is one of the most influential philosophers in the Confucian
tradition. He is best known for his theory of the unity of knowledge
and action. A capable and principled administrator and military
official, he was exiled from 1507 to 1510 for his protest against
political corruption. Although he studied the thought of Zhu Xi [Chu
His] (1130-1200 CE) seriously in his teenage years, it was during this
period of exile that he developed his contribution to what has become
known as Neo-Confucianism (Daoxue, [Tao-hsueh or "Learning of the
Way"). With Neo-Confucianism in general, Wang Yangming's thought can
be best understood as an attempt to propose personal morality as the
main way to social well-being. Wang's legacy in Neo-Confucian
tradition and Confucian philosophy as a whole is his claim that the
fundamental root of social problems lies in the fact that one fails to
gain a genuine understanding of one's self and its relation to the
world, and thus fails to live up to what one could be.
1. Intellectual Context
Neo-Confucians, above all, urged people to engage in what they thought
was "true learning," which led to the genuine realization of the self.
However, the cultural landscape of early and mid-Ming dynasty China
(1368-1644 CE) did not unfold as Neo-Confucians wished. To understand
the shared theoretical challenge that Wang Yangming confronted, one
should first note that quite a number of Neo-Confucians at that time
had contempt for what they thought was a certain vulgarized form of
Confucian learning. This "vulgar learning" (suxue) included such
activities as memorization and recitation (jisong), literary
composition (cizhang), textual studies (xungu), and broad learning
(boxue). To the eyes of Neo-Confucians, all these forms of learning
represent learning that is aimed at accumulating external knowledge
for its own sake. As a consequence, these forms of learning
disregarded what Neo-Confucians considered to be the true purpose of
the learning: construction of the moral self.
Ironically, the rampant increase in charges that certain work is
"vulgar" was linked to the very triumph of Neo-Confucianism in
general, and to Zhu Xi's learning in particular, through its official
recognition by the Ming state. While is true that, by the early Ming,
"Cheng-Zhu" learning (named after the brothers Cheng Yi [Ch'eng I] and
Cheng Hao [Ch'eng Hao] as well as the aforementioned Zhu Xi) had
already enjoyed official recognition for over one hundred years, it
was at this time that the institutionalization of the Cheng-Zhu
teaching in early Ming was relatively complete. As is well known, by
the time of the Yongle reign (1403-24), Cheng-Zhu learning had become
fully established as the basis for the civil service examination that
was the exclusive pathway to government service in imperial China. The
Emperor Cheng Zu embraced Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism and ordered Hu
Kuang (1370-1418) and others to compile an official version of Zhu
Xi's commentaries on the Four Books (the Confucian Lunyu or Analects,
the Mengzi or Mencius, the Daxue or Great Learning, and the Zhongyong
or Doctrine of the Mean) and Five Classics (the Shujing or Classic of
History, the Shijing or Classic of Poetry, the Yijing or Classic of
Changes, Liji or Record of Rituals, and the Xiaojing or Classic of
Filial Piety). Their effort resulted in the comprehensive anthology of
the Great Compendia on the Five Classics and the Four Books.
The establishment of Neo-Confucianism as the examination curriculum
contributed to what some thinkers considered to be the "vulgarization"
of Neo-Confucian moral teaching. As Cheng-Zhu learning served as the
basis of the civil examinations, those who wanted to get involved in
the political arena had to master it regardless of whether or not they
agreed with the essence of its teaching. In other words, they studied
it for the sake of their worldly interests rather than out of concern
for moral self-fulfillment. Wang Yangming was one of the most
prominent among those thinkers who found it difficult to accept both
"vulgar learning" and the form of Neo-Confucian learning that was
vulnerable to degeneration into "vulgar learning." One can find Wang's
lengthy critique of "vulgar learning" in the section of "Pulling up
the root and stopping up the source" in Chuan xi lu ("Instructions for
Practical Living" in Wing-tsit Chan's translation).
While Cheng-Zhu learning was different from "vulgar learning" in its
fundamental orientation, Wang Yangming thought that Cheng-Zhu style of
"investigation of things" (gewu) was particularly susceptible to
degeneration into "vulgar learning. So, what was at stake in Wang
Yangming's reformulation of Neo-Confucianism was the issue of how to
reinvent Confucian learning in a way different from the way of
Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, which turned out to be susceptible to
"vulgarization."
2. Philosophical Anthropology
In Wang's mind, given the fact that the practitioners of "vulgar
learning" devote their attention only to the accumulation of external
knowledge, what is potentially problematic in Cheng-Zhu style of
"investigation of things" is its search for moral principle (li) in
the external world (as well as in the mind, xin [hsin]). Wang believed
that the internalization of li resolved many problems that "vulgar
learning" created. Wang's idea that "the mind is principle" (xin ji
li) expresses his belief succinctly. The most apparent and significant
implication of xin ji li is the change of the locus of li from the
external world (and the mind) to solely the mind. However, the
proposition of xin ji li indicates more than the locus of li.
