it and man’s nature. The nature is what fosters life, and action or conduct conforming to the true nature of man conduces to his total well-being—physical, emotional, spiritual—and ultimately to the welfare of all things. Thus a truly moral life builds one’s morale and spirit but also contributes to one’s bodily health. Conversely, one’s mental and moral capacities greatly depend on one’s physical powers and drives for their development. Even the so-called School of the Mind does not see this mind as a disembodied spirit but rather as a vital power manifested through the physical aspect of man, his material force or ether (qi). Likewise, this school rejects the tendency in Cheng-Zhu thought to distinguish an abstract essence of mind or moral nature, on the one hand, and an emotional, sensual self identified with the body, on the other. The nature as principle is neither an immutable norm by which one judges the propriety of one’s impulses and desires nor a purely rational law standing over against man’s physical drives and passions. The life-fulfilling nature and the vital power of material force are inseparable.
When we refer to the School of the Mind (Xinxue), then, we must remember that Xin represents both the heart and mind of man, his affective as well as his rational nature. To think of this school as a form of philosophical idealism or Neo-Platonic mysticism is misleading. The mind here represents man’s actual nature, and a major tendency in the school is undoubtedly existentialist. At the same time, the very effort to overcome or to embrace the antithesis between ideal and actual, the spiritual and the material, the static and the dynamic creates its own ambiguities and precludes simple characterization. We do well to note the range of possibilities inherent in these concepts. Insofar as our word “spirit” designates the breath of life, its original and basic meaning in the West, it must be identified not with reason or principle but with the Chinese qi (“material force” or “ether”), which is constantly active in the universe, constantly emerging from an invisible state into a visible. So too in the mind the creative power of material force is constantly manifesting itself.
The moral nature, which is spoken of also as the “substance or essence of the mind” (benti), is the principle of unity and harmony between man and things. And the impulses, desires, and drives that arise in the mind are not necessarily evil unless they impair or destroy that harmony. The problem of self-cultivation is to observe these impulses and ideas as they emerge from the formless state and to insure that their expression (or functioning) conforms to this total harmony. Mind culture in the more orthodox thinkers consists in identifying these impulses at the point of inception (ji) and acting on them in such a way that the fundamental composure or harmony of the self is preserved and sustained. On the other hand, if one assumes, as Ming existentialists do, that the essential mind or nature is transmoral in its perfection, then self-cultivation becomes a matter of true self-expression rather than of moral judgment or self-restraint.
In either case, the School of the Mind focuses on the active, living subject in contact with others and with things seen as one body with oneself. Self-understanding, an apprehension of one’s true self, or insight into the substance of the mind does not require withdrawal from the senses or from contact with the world. Knowledge and action involve a constant interaction between the self and others, the nature and the senses, the individual and the environment. Rightly or wrongly (and I cannot deal fully with the issues here), most Ming thinkers felt that this distinguished Confucian self-cultivation from the type of Buddhist contemplation that sought withdrawal into an inner self or a higher self, in which the flow of ideas, thought, and desires had been stopped.
This view of the mind or self was holistic in the sense that man and his universe were seen as an organic unity, whereas Buddhism asked man to disavow his distinctively human nature and establish his true nature in a state of nondependence on the world. According to Wang Yangming, this destroyed the essential unity of things by creating higher and lower spheres of existence, a transcendental and a mundane order. It did not help that Buddhism ultimately reconciled the two through insight into the identity of Nirvana and Samsara. Such a mystical insight afforded no way of dealing with the world in rational, human terms.
If, however, this life-affirming view was seen as opposed to Buddhism and Daoism, there were in Ming thought other tendencies toward reconciliation. The intuitionist and existentialist trend in the Wang Yangming school led close to Chan Buddhism, even if their original premises differed. There were points of convergence in the belief in sagehood and buddhahood being inherent in all men and in the experience of enlightenment as the recognition of one’s true selfhood being identical with the actual self. Further, the affirmation of the physical and affective side of man’s nature opened the way to Daoist concepts and practices of self-cultivation through both physiological and psychological means.
A NEW “LIBERALISM” AND “PRAGMATISM” IN THE LATE MING
In the widespread trend toward “Unity of the Three Teachings,” so marked in the sixteenth century, there is no doubt a large element of traditional Chinese syncretism. But syncretism of this sort had usually operated on a low intellectual level as an aspect of popular religion. The striking feature of the new humanitarianism that developed out of the Wang Yangming school was that, drawing on the latter’s liberal view of man, it brought together the upper and lower classes, deepening the level of social consciousness in the former and raising the level of moral consciousness in the latter, while also releasing new political and cultural energies throughout the society. In other words, this was not simply a popular religious phenomenon but one that tended to unite and activate new forces on several levels, with leadership coming from an important segment of the educated elite. This is particularly apparent in popular literature and painting. Evidences of it are found in the new “morality books” discussed by Professor Sakai, on one hand, and in a very different way by Professor Hsia’s discussion of the romantic trend in the dramatic literature of Tang Xianzu.33 Both of these developments arose partly out of contact with the so-called left wing of the Wang Yangming school. The morality books drew upon its view of the autonomy of the moral self, and romantic literature drew upon its recognition of the passionate and appetitive nature of the individual. The present writer’s discussion of individualism in the late Ming brings out further the possibilities inherent in the optimistic and liberal view of the self found in this school.34
There is still other evidence that what we find in the sixteenth century is a near-revolution in thought rather than simply a passing mood of eclecticism. The new view of the self, stressing the actual nature of man and especially his physical life and concrete needs, tended to generate a new “pragmatism” that gave increasing attention to “practical” realities in statecraft and fiscal administration.
Since this kind of thinking centered, philosophically speaking, around the concept of qi, it has been described as a kind of materialism. If we recall, however, the dual aspect of qi as both matter and “spirit,” we are not surprised to find that its proponents in the late Ming are as readily drawn to Chan Buddhism as to anything resembling Western materialism. It is also significant that among Confucians upholding a monism of qi the emphasis on realism and practicality finds its concrete expression within the domain of the traditional Confucian concern for society, that is, primarily in government, rather than in the development of a thoroughgoing empiricism in either the physical or social sciences. At the same time, it is more an expression of Ming “activism” than it is of the kind of detached, theoretical speculation important to the development of science in the West.
It is for these reasons that I have spoken of a near-revolution in thought during the latter part of the Ming, recognizing both the new potentialities and opportunities it presented and also the failure of these to develop fully. By and large, the new trends were confined during the seventeenth century to the established areas of Confucian concern: self and society as understood essentially in humanistic and moralistic terms. Nevertheless, this could not mean simply a return of Chinese thought to the status quo ante. If a new empiricism and positivism failed to develop fully, still the Ming left its successors at a new stage. The antimetaphysical tone of Qing thought is clearly the product of the increasing Ming emphasis on practical action, physical reality, and empirical study. In other words, Qing thought is the direct heir of the Ming, even though it prefers not to acknowledge this indebtedness. Like the Ming itself with respect to the Song, the Qing attacks in its predecessor what the latter had taught it to be dissatisfied with. It washed its hands of the Ming in Ming water.