Over the last two chapters, we have explicated the heartmind, including its role as the seat of the emotions. In the present chapter, we turn to another crucial aspect of the heartmind's functioning, in this case one that corresponds in certain ways to western conceptions of “epistemology.” Like western epistemology, our present interest is in a kind of knowing; the Chinese term at the heart of this chapter, zhi 知, is typically translated as “know.” Unlike western epistemology, though, Neo-Confucians do not focus on the contrast between beliefs that count as knowledge and those that are merely opinion. Instead, the most important kind of knowing is a spontaneous discerning of Pattern that automatically brings with it motivation and thus action; the important contrast, for most Neo-Confucians, is with those forms of knowing that do not satisfactorily connect us up to Pattern. There is some room in this kind of picture for judgment, justification, and reflection, but these activities are not as central as they are in western epistemology. Instead, key debates focus on questions like: Does the cultivation or activation of ideal knowing involve discriminating between subject and object, or not? What is the role of perception, and can one directly perceive Pattern? Is sudden, holistic insight possible, and if so, what is its significance? Finally, how exactly are knowing and acting related, and does the right kind of knowing always guarantee a proper response? Answers to these questions are both important in their own right and set the stage for our examination of self-cultivation and virtue in chapters to come.
As in other areas, in their theories of knowing Neo-Confucians creatively and critically synthesize a variety of earlier ideas, especially those from classical Confucianism and various schools of Chinese Buddhism. As such, it makes sense to begin with a few of these earlier ideas. Chris Fraser summarizes the situation in classical texts as follows:
Perhaps the most frequent use of the word zhi (know) in early Chinese texts is in contexts in which it is best interpreted as “knowing-of” or “knowing-about,” a sort of recognition, familiarity, or understanding. A second common use is to mean roughly “know-to” or “know-how-to,” referring to a kind of competence or ability. Occasionally, zhi is used in contexts in which it is interpretable as “knowing that” and seems to refer to propositional knowledge.1
Many famous passages illustrate the first of these uses. For example, the Analects' brief spiritual autobiography of Confucius reads: “At fifteen, I committed myself to learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood (zhi) the cosmic decree; at sixty, my ear was attuned; at seventy, I could follow my heartmind's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.”2
Similarly, in the Mencius we read: “To fully fathom one's heartmind is to understand (zhi) one's nature. To understand one's nature is to understand the cosmos.”3 A theme of much scholarship on early Chinese theories of knowing is that these texts understood “knowing”/“understanding” in terms of competence in distinguishing various aspects of what is known from one another, which is often then linked to appropriate, skilled responses.4 It is easy to see how this kind of knowing would be closely connected to the virtue of wisdom, which precisely has to do with deeply understanding things and their interconnections, leading to fluid responses even to complex situations. Indeed, early texts often use the very same character for “knowing” and “wisdom.”5 Although there certainly are cases in classical texts where the object of the verb “to know” is a proposition, the general model of knowing was based on competence and distinctions rather than representation.6
The central goal of all forms of Buddhism is soteriological, not epistemic: that is, rather than learning something or knowing something, what we need is to awaken, be enlightened, transform. Nonetheless, Buddhist schools engage in considerable discussion of knowing, understanding, perception, and the like. It is helpful to think about these uses of epistemic language as falling into three types: the problematic, the useful, and the genuine. Regular, empirical, conceptually articulated knowing is often seen as a problem. Such forms of knowing assume a mistaken view of our reality that must be overcome for enlightenment to be possible. Second, the idea that various kinds of knowing or understanding can be useful, expedient means (upāya) on the road to enlightenment is quite common. Finally, many theorists use one or more terms to express ideas of genuine, unproblematic knowing. Special terms are sometimes used to mark these modes of knowing. For example, in the Platform Sutra we are told that, when there are “no objects that one knows [conceptually; i.e., as a thing distinct from other things], that is called ‘genuine knowing.’ ”7 The earliest use of “genuine knowing” (zhenzhi) in fact dates back to the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. As we will soon see, Neo-Confucians take a range of positions on the value of empirical knowing, some coming closer to Buddhist views than others, and some Neo-Confucians also adopt the term “genuine knowing,” albeit to mean something rather different than their Daoist and Buddhist predecessors.
We begin with debates among Neo-Confucians over whether there is one or more than one basic type of knowing and, if more than one, how they are related. Many Neo-Confucians discuss “sensory knowing” (wenjian zhi zhi 聞見之知) as opposed to “virtuous nature's knowing” (dexing zhi zhi 德性之知), but the meanings and relations of these terms vary. Both forms of knowing also become intertwined with the most famous category of Neo-Confucian epistemic cultivation, namely “getting a handle on things” (gewu 格物). Without too much distortion, we can summarize the positions that we will consider as follows. Zhang Zai believes that the two types of knowing are distinct but that sensory knowing is necessary for virtuous nature's knowing. Cheng Yi thoroughly distinguishes sensory and virtuous nature's knowing, arguing that the latter does not in fact depend on the former. This, in turn, leads to difficulties that will encourage Zhu Xi to deny the usefulness of the distinction altogether, as we will see in the following section.
