- Length
- 320 pagesChan, Instructions for Practical Living, Columbia, 1963
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Instructions for Practical Living
A philosopher who was also a successful general, arguing that the moral knowledge everyone already has is worth more than the moral knowledge anyone could assemble. His seven days in front of a bamboo grove is the most productive failed experiment in Chinese philosophy.
- Date
- 1518-1524
- Attributed to
- Wang Yangming, recorded by disciples
- Region
- Ming China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1963 English, Wing-tsit Chan The standard complete version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 345 years
Suppressed at intervals in Ming and Qing China as heterodox and enormously influential in Japan, where it fed directly into the thought of the men who made the Meiji Restoration.
What the book says
Conversations and letters recorded by students, in which a general and provincial governor takes apart the orthodoxy he had spent his youth trying to follow. Wang begins from a failure he describes himself: instructed by the reigning philosophy to investigate things and find their pattern, he sat in front of a stand of bamboo for seven days investigating it, understood nothing and made himself ill. The conclusion he eventually drew was that he had been looking in the wrong place - there is no pattern in the bamboo waiting to be extracted, because pattern is not separable from mind. From this come the two doctrines the book is known for. The first is that knowledge and action are one: to know that one should be filial and not to act filially is not to know it, and the two are not stages but a single thing described from either end. The second is innate moral knowing - a capacity present in everyone that responds correctly before deliberation, the way anyone knows on sight that a child at a well needs help, and which is obscured by selfish desire rather than absent. Learning is therefore the removal of obstructions rather than the accumulation of understanding, and the model is polishing a mirror.
What it argues
That mind and pattern are not two, and that everything else follows. If the standard of right conduct were in the world, it would have to be found before it could be applied, and the finding would never finish; if it is innate, then the moral task is to stop interfering with it. Knowledge and action are then one thing, since a knowledge that failed to issue in action would not be the knowledge in question but a report about it. Wang is careful that this is not a licence for spontaneity: innate knowing is obscured constantly by self-interest, and the work of clearing it is lifelong and hard.
What it answered
Zhu Xi's method, from within Zhu Xi's own tradition and using his vocabulary. The disagreement is narrower than it looks and sharper for that: both men are Confucians, both accept that human nature is good, both want cultivation. The split is over where the standard lives and therefore over what studying is for. Wang also has a polemical charge - that the orthodox programme produces scholars who know a great deal and behave no better - which is why the doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action is offered as a diagnosis as much as a thesis.
How it argues
By conversation and by counter-example, and with a directness that Zhu Xi's tradition had lost. Wang's characteristic move is to ask what the orthodox account would actually require of a person in a specific case and to show that nobody could do it, or that doing it would not produce the result claimed. The recorded exchanges are short, concrete and often about how a particular student should handle a particular difficulty, and the doctrine emerges from the handling.
The moment
Wang wrote as a serving official with a remarkable career: exiled to a remote post in Guizhou after offending a eunuch, where he had the insight the tradition calls his enlightenment, and later a general who put down two major rebellions. The philosophy is inseparable from that. A man who has had to make decisions under pressure with no time to investigate anything is well placed to doubt a method that requires investigation first.
How it travelled
Better abroad than at home. The school flourished in the late Ming, was blamed by Qing scholars for the dynasty's collapse and for what they regarded as a subjective, undisciplined style of thought, and was pushed to the margins. In Japan it arrived as Yomeigaku and had a career out of proportion to its size, valued for its emphasis on action and read by many of the samurai who overthrew the shogunate in 1868. Wing-tsit Chan's 1963 translation made the text available in English, and Western interest has grown since.
The strongest objection
That the unity of knowledge and action either redefines knowledge or denies something obvious. People do fail to act on what they know - the phenomenon has a name in every tradition - and Wang's response, that such a person did not really know, saves the thesis by making it true by definition. The Qing critics added a practical charge: a doctrine locating the standard in the mind gives no way to correct someone whose innate knowing tells them something monstrous, and the school's later followers included men whose confidence considerably exceeded their judgement. Wang's answer is the work of clearing obstruction, which is real but is not a check.
Why read it
Because it is the most immediately engaging philosophical book in the Chinese tradition after the Mengzi - short exchanges, concrete problems, and an author whose life supplied the pressure his ideas were tested under. The bamboo passage takes a paragraph and explains the whole book.
- First printed
- 1518
- First in English
- 1963
- Digitised
- Partial
In three parts of different origin: an early section recorded by Xu Ai, a middle group of letters, and a late section recorded after Wang's death. The three differ in doctrine as well as in date, since Wang's position developed.
Wing-tsit Chan's 1963 English is the standard complete version and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived in China, where Wang has been the subject of a substantial rehabilitation, and increasingly discussed in comparative philosophy for the unity thesis, which speaks directly to Western debates about moral motivation and weakness of will.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the only complete English version is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The three parts of the collection differ in doctrine and the development of Wang's position through them is argued over. Whether the mature doctrine of innate knowing is continuous with the earlier unity thesis or a distinct claim is disputed. Whether the bamboo story is autobiography or a teaching device shaped in the telling cannot be settled. And the Qing charge that his school contributed to the fall of the Ming is a piece of intellectual history that later scholarship has largely rejected but that shaped his reputation for three centuries.