Lu-Wang School of Mind
from 1180
Principle is not out there in things to be studied but already in the mind, and knowing the good and doing it are one act rather than two.
- Active
- from 1180
- Where
- Song and Ming China, then Japan
- Also
- 陸王心學 Lù-Wáng Xīnxué
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Chinese
The claim
Mind is principle. And knowledge and action are a unity: if you know a thing is right and do not do it, you did not know it in the sense that matters.
What it held
Wang Yangming's break with Zhu Xi began as a practical failure. Told that investigating things reveals principle, he spent seven days investigating a bamboo grove, found nothing, and fell ill. The conclusion he eventually drew was that he had been looking in the wrong place: principle is not in the bamboo but in the mind that engages it.
The doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action follows. Wang's example is disarming — you do not know that a smell is foul and then decide to dislike it; the knowing and the aversion are one event. Moral knowledge is the same. Someone who says they know they should be a better son and is not, does not yet know it.
The third element is liangzhi, innate knowing: an immediate moral awareness present in everyone, needing to be uncovered rather than acquired. It is a democratic doctrine and was heard as one. If the sage's knowledge is in every person already, then years of classical study are not the qualification they were claimed to be.
The Taizhou school pushed this hard, with figures preaching to labourers and one member executed for it.
How it argued
Teaching by dialogue and by testing doctrines against experience, plus quiet sitting — and Wang's own biography of exile, military command and administration is treated by the school as evidence.
What it was arguing against
Cheng-Zhu's external investigation of things, and the assumption that moral competence requires scholarly attainment.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether innate knowing can be trusted without study, which its critics said produced antinomianism. The Taizhou radicals were the evidence they pointed to.
Common misconceptions
That it is a form of idealism denying the external world. The claim is about where moral principle is located, not about whether things exist.
How it began
Wang Yangming was exiled to a remote posting in Guizhou after offending a eunuch, and had the insight there that principle is in the mind — the enlightenment at Longchang.
What became of it
Living. Dominant in the late Ming, suppressed as dangerous, and enormously influential in Japan, where Oyomei-gaku shaped the men who made the Meiji Restoration.
Lasting influence
Japanese Yomeigaku, and through it the late Tokugawa reformers. Modern Chinese thought has repeatedly returned to Wang, including from opposite political directions.
Why it still matters
The unity of knowledge and action is a serious position on moral motivation, and close to what contemporary philosophy calls internalism.
Put another way
A mirror that does not need to travel to reflect what is in front of it.
Where to start
Instructions for Practical Living. It is conversation, and the arguments arrive through examples.
The surprising bit
He was also a successful general who put down two rebellions, and his followers regarded the campaigns as demonstrations of the philosophy rather than interruptions of it.
In their own words
Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the completion of knowledge.
The streets are full of sages.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Cheng-Zhu School
- Influenced
- Evidential Learning (Kaozheng)
The verdict
The Confucianism that made moral knowledge everyone's property, and was distrusted for exactly that.