Let us start with Zhang Zai, for whom the meaning of “sensory knowing” is rather clear: literally “hearing and seeing's knowing,” it encompasses all knowing activity that involves the senses (including reading), insofar as the thing that is known is understood to be external to oneself. A distinction between knowing subject and known object is fundamental to sensory knowing. Sensory knowing is not accomplished by the senses alone; it is ultimately one's heartmind that “joins together inner and outer” so that one knows. As Zhang Zai puts it: “When people say they have knowledge, it comes from the sensations of the sense organs. Human perception comes from the joining of the inner and the outer.”8 Knowing, on this picture, is something that happens as a result of our actual interactions, rather than something that could be innate. We will return to this important point below. We should also note that the known object is conceptualized as a “thing” (wu). “Thing” is a broad category that refers to anything that we can individuate or distinguish from something else, including affairs or events.9
The term “virtuous nature's knowing” is a bit peculiar. It seems to have been coined by Northern Song Neo-Confucians to refer to the special kind of knowing that they sought.10 It does not refer to knowledge that we have naturally or innately, but instead to knowing that fully matches with or realizes our nature, in the special sense of “nature” discussed in chapter 3. According to Zhang Zai, the key difference with sensory knowing is that although virtuous nature's knowing also involves the joining together of differences, these differences are not conceived of in terms of “inner” and “outer,” or “self” and “other.” Instead, Zhang says that when the heartmind has been expanded to embody (ti 體) all things – that is, all things are perceived as interrelated parts of oneself – then we have virtuous nature's knowing.11 In a sense that we will explain below, the sage “views all-under-heaven as having no things that are not himself (or herself).”12
How are sensory knowing and virtuous nature's knowing related? On the one hand, Zhang is very clear that “virtuous nature's knowing does not sprout from seeing or hearing.”13 Zhang complains about those who see ideal knowing as a matter of “exhaustively investigating Pattern” and thus “fully fathoming things.” This is to think that by doing sensory knowing – attending to things external to us – evermore carefully, we will eventually succeed in attaining virtuous nature's knowing. But the problem lies in our making a distinction between ourselves (as knowing subject) and the things (as objects of knowing) in the first place. So virtuous nature's knowing cannot just be a highly advanced form of sensory knowing. On the other hand, Zhang also tells us that while “hearing and seeing are not sufficient to exhaust things, yet they are also necessary. If we have no ears or eyes, then we would be as wood or stone. If we have ears and eyes, we have a way of joining together the inner and the outer. If one does not hear or see, what experience can there be?”14 The senses are required for virtuous nature's knowing, but we only have virtuous nature's knowing when the knowing subject has expanded to encompass all of reality. There is no “other,” no external “object.” It is for this reason, presumably, that Zhang goes so far as to say that the ultimate state is “without knowing” (wuzhi 無知): being without the subject–object distinction that is essential to sensory knowing, virtuous nature's knowing is uniquely all-inclusive.
This is not to say that there are no distinctions of any kind in virtuous nature's knowing. The joining together of distinct things (inner and outer) that we do in sensory knowing is analogous to the joining together of opposites that we do in virtuous nature's knowing. For Zhang Zai, reality is always in a dynamic process of change, a joining and then separating of the distinct poles of yin and yang. The object or content of virtuous nature's knowing is not a frozen set of ideal truths, but a dynamic state whereby our heartminds are able to perfectly follow the changing distinctions of reality, perfectly responding to the stimulations and changes in the world. Because all things are viewed as aspects of the self – although they need not all be seen as equally important or valuable parts – virtuous nature's knowing is simply the unimpeded awareness of and response to one's own needs. Unlike Buddhists (as Zhang understands them), Zhang does not hold that this changing world is unreal: it is completely real, which is precisely the reason that actual experience and the actual use of our ears and eyes are necessary for even ideal knowing. Finally, note that to act in accord with virtuous nature's knowing is to act perfectly. For this reason, some scholars translate dexing zhi zhi, which we render as “virtuous nature's knowing,” as “moral knowing.” We agree that virtuous nature's knowing has a normative or ethical dimension to it, but the all-inclusive character of virtuous nature's knowing leads us to resist viewing it as only “moral.” Virtuous nature's knowing is not just about moral injunctions, but about interacting well with the world in every way, and includes knowing things with no obvious moral import, such as “thunder follows lightning.” Sensory knowing, in contrast, seems not to have direct implications for action, moral or otherwise. We will return to this important point below.
The Cheng brothers take a different tack from Zhang Zai: they distinguish sensory from virtuous nature's knowing quite sharply, and put little value on sensory knowing. Here is Cheng Yi: “Sensory knowing is not virtuous nature's knowing. In the former, things interact with things and thus one knows them; it is not internal. Today's so-called renaissance men have this kind of knowing. Virtuous nature's knowing does not depend on sensory experience.”15
One thing we can glean from this is that virtuous nature's knowing is “internal,” in some sense, but beyond that it leaves things somewhat vague. In particular, it is not clear what sorts of things we can understand through virtuous nature's knowing alone. At the very least, it must include moral knowing and an understanding of life and growth: we have seen that, for the Cheng brothers, our inherent nature has a kind of direct access to the life-giving generativity of the cosmos. But does it also include knowledge of things that seems to depend largely on empirical evidence – for example, the location in space or time of specific events? Cheng Yi, in an exchange with another Daoxue philosopher, suggests that he indeed “already knows” such things. But, when pressed, Cheng seems to conceive knowing of these sorts of facts as constrained by pragmatic and ethical considerations. Cheng says that thunder “arises in the place it arises,” suggesting that this is all we need to know about the subject.16
When Cheng Yi says that he “already knows,” this raises a significant problem for anyone who believes that what we need to know is already within us: how, then, to explain why so many of us seem ignorant and misguided? One side of the Chengs' answer has to do with distinguishing two kinds of “nature,” on which see chapter 4. The other part of their answer draws on a key phrase from the short classic text Greater Learning: “Reaching understanding [or knowing: zhi] lies in getting a handle on things (gewu).”17 Unfortunately, the classic does not explain what “getting a handle on things” means. Cheng Yi offers the following:
The word ge means “to reach” (zhi 至). … Every single thing has a Pattern, and one must exhaustively investigate it so as to reach its Pattern. There are many ways to do this. One is to read books and elucidate the moral principles (yili 義理) in them. Another is to discuss people and events of the past and present and to distinguish which are right and which are wrong. Still another is to encounter things and affairs and deal with them in the proper way. These are all exhaustively investigating Pattern.18
In other words, even though Pattern is already within one as one's nature, for it to be part of one's active knowing one must consciously engage with Pattern in any of its multitudinous manifestations in the world, thereby “reaching” Pattern. As Cheng Yi puts it, “Although knowing is something that I innately have, without ‘reaching’ Pattern one cannot attain it [actively].”19 The Chengs say relatively little to explain what we are calling “active” knowing, other than to connect it to spontaneously apt action and to label it “genuine knowing” (zhenzhi).20 Later in this chapter, we will see that Zhu Xi offers more of an explanation for why and how active knowing has the effects it does, via the category of “discernment.”