First, li does not simply reside in the mind but is coextensive with
the mind. Accordingly, li does not exist as a distinguishable,
searchable entity in the mind. Rather we call li the state in which
the mind is so well preserved that it responds to the situation
properly. In this sense, xin ji li meant a kind of evaluation that the
mind could embody, a desirable quality represented by the concept of
li, rather than a formula expressing the relationship between two
distinct entities. Since li was not conceived as a static principle
that one could discern and hold fast to, being attuned to li involved
nothing other than having no selfish desires. In other words, we
should not "seek the Principle of Nature" because principle is not
something we can "seek."
Second, the identification of xin and li brought about significant
changes in the understanding of the mind as well. These changes in the
understanding of the mind entailed a new philosophical anthropology.
The mind — the unstable entity that was formerly understood in terms
of qi (ch'i, vital force) and believed to be vulnerable to evil — is
now conceived as li, the perfect moral entity.
Many of Wang's statements, such as "The nature of all humans is good"
and "[T]he original substance of the mind is characterized by the
highest good; is there anything in the original substance of the mind
that is not good?" show that he upheld the typical Neo-Confucian
premise of the goodness of human nature. However, Wang's philosophical
anthropology was different from that of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism in
that it pushed the premise of the goodness of human nature to its
extreme.
In Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, xin means the operation of the
subjective consciousness, or the location where the operation of the
subjective consciousness takes place. If xin represents the immediate
self as a current flow of consciousness while li is a normative state
that should be embodied, xin ji li means, above all, that the mind
ceases to be one of the loci where the moral principle resides; it
achieves the very status of moral principle itself. This
identification of xin and xing (hsing, nature) means creating a notion
of the self-sufficient moral agent by negating the distinction between
the potential goodness of the self and the actual state of the self.
While this notion of a self-sufficient moral agent is encouraging, it
was not without problems for a group of intellectuals. For example,
Luo Qinshun thought that the identification of the subjective function
of the mind with the objective reality of principle constituted "a
case of an infinitesimal mistake in the beginning leading to an
infinite error at the end." How so?
In the view of people like Luo, the notion of a self-sufficient moral
agent contained in the formula of xin ji li appears virtually bereft
of any viable tension between the ideal and the actual: the immediate,
actual self is the ideal. This absence of a normative tension poses a
certain threat to the rigor of morality. This is why they criticized
the notion of a self-sufficient moral agent as being a source of
arbitrariness and subjectivism in moral behavior. However, normative
tension is not completely out of sight for those who advocate the
formula of xin ji li. For one thing, Wang's distinction between the
mind in itself (xin zhi benti) and the so-called human mind (renxin)
provides one with a standard with which to distinguish between the
normative state and the actual state of the self. For Wang, the "mind
in itself" represents the original state of the mind, which possesses
the perfect faculty of moral judgment. The "human mind" represents the
state of the mind that is "obscured" by selfish human desires, and
thus does not realize the perfect faculty of moral judgment. Since the
immediate state of the mind often remains at the level of the human
mind, one is expected to endeavor to recover the mind in itself.
As long as Wang maintains a distinction between the mind in itself and
the human mind, what is really at issue is not whether to posit a
normative ideal, but how to conceptualize a normative ideal. Most
important to his conceptualization, Wang does not conceive the
normative ideal independently of the functioning of the mind. That is,
there is no ontological difference between the normative ideal and the
actual, for both the mind in itself and the human mind represent
certain states of our consciousness. The only difference between the
mind in itself and the human mind is whether or not the mind is
clouded by selfish desire.
Thus, the main consequence of this way of conceiving a normative ideal
is that our current state of mind is able to return to its original
state simply by getting rid of selfish desires, without a separate
effort to apprehend normative principle.
Distinguishing the goodness that reflects the original state of the
mind from the badness that stems from selfish desires is absolutely
critical in the process of returning to the original state of the
mind. Such knowledge is just another aspect of the self-sufficient
nature of the self. Following the Mencian tradition, Wang called this
knowledge liangzhi (innate knowing). According to Wang, liangzhi
possesses several intriguing features:
1. Everyone without exception possesses liangzhi.
2. Liangzhi is innate, not something acquired by learning.
Thus, effort is necessary not for forming liangzhi but for setting it
in motion.
3. Liangzhi is not subject to variation or change due to time
and place. One's inner source of moral guidance can be simply applied
to human conduct or society irrespective of the circumstances. Also,
one can understand and make perfect judgments about things without
much information.
