Neo-Confucian Learning and Wang Yangming (1472-1529)
Besides the Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian school, another significant, but unorthodox, Neo-Confucian school of thought was called the Lu-Wang School, after a Song Dynasty scholar Lu Jiuyuan, and a Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) scholar Wang Yangming. Wang Yangming was much more famous than Lu Jiuyuan (another name of his was Lu Xiangshan, as most Chinese scholars had two names) in history and has followers in present day China. Some of his sayings are still quoted by standard Confucian scholars today. While Zhu Xi emphasized book learning (what he meant by the "investigation of things"), Wang Yangming ignored the nuanced differences between things in the world and asked for a holistic intuitive understanding without external knowledge. When developed to the extreme, Wang Yangming's thought resembled Chan Buddhism in its emphasis on meditation, sudden awakening, and the elimination of intellectual concepts and divisions between the self and the outside world.
1. The integration of the universal principles and the human mind through the "sincerity of intentions."
Both the Cheng-Zhu School and Lu-Wang School of Neo-Confucian learning drew upon the Buddhist division between the human subjective (human mind) and the world outside (mind of the Way). Although both tried to recombine the two worlds and go back to the interpretations of Confucius and Mencius who tended to treat the human being and the outside world as an integral whole and seldom differentiated between human subjectivity from the human interactions with the world, the Wang Yangming school tended to do so more than Zhu Xi--in completely identifying the human subjective world with the world of truth outside of the human being. (849)
Like Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming divided the human mind into the mind of the Way, which "is manifested with the utmost subtlety. It is the source of sincerity," and the mind of the human, which had the potential for unnaturalness and insincerity. The example that Mencius had used to illustrate human empathy, a compassionate impulse to save a child who was falling into a well, to Wang Yangming, was the display of the Way guiding human nature. In this sense, he was similar to Zhu Xi who defined the Confucian virtues as principles, which to Mencius had proceeded from natural human sentiments. And like Zhu Xi, he argued for the unification of the human mind and the mind of the Way.(de Bary, 843) This is what other Neo-Confucians including Zhu Xi called "sincerity of intentions." By sincerity, they were not just asking for sincerity, but a total belief in one's spontaneous willingness in practicing the Confucian principles. The principles, in other words, were no longer principles, but should be practiced as spontaneous sentiments. Only then could one be a true Confucian.
I can relate to this neo-Confucian emphasis on practicing principles as if they were real human sentiments. Although growing up in Communist China, the Communist regime co-opted many Neo-Confucian elements into its mass political education. Thus we were taught to perform all our with all sincerity: when we were cleaning up our classroom windows, mopping the floor, addressing teachers and other adults with attention and respect, we were taught not to feel we were following externally prescribed guidelines, but following spontaneous sentiments. Thus when I once heard an explanation of forgiveness from a Christian point of view, I was struck by its emphasis on abiding by authority rather than (at least not initially) a spontaneous sentiment: a Christian should forgive, because it is the will of God and Christians should submit to God's authority. When forgiving, the Christian does not need to like or love the person he/she forgives, in fact his/her sentiment does not really play a role in this process of forgiveness, because the key is obeying God's authority. In the Neo-Confucian interpretation of the same thing, forgiveness, it would then have to be done with total sincerity, as if it was the spontaneous sentiments of the person who forgave, which is how the human mind is unified with the mind of the Way. Christianity, in contrast to Neo-Confucian learning, leaves much space for human innate autonomy.
2. Unity of mind and principles to battle Buddhism
This unity of the human and the Way was also how the Neo-Confucians battled the Buddhists. As Wang Yangming mentioned, the Chan Buddhists divided between real truth and perceived truth and treated the two as two separate realms that could only be overcome by the spiritual ultimately overcoming the material, when one reached the state of nirvana.
3. Seeking knowledge completely from within.
The difference between Wang Yangming and Zhu Xi was that while Zhu decided this sincerity of mind would be achieved through "investigation of things," meaning extensive readings in Confucian books and gradual grasping of the spontaneous practice of heavenly principles, for Wang, this was to be achieved "more naturally" without the extensive book reading. For Wang it was the cultivation of one's intuition, "extending one's innate knowing to the utmost." (846) Following the Confucian/Mencian argument that humans have innate moral abilities, Wang argued that therefore one did not need to search for what was good and bad from the outside: "Later generations fail to realize that the utmost good is inherent in their own minds, but exercise their selfish ideas and cunning and grope for it outside their minds."(846-47) While Zhu Xi believed in the diversity of principles in events and things although ultimately all principles would boil down to the same, Wang Yangming believed all things in the world formed a single unity, and since no distinction needs to be made of things in this world, there was no need for detailed study of them through external learning, but learning should consist of intuition that connected all things of the world. (847)