The examples of “getting a handle on things” that Cheng Yi lists – reflecting on book learning, dealing with things and affairs, and so on – all sound like external matters that would follow from sensory knowing. That is, the activity that Cheng is calling for would seem to rely on a discrimination between external object and knowing, reflecting subject. And yet if we look further at what the two Chengs say, we will see that things are not so straightforward in two distinct ways.21 First, the Chengs sometimes assert that one must investigate multiple instances of Pattern and sometimes say that the Pattern of one single thing or event will suffice.22 Second, and even more consequentially, it is ambiguous whether getting a handle on things is primarily focused on “things” that are external or internal to the self. At one point, one of the Chengs is asked, “Does getting a handle on things refer to external things or to things in the nature?” He replies: “It makes no difference. Whatever is before the eye is a thing, and all things have Pattern. For example, that by which fire is hot, that by which water is cold, and even including the relations between ruler and minister or between father and son: all are Pattern.”23 Although the examples here look like external things or affairs, Cheng's remark that “it makes no difference” makes room for a very different kind of inward-oriented investigation, focused on either specific Patterns within our nature or the one single Pattern that is our nature.24
If the Chengs are ambiguous about whether external, sensory knowing must be part of getting a handle on things, several of their most influential followers are not. For Yang Shi and Zhang Jiucheng, the only kind of knowing that really matters is strictly internal (even though they both emphasize active engagement with the outside world). Yang particularly emphasizes the role of “quiet sitting” in helping one to “embody with the heartmind the state before the emotions … are aroused; then the meaning of centeredness will appear of itself.”25 Zhang Jiucheng, who was Yang's student and also a close correspondent with the leading Chan Buddhist teacher of the era, adjusts Yang's teachings by removing the emphasis on “quiet sitting,” but he is equally explicit about the internal focus of knowing. For Zhang, the key is to be ever vigilant and watchful over one's “unseen and unheard” inner nature; he repeatedly uses the classical phrase “cautious and apprehensive” to express this idea. For example:
If a superior person wishes to seek the centeredness common to all, he must get the taste of it through being cautious over what is unseen and apprehensive over what is unheard. This is the basis for knowing centeredness. If one cannot hold to this method … it is as if one were to eat and drink all day yet never know the taste. Oh, the taste of it! You will know it when you have become thoroughly immersed and drenched in what is unseen and unheard.26
Elsewhere, he says that the important types of knowing all come down to “being cautious over what is unseen and apprehensive over what is unheard. … If one does not practice this, it will be like duckweed adrift on the water, drifting with the wind to the north or south; where will one anchor oneself?”27 A contemporary scholar nicely sums up Zhang's exclusive focus on inner “virtuous nature's knowing”: “Within Zhang's framework, neither moral judgments nor practical knowing belong to the realm of ordinary human knowing, but must arise as the spontaneous manifestation of one's nature.”28
To sum up so far, we have three influential positions on the role of sensory knowing. Zhang Zai sees the necessity of sensory knowing but also distinguishes it from the type of knowing he most values, virtuous nature's knowing. Despite the fact that the Cheng brothers are responsible for bringing “getting a handle on things” to the forefront of Daoxue discourse, they are curiously ambiguous on whether sense-based attention to external things needs to be part of our efforts to improve our knowing. Cheng students like Yang Shi and Zhang Jiucheng, finally, place exclusive emphasis on an inward-focused practice that aims to know our nature directly.
By the mid-twelfth century, when Zhu Xi is coming of age, the mainstream view within Daoxue is that learning is centrally an inward affair aimed at virtuous nature's knowing (though the term “virtuous nature's knowing” is not always used explicitly). Zhu initially shares this view, but comes to see it as philosophically problematic and rejects the possibility of directly accessing nature, as we will discuss in chapter 7. Here, we look at one key consequence of Zhu's mature view: his rejection of the distinction between sensory knowing and virtuous nature's knowing. Asked whether there is such a thing as sensory knowing, Zhu is unambiguous: “There is only one kind of knowing! The only issue is whether it is genuine or not. This is the only difference at issue; it is definitely not the case that after we have sensory knowing we later have another instance of knowing.”29 Discussing an assertion by Zhang Zai that we must avoid allowing sensory knowing to “handcuff” our heartminds, Zhu argues:
In order to be able to learn, we must possess senses of seeing and hearing. How can we possibly do without them? We work hard with our senses until we freely arrive at an interconnected understanding. Ordinarily, when we study something by relying on senses, a single affair only leads us to know a single principle.30 However, when we reach the stage of an interconnected understanding, all Pattern becomes one.31
Even though Zhu Xi only mentions Zhang Zai here by name, he was well aware that Cheng Yi had insisted on, if anything, a stronger distinction between these two purported types of knowing; Zhu does not criticize Cheng explicitly out of respect.32 He shows no such restraint for those of the Chengs' students who pursued a single-minded focus on virtuous nature's knowing even further, saying of Zhang Jiucheng that his writings are “outwardly Confucian but secretly Buddhist; … his purpose is to confuse the world and lull people to sleep so that they enter the Buddhist school and cannot extricate themselves from it even if they want to.”33
Zhu's picture of knowing – that it was a continuous process, reliant on the senses, that could eventually lead to a kind of breakthrough and consequently to “genuine” knowing – is of course quite consistent with some of what the Chengs said, and indeed bears resemblances to aspects of views held by other Northern Song Neo-Confucians. In subsequent sections, we will explore Zhu's conception of knowing, including what it is that makes knowing “genuine,” in more detail. Before moving on, though, we need to cover three more issues: the scope of Zhu Xi's idea of knowing, the persistence of views emphasizing direct, virtuous nature-knowing, and later attention to why “getting a handle on things” is necessary.
By the “scope” of Zhu's view of knowing, we mean two things. First of all, as with all the thinkers we have discussed, for Zhu Xi “knowing” is a process concerned with coming to understand things, coming to be able to make distinctions (in practice) among things, as well as coming to have specific items of articulable knowledge. As we will discuss in subsequent sections, the “deeper” or more “genuine” the knowing is, the less it has to do with propositional knowledge (e.g., coming to know that Mill Street is unusually slippery after it has rained) and the more it has to do with changes to how we discern and interact with the world. Second, it is quite common to hear scholars claim that Zhu Xi (among others) is really only concerned with “moral knowledge.”34 There is a kernel of truth in this idea since the kind of knowing that Zhu Xi values always has a normative upshot, but the norms apply extremely broadly. As we saw in chapter 2, Pattern includes much more than just interpersonal norms; and, as we will explain in more detail in the next section, the best kind of knowing entails discerning and being motivated by the life-affirming coherence of the cosmos in everything one encounters. As Zhu puts it, when this happens, one sees that “in the midst of daily affairs, there is nothing that is not the pervasive circulation of cosmic Pattern.”35
Next, we should keep in mind that the idea particularly associated with people like Zhang Jiucheng – that there is a distinct, non-sensory kind of knowing on which we should really focus our efforts – does not go away. Its standard-bearer in Southern Song Daoxue is Lu Xiangshan, famous for his debates with Zhu Xi on this and other issues. On our reading, Lu does not make any significantly new epistemological moves in these arguments; his claim that Zhu Xi focuses on “engaging in inquiry and study” rather than on “honoring the virtuous nature” simply begs the question against Zhu, since Zhu holds that these are crucially connected, as we have just seen.36 A more interesting version of the focus on virtuous nature's knowing comes with Chen Xianzhang of the early Ming dynasty. Chen says that he tried to make progress by reading books, but “did not acquire anything.” He elaborates:
What I mean by “did not acquire anything” is that this heartmind of mine and this Pattern of the world outside me did not coincide with and match one another. Then I forsook all the complexities of other methods and pursued, through quiet sitting alone, what was essential within myself. In time I was able to see the inherent reality of my own heartmind manifested inscrutably.37
For a wide range of thinkers in the Ming, the obsession of their contemporaries with what these thinkers called “vulgar learning” was a major problem in their society.38 Even though these critics were aware that the rote book learning and other activities that constituted vulgar learning were not what Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi had called for when they spoke of “getting a handle on things,” they still had two concerns: first, that Zhu's teachings could too easily be followed in such a way as to lead to mere vulgar learning; and second, some of these thinkers agreed with Chen that external-oriented “getting a handle on things” did not work.39 Chen's own critique continues as follows:
Those who learn should seek the Way not only in books but also in the heartmind. They should take note of the incipience (ji) of movement and tranquillity and of being and non-being. They should extend and nourish what they have within themselves. They must not be confused by what they see and hear. They must get rid of the fragmented functioning of the senses.40
Unlike most of the thinkers canvassed to this point, Chen doubts that there is a way that our sensory perception of things can lead us to the sense of interconnected, coherent unity that he is seeking; at the very least, his own efforts have failed to show how internal and external patterns tallied with one another. He therefore strives for an exclusively inner-oriented kind of knowing.
Did Chen really mean to abandon sensory knowing, at least as any part of the story of seeking the Way? One of his contemporaries worried that he did, indeed, writing that in the end Chen and his followers “fall into a state of emptiness and mysteriousness.”41 The potential problems with an exclusively inward focus are also discussed astutely by Luo Qinshun, an important mid-Ming Daoxue thinker. He writes: “If one's learning is not extensive and one's discussion is not detailed, one's vision will be limited by the confines of one's own heartmind, and however one may wish to be free from error, it will be impossible.”42 Elsewhere, Luo explains that because of the widespread influence of Chan Buddhism, many students back in the Northern Song “no longer directed their thoughts to the Pattern of heaven and earth and the myriad things,” and so were “reduced to onesidedness and solely preoccupied with the self.” As a result, the Cheng brothers taught the concept of “getting a handle on things” with the intent that students would “achieve corresponding illumination of things and the self, perfect interfusion of inner and outer, and complete integration of subject and object.”43 We believe that this is a fair summary of the Chengs' concerns and goals, although as noted above, their ambiguity about whether external investigation was actually necessary still seemed to leave the door open to what Luo would no doubt count as a “one-sided” approach. What is most interesting in Luo's discussion, though, is his next assertion:
The way that this Pattern operates in the world is such that out of unity there proceed the myriad things without the intervention of any artificial contrivance. And when the many reconverge into the one, what possibility could there be for selfish manipulation? Thus to “seek within oneself” one must begin with one's own nature and emotions. One then goes on to extend to other things what one has perceived in oneself, and if it is found to be inconsistent, then it is not ultimate Pattern.44
So sensory knowing does have a key role: it helps us weed out any biased intuitions because all manifest emotions that actually realize our natures should fit into the broader Pattern of the entire cosmos. By working back and forth between inner and outer knowing, we can gradually approach what earlier thinkers have called virtuous nature's knowing or genuine knowing.45
The last view of sensory knowing that we will examine here is Luo's contemporary, the great Wang Yangming. Although Wang sometimes uses “hearing and seeing” to refer to the problematic kind of “vulgar learning” mentioned above, his most balanced view has room for a more positive understanding of sensory knowing.46 Wang writes:
Good knowing (liangzhi) does not come from the senses (jianwen), and yet all the senses are functions of good knowing. Therefore good knowing is not impeded by the senses. Nor is it separated from the senses. … So outside of good knowing, there is no other knowing. Therefore reaching good knowing is the great basis of learning and the first principle of the teaching of the sage. Now solely to seek in the subsidiary sources of the senses is to lose that basis, thus clearly falling to the secondary level.47
Combine this statement of the role within good knowing of the senses with this related idea:
To know the specifics of caring for the comfort of parents…is a type of knowing but cannot be called reaching understanding. It is necessary to reach the type of knowing that understands the specifics of how to care for one's parents and realizes this by means of caring; … only then can this be called reaching understanding. Caring for the comfort of parents must be carried out entirely according to what the good knowing knows to be the specifics of caring for them, without the least bit undone. … Only then can things be said to have been handled (gewu).48
Taken together, these two passages argue that when an individual properly understands that one's sensory knowing is an aspect of good knowing, then far from being a barrier to moral action, sensory knowing is one of the keys to such action. As was discussed in chapter 5, good knowing is perfect emotion that motivates us appropriately and alerts us whenever our responses go awry; here, we learn that the detailed content of good knowing relies in part on our sensory knowing.49
One lesson that can be taken from these last two sections is that some version of virtuous nature's knowing – whatever its exact relation to sensory knowing – is central to all Daoxue Neo-Confucians. It is fitting to end this section, therefore, by noting that a common theme in criticisms of Daoxue was the rejection of virtuous nature's knowing. The Ming dynasty thinker Wang Tingxiang is perhaps the most fascinating example of such a position.50 He argues that Daoxue-style virtuous nature's knowing is dependent on an “active heartmind” (dongxin 動心) that draws on a supposedly innate ability to know what things like filial behavior are. To the contrary, Wang maintains that at birth we cannot even distinguish an ox from a horse: our “responsive heartminds” (yingxin 應心) depend on teaching and experience in order for us to know how to make any distinctions at all. Wang does acknowledge that sensory knowing can go awry; his solution lies in the power of the heartmind to “reflect” (silü 思慮). All knowing, even of the sage, is ultimately on a continuum; he explicitly rejects the possibility of a separate “virtuous nature's knowing.” While we should keep in mind that not all the philosophers we have examined in these sections actually held that virtuous nature's knowing is a distinct type of activity from sensory knowing, nonetheless Wang's approach to knowing becomes increasingly common in the Qing dynasty and is related to the rising importance of the “evidential learning” movement.51
We have now seen the range of Neo-Confucian views about the roles that our senses and external objects (including books) should play in knowing, including the radical stance that senses and objects should play no role at all in the only kind of knowing that really matters. We also saw reasons to resist thinking of virtuous nature's knowing as narrowly “moral,” even though it is certainly normative in the broad sense of guiding us in the best ways to be and act in the world. In this section, we will step away from the long, historical survey offered in the prior two sections and focus on the three different types of knowing that Zhu Xi identifies. (To be clear, Zhu never explicitly says that there are “three types” of knowing, but all three types we discuss here are distinguished in Zhu's writings with distinctive terminology and descriptions.) In so doing, we also bring into our discussion two other important epistemic terms, both with significant roots in Chinese Buddhism: jue (awakening to) and zhijue (discernment). Because the terminology and details can get confusing, let us begin with a schematic overview of Zhu's understanding of knowing:
Knowing of any of these types may be sufficient, in a given case, to lead one to act well, but with Types Two and Three one's apt responses are more automatic and their scope increasingly broad. Fully knowing in the Type Three sense is a central characteristic of a sage. As we explain below, both Types One and Two can contribute toward the attainment of Type Three, but they are quite distinct from one another, and there is no specific order (for example, from One to Two to Three) that must be followed in the process of developing the highest type of knowing.