4. We can never lose liangzhi. At worst, we simply lose sight
of it. Since liangzhi is always present in the mind, one can always
activate it anytime if one desires it. "Once determined to reform, he
recovers at once his own mind."
5. The character of liangzhi is intuitive. For Wang, the power
of liangzhi lies in its ability properly to respond to any situation,
rather than in factual knowledge that involves concrete information.
In this way, Wang emphasized the intuitive power of the mind. Wang's
invoking of the image of the mirror and balance well expresses his
emphasis on the intuitive moral sensitivity that liangzhi possesses.
Both the mirror and balance give us knowledge of a given object by
making it possible to reflect and weigh it without previous
understanding. This aspect of Wang's learning can be characterized as
anti-"over-intellectualizing."
6. Despite its intuitional character, liangzhi is perfect.
People often tend to lose sight of liangzhi because of selfish human
desire. But once one gets rid of selfish human desire, the perfect
power of liangzhi is completely restored. Simply put, "it [innate
knowledge] knows everything" In short, when liangzhi is rendered as
innate knowledge, knowledge means the capacity for moral judgment
rather than factual knowledge. Thus, if we were but in full contact
with liangzhi, liangzhi would make people perfectly moral rather than
erudite. For Wang, however, such moral judgment presupposes a total
understanding of a given situation.
7. For Wang, who believed in the perfect, intuitive power of
liangzhi, resolution based on confidence was important: "There is the
sage in everyone. Only one who has not enough self-confidence buries
his own chance."
8. Trusting in innate moral knowing, Wang seemed to simplify
the cumbersome process of learning, considering it to be a matter of
eliminating selfish desires: "In learning to become a sage, the
student needs only to get rid of selfish human desires and preserve
the Principle of Nature, which is like refining gold and achieving
perfection in quality." People are no longer under the burden of any
other business except for getting rid of selfish desire.
All of the above points together explain the populist ethos in Wang's
learning, as we see in Wang's famous statement: "All the people
filling the street are sages." For Wang, becoming a fully moral agent
is simple and easy. "Just don't try to deceive it [liangzhi] but
sincerely and truly follow in whatever you do. Then the good will be
perceived and evil will be removed. What security and joy there is in
this!" It cannot but be easy because we are already fully moral
agents. As self-sufficient moral subjects we do not need to engage in
the exploration of the external world.
3. Redefinition of the World
Wang wanted to show that moral awareness depended on the self. While
the importance of the moral agent is quite understandable in the moral
sphere, it begs the question of what kind of relation moral principle
has to the world out there if the ontological status of moral
principle hinges solely on the moral agent. In other words, how could
it be that one's moral principle is completely in the mind and, at the
same time, vitally connected to the world out there? Answering this
question is absolutely critical if Wang's reassertion of personal
morality is to be socially responsible. Wang's sense of social
responsibility is clear when he wants to distinguish his own
convictions from those of Buddhists, whom Confucians have regarded as
forsaking the external world. "In nourishing the mind, we Confucians
have never departed from things and events."
On what ground, then, could Wang maintain that his learning was
focused on the mind and, at the same time, did not depart from the
external world? How did Wang resolve this contradiction? As is
expected in his rhetorical question, "Is there any affair in the world
outside of the mind?" the answer lay in his redefinition of the world
in such a way that there was no affair outside of the mind.
According to Wang, the external world is not something out there, as
distinct from the mind, but "that to which the operation of the mind
is directed." This redefinition of the external world is based on the
insight that everything we can know about the world is mediated by
experience. This experience is made possible by our sense organs. The
activity of these sense organs is associated with the mind. Thus, all
things that we encounter in our lives are necessarily associated with
the mind. The world so conceived is no longer an independent entity
external to the mind, but an inseparable part of the mind. According
to this picture, the external world exists always in reference to the
self.
This position makes one wonder if the external world does not exist
without the operation of one's mind. However, what Wang Yangming cares
about is not (scientific) investigation of the existence of the world
itself — which is a question of modern epistemology — but the
perspective from which we can properly understand our relationship to
the world. When Wang asks rhetorically, "Is there any affair in the
world outside of the mind?" the message he is trying to convey is that
all the things and affairs in our lives exist in an activated state,
so that is what we should have in mind when we think about the world.
How, then, is the world in an activated state? The practitioners of
"vulgar learning" often take the world as something statically "out
there." When they produce factual knowledge, they assume a static
world-picture to the extent that they can produce fixed knowledge.
However, if we accept Wang's definition of things as "that to which
the operation of the mind is directed," the real world in our lives
turns out to be the experienced world. In other words, the world is
not silent, inert, and vacant, but activated and awakened. Indeed,
life manifests itself in movements like eating, going to bed, and
speaking rather than seeing while stationary. To be exact, we are, in
a sense, moving when we are stationary, