Wang Yangming insisted that knowing what is right and doing it are one act
For the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming, knowing the good without acting on it was not real knowledge at all. He was also a formidable general who bluffed a rebel prince into fatal hesitation in 1519. His school later inspired Japanese samurai thinkers and nineteenth-century reformers.
Born in Yuyao, Zhejiang, on 26 October 1472, Wang came from a family of officials; his father took first place in the imperial examination of 1481. Wang passed the highest examinations by 1499 but was banished in 1506 after offending a powerful eunuch. He later returned to favour and became governor of Jiangxi, where he crushed peasant uprisings in 1517 and 1518 while petitioning the court for amnesty and worrying about the destruction war caused.
In 1519 Zhu Chenhao, the Prince of Ning, rebelled from Nanchang and threatened to sail down the Yangtze to the southern capital, Nanjing. Wang spread false word that armies were closing in; the prince hesitated, Nanjing was reinforced, and the rebel was defeated and captured. The campaign includes one of the earliest mentions of Chinese troops using a Portuguese breech-loading cannon. Wang was made an earl, yet ostracised for challenging the orthodoxy of Zhu Xi.
That orthodoxy treated study as preparation to be completed before right action. Wang, building on the Song thinker Lu Jiuyuan, argued instead that everyone is born with innate knowledge of good and evil, intuitive rather than reasoned. The mind is not shaped by the world; it gives the world its order, an inner light of moral understanding. To clear away selfish desires he recommended sitting still in quiet meditation, a practice resembling Chan Buddhism.
He died on 9 January 1529, and in 1584 received the highest scholarly honour, sacrifice in the Confucian Temple. His School of Mind dominated late Ming thought. In Japan, where it was called Ōyōmei-gaku, it shaped figures such as Saigō Takamori, and Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō carried a seal declaring that his whole life followed Yangming's example. Taiwan's Yangmingshan is named after him.
Source: Wang Yangming