The most basic and shallow kind of knowing is to know a rule for a given type of circumstance. Knowing that one should be filial to one's parents, that one should not eat an extra piece of chocolate cake, or that chairs are for sitting on, are possible examples of such rules. Knowing the rule means that one can say it and know at least generally how to apply it. Zhu Xi calls such rules “rules to which [a thing or affair] should conform.” This type of knowing is common but also problematic because all too often one “knows” a rule in this sense but fails to follow it. In a well-known passage, Zhu talks about the ways in which merely “knowing an affair” to be right or wrong is unreliable; one can know it to be wrong, and yet suddenly start thinking about doing it, or even do it without really being aware of doing so.52 To be sure, someone who knows the rule can sometimes get him or herself to follow it, but Zhu agrees with earlier Daoxue thinkers that this kind of merely conscientious behavior is worrisome.53
Type Two is typically expressed as “seeing an instance of how things should be and being unable not to do it.” This seems not to depend on antecedent understanding of any rules; it is rather an instance of brute clarity, whereby one sees and responds to a particular situation. Zhu says:
If someone does not see “how things should be and be unable not to do it,” then all he or she can do is rely on some past model as a guide to how to respond. When someone genuinely sees that it is something that “I ought to do,” then there will naturally be that which he or she cannot stop doing. For example, a minister must be devoted: so long as one sees this and is not just mouthing the words, then in acting as a minister one cannot avoid being devoted.54
Without Type Two knowing, the best one can do is rely on the words or example of someone in the past who has faced a similar situation and try to shape one's reaction to follow the past model. (Presumably this is Type One knowing.) Sometimes, though, one sees a situation in such a way that the reaction is automatic. What is happening in such a case? Consider this exchange:
Someone asked: “How is it that Pattern is ‘unable to stop’?” Master Zhu replied: “The normative force of Pattern is naturally unable to stop. Mencius understood this most clearly, and thus said, ‘Among babes in arms, there are none who do not know to love their parents. When they grow older, there are none who do not know to revere their elder brothers.’ Naturally these are places at which one cannot stop.”55
“The normative force of Pattern is naturally unable to stop”: the idea is that there is a deep, structured dynamism to the cosmos that generates all life in unending fashion.56 Type Two knowing takes place when we are able to get a glimpse of this, but it falls short of Type Three knowing because it does not flow from a broadly inclusive grasp of Pattern's interconnections. Certain situations are ripe for these brief and bounded experiences of Pattern; Zhu insists that they are open to anyone, at any level of cultivation. In addition to the few we have already cited, a final passage that often comes up is Mencius's famous claim that anyone, upon suddenly seeing a child about to fall into a well, would respond with alarm and commiseration.57 We speculate – although Zhu does not make this clear – that the situations in which Type Two knowing happen most readily are those in which distracting, potentially biasing factors are simply not present. After all, the Pattern is always there to be seen and to motivate response, so what is at issue here is under what circumstances – short of the full, sagely sensitivity that characterizes Type Three – one is able to see and respond fluidly.
There are two strands within Zhu Xi's writings that lead to the conclusion that, in addition to knowing of Types One and Two, there is also a third, most valuable type. The first revolves around the verb jue, which means, “awaken to” or “be sensitive to.” For Chinese Buddhists, jue is a central term that refers to the awakening that the Buddha experienced and which Buddhists seek for all sentient beings. Zhang Zai and early Daoxue Confucians like the Cheng brothers use jue repeatedly to mean “awaken,” both when speaking critically of Buddhist ideas of “awakening” and to refer to a Confucian kind of “awakening.” As they note, there is a passage in the Mencius that speaks of awakening; the Chengs are insistent, therefore, that “awakening” is a legitimate Confucian notion and refers to something different than the Buddhist idea.58 Cheng Yi also explains the difference between “knowing” and “awakening” as follows: “Knowing is to know this affair; awakening is to awaken to this Pattern.”59 Cheng Yi himself does not offer more explanation of the difference, but Zhu Xi approvingly invokes the further gloss of one of Cheng Yi's students. According to this explanation, when one knows the respect of a minister or the filiality of a son, then this is “knowing this affair.” When one knows that by which ministers are respectful or sons filial, though, that is “awakening to this Pattern.”60 In a related context, Zhu himself says that “at first one is simply devoted or filial, and then later one comes to know that by which one is filial and that by which one is devoted, and one cannot be budged.”61 It is an interesting question whether merely “knowing this affair” refers to Type One or Type Two knowing. On one hand, the use of “this,” connecting it to a particular situation, suggests that it is Type Two; on the other hand, the statement that only when one has moved to the “awakening” level is one invulnerable to being “budged” suggests that the contrast is with the unreliable Type One. In either case, “awakening to this Pattern” offers a different and deeper kind of understanding.
Both of the last passages connect awakening to the rather cryptic idea of grasping “that by which [one is filial, devoted, and so on].” Pursuing this clue will help us better understand how Type Three knowing works. In what is probably his best-known statement on the meaning of Pattern, Zhu says, “As far as things in the cosmos go, we can be certain that each has a reason by which it is as it is, and a rule to which it should conform. This is what is meant by Pattern.”62 We have already seen that when one only knows the relevant rule, this is mere Type One knowing. As Zhu develops the idea of understanding the “reason by which it is as it is” – which uses the same terms as the “that by which” mentioned above – we will see that it is significantly more important. In a key passage, Zhu explains as follows:
[Compared with the rule to which it should conform,] the “reason by which it is as it is” takes it up one level. For example, that by which a lord is humane: the lord is the ruler while the people and territory are his concern. He naturally employs humane love. If we think about this relationship without humane love, it just does not work. This is not to say that a lord cannot help but use humane love; it is rather that to do so matches with Pattern.63
There are bad rulers who are governed by their selfish desires and fail to employ humane love, but Zhu is saying that reflection on the organic, structural relationship between a ruler and his people reveals that the relationship works only when the ruler is motivated by humane love. Zhu adds several more examples in the passage, all of which make the point that, no matter whether one is talking about human relations or patterns in nature, it is the affirmation of birth and life that leads to things fitting together in meaningful fashion, each aspect playing its role. When Zhu talks of going up a level, he is saying that one needs to put a given matter into the special context provided by Pattern. When one learns to do that – to view each individual thing as fitting together thanks to the value we accord to life – then one has the flexible Type Three knowing that can make sense of and respond aptly to any stimulus. This is to grasp the “reason by which” things are as they are.64
In light of our understanding of the three types of knowing, it makes sense that Zhu repurposes the Buddhist term zhijue – a compound of “know” and “awaken” that just means perceptual awareness in a Buddhist context – as a general term for the various kinds of knowing activity of our heartmind.65 Just as “know” (zhi) itself can refer to any of the three types, so can zhijue. The English verb “discern” does a good job of capturing the meaning of zhijue because of the way that “discern” foregrounds the process of making distinctions and connections among things. For Zhu Xi, knowing and discerning are active processes, not inactive states. He says that “knowing is our heartmind being stimulated by something.”66 In a crucial passage, Zhu tells us it is through the actual process of discerning that we come to possess Pattern in its local specificity and activate our specific emotions: “The heartmind's discerning is that whereby we possess this Pattern and activate this emotion.”67 In other words, the world becomes intelligible, normative, and motivational for us precisely through our discerning of it.68 As we have explained in chapter 3, nature is a kind of metaphysical structuring; because it is metaphysical and only implicitly or potentially sensible, Zhu Xi says that the heartmind can metaphorically be thought of as having empty space within it. If heartmind is really a process whereby emotions emerge from nature – as we discussed in chapter 4 – though, then we should not take the metaphor of “space” too literally.69 After all, Zhu is quite explicitly metaphorical in passages like this: “Nature is like the heartmind's field, filling all the emptiness, all is simply Pattern.”70 Nature is a metaphorical field, poised to blossom with sprouts of emotion when the time is right. Returning again to the role of knowing, Zhu Xi holds that actual discerning is what leads to the most full-blooded “possession” of specific aspects of Pattern.
In the previous section, we showed that Zhu Xi recognizes three distinct types of knowing, and that knowing is a kind of active discernment whereby the Pattern with which all things are implicitly equipped comes to be specifically present to us and motivating. Earlier sections revealed other ways in which Neo-Confucian philosophers distinguish between types of knowing, usually emphasizing the importance of “virtuous nature's knowing,” which may or may not have a tie to “sensory knowing.” For some of these thinkers, a structured, careful process of deliberation is necessary in order to arrive at the genuine knowing that they seek, while others deny the need for such deliberation. Most agree, however, that genuine knowing is a holistic state in a sense that we will explain below. Most agree, in addition, that genuine knowing is an intrinsically motivational state, though few go as far as Wang Yangming and say that knowing and acting are actually unified. Explaining the various interconnections among deliberation, holism, and motivation is the task of this final section of the chapter.
Let us begin by focusing on Zhu's picture. His core contention is that one begins with whatever Type One knowing of rules one has acquired, as well as with the Type Two moments of brute clarity that one has experienced, and then engages in a process of learning that systematically relates these dimensions of knowing to classic texts, exemplary models, and other dimensions of one's experience. Zhu Xi refers to this process via the classically derived terms “getting a handle on things” (gewu) and “reaching understanding” (zhi zhi). (We discuss getting a handle on things here in a fairly abstract way, emphasizing its connections to knowing; in the next chapter, on methods of self-cultivation, we look at some of types of “handling” in more concrete detail.) According to Zhu, the process of “getting a handle on things” and thus “reaching understanding” depends on distinguishing among things and distinguishing between self and other, as well as on coming to see connections among things and thus softening the self–other boundary. One of the key tools we are to employ is “analogical extension” (tui 推). Zhu says that analogical extension will help us arrive at “that by which” things are as they are, and recall from above that comprehending “that by which” (i.e., Pattern) is the goal of Type Three knowing.71 These types of deliberative activity are important in the extended transition from a Type One and Type Two knower to a Type Three knower. Insofar as one is already a Type Three knower, then deliberation is not generally necessary.72
Two examples will help us to make clear what Zhu has in mind. The first comes in one of Zhu's many discussions of the child-and-the-well thought-experiment from the Mencius 2A:6. He writes: “As for a child falling into a well, this is something that all people can perceive; when one is able to analogically extend to clarity this ‘beginning’ that has manifested to one, then that is [genuine] clarity.”73 In other words, employing techniques like analogical extension on raw materials like the Type Two knowing experienced upon seeing a child about to fall into a well, we can hope to reach full-blown Type Three knowing. We tend to easily experience the intuitive wrongness of letting an innocent child tumble down a well, such that it seems obvious and makes us want to stop the tragedy (at least when there are not powerful countervailing forces to discourage us). We strive to reach genuine Type Three knowing by reflecting on the resonance between the Pattern in saving the child and the Pattern in some proximate matter – say, allowing one's personal rival to fall down a well (rather than a child) or allowing a child to starve (rather than fall to her death).74 As one reaches toward more capacious knowing, one will see the wrongness of these other situations with the same immediacy and motivational power as the former. Here is a second passage in which Zhu offers a powerful metaphor for this sort of deliberative work:
For cosmic Pattern is never in all the ages extinguished in any human being; no matter how it is covered over or confined, cosmic Pattern is always constantly there just as ever, emerging from within selfish desire at every moment without cease – it is just that human beings are not aware of it. It is exactly like a bright pearl or a large shell partly covered in sand and gravel, successively flashing forth here and there. Just recognize and gather these successive flashes of the Way and its principles (daoli) right where they appear, joining them together until they gradually become an integral whole.75
Perhaps the most important thing to note here is that Type Three is not just a generalization of the brute experiences of Type Two. Type Three is not having Type Two experiences all the time, but is the distinctive, holistic result of patient, connective work.
We have already seen two important terms that Zhu Xi uses to describe Type Three knowing, namely “awakening” (jue) and “genuine knowing” (zhen zhi). With a third term for the same state, he makes more explicit the holism that characterizes this type of knowing: “unimpeded interconnection” (huoran guantong 豁然貫通).76 A crucial point about these holistic states of awakening and unimpeded interconnection, which distinguishes Zhu and the other Neo-Confucians from virtually all Buddhist descriptions of holistic states of enlightenment, is that for the Neo-Confucians, “unimpeded interconnection” is still structured or centered in ways that we can at least partly articulate. This, after all, is what Zhu emphasizes when he talks about having a good nature as being akin to being in the center of a room, oriented toward the possible exits (see chapter 3). Knowing as unimpeded interconnection means that one is not restricted to a single principle – which Zhu analogizes to being stuck in one corner of a room – but instead, having “seen that the myriad Patterns come together, one can choose and follow that which is perfectly apt.”77
It should be clear that Zhu Xi does not think that the way to Type Three knowing is simply the spontaneous, untutored discernment of the whole: a lengthy process of reflection and deliberation is needed before one can reach unimpeded interconnection. We have already seen some examples of Neo-Confucians who deny that anything like Zhu's process of analogical extension is necessary – think of Zhang Jiucheng or Chen Xianzhang discussed above – and even more radical cases can be found in the late Ming dynasty, such as Wang Yangming's follower Zhou Rudeng, who condemns “deliberation” (niyi 擬義) and advocates that one simply awaken one's internal sage and follow one's own path.78 On the other hand, those Neo-Confucians who reject the “inherent nature” naturally put great emphasis on the role of deliberation, analogical extension, and the like, though they, too, often hold that something like Zhu's understanding of unimpeded interconnection is ultimately achievable.
As mentioned at the outset of this section, most Neo-Confucians hold that genuine knowing is intrinsically motivational. That is, when one knows in the right way, proper motivation and proper action are automatically sparked. Cheng Yi has a particularly famous way of discussing this connection:
There is a difference between genuine knowing and everyday knowing. I once saw a peasant who had been wounded by a tiger. When someone said that a tiger was attacking people, everyone was startled, but the peasant reacted differently from the rest. Even a child knows that tigers are dangerous, but it is not genuine knowing; it is only genuine knowing if it is like the peasant's. So when people know bad but still do it, this also is not genuine knowing; if it were, decidedly they would not do it.79
Cheng implies that the peasant who has personally experienced a tiger would not put on false bravado: genuine, personal knowing leads to apt emotional response and therefore, as Cheng says at the end of the passage, to action. In another discussion of this topic, he puts it this way: the person who has been wounded by a tiger “has completely sincere fear of it, based on having truly perceived the Pattern. This attainment in one's heartmind we call ‘having virtue,’ and so the person has no need to force himself to act.”80
This last quotation is particularly helpful because it allows us to see what is at stake in Cheng's emphasis on personal experience. His point is not that the knowledge of the peasant who has experienced the tiger has a different feel or different content from the merely abstract knowing of a child: this is not about what some contemporary philosophers call “qualia.” Rather, the personal experience has facilitated a transformation such that the peasant's natural fear of tigers has become an unimpeded disposition, a “virtue,” which requires no “forcing” in order to spark action. All this is really just an easily comprehensible example, of course, that is intended to help us understand what it is to genuinely know and thus possess the more important virtues – humaneness, wisdom, and so on – with which the Neo-Confucians are mainly concerned. We will discuss this further in the next two chapters on self-cultivation and ethics.
Subsequent Neo-Confucians generally agree with Cheng Yi and often cite his tiger example, but they do have some important disagreements with one another. Many agree with Zhu Xi that knowing and acting are “mutually dependent” – in that knowing without acting is superficial, while acting without knowing is unreliable – and also that “As for their order, knowing comes first; as for their significance, action comes first.”81 Zhu goes on to explain that while Cheng Yi was sometimes unclear on the need for knowing to come first and only then be followed by acting, to do otherwise risks confusion.82 Wang Yangming, in contrast, thinks it is a mistake to view genuine knowing as somehow temporally prior to action. He famously argued for the “unity of knowing and acting,” writing that:
But people today instead separate knowing and acting into two distinct tasks to perform and think that one must first know and only then can one act. They say, “Now I will perform the task of knowing by studying and learning. Once I have attained real knowledge, I then will pursue the tasks of acting.” And so, till the end of their days, they never act, and till the end of their days, they never know. This is not a minor malady, nor did it arrive just yesterday. My current teaching regarding the unity of knowing and acting is a medicine directed precisely at this disease.83
To explain what he means by the unity of knowing and acting, Wang says that “knowing is the intent of acting, and acting is the effort of knowing”; that “knowing is the beginning of acting, and acting is the completion of knowing”,84 and that “where the knowing is honest and genuine, it is acting; where acting is discerning and finely observing, it is knowing.”85 It may seem that the differences between Wang's position and that of Cheng and Zhu are small – perhaps only rhetorical? – but Wang's contemporaries clearly did not see it this way. His many followers eagerly embraced his ideas, while many others criticized him for conflating two activities that need to be kept distinct.86 Modern readers might also think that at most Wang has shown that genuine knowing and actually being motivated are unified, rather than the more ambitious claim that knowing and “acting” are one and the same. In response to this objection, Wang would argue that the difference that matters is whether or not one is motivated, not whether or not one makes an external action. As he says, “knowing is like water; that our heartmind is never without good knowing is like the fact that water is never without an impulse to go down.”87 All we have to do is realize this about ourselves and remove selfish obstructions to the functioning of this genuine knowing, and external action will follow without any further effort.
How should we understand the difference between Wang and his critics on the relation between knowing and acting? If one just focuses on the things that Zhu and Wang say specifically on this topic, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they really agree. After all, in response to a question about whether “exhaustively investigating Pattern” (qiongli 窮理) (i.e., knowing) or “accumulating appropriate actions” (ji yi 集義) (i.e., acting) comes first, Zhu replies, “exhaustively investigating Pattern comes first, but it is not that they are strictly divided into stages of before and after.”88 Together with other things that we have seen from Zhu, this sounds like Wang's “knowing is the beginning of acting, and acting is the completion of knowing.” However, we cannot forget the broader philosophical context. As we have seen in other chapters, where Zhu speaks of nature and Pattern, Wang speaks of the heartmind and of our actual, particular experiences of “good knowing.” Even if Zhu believes that genuine knowing cannot be separated in practice from acting, Wang's language makes the equivalence between knowing and acting even tighter. It may be that Zhu would agree that what we call Type Two and Type Three knowing are indeed united with acting in Wang Yangming's sense, but this is clearly not the case for Type One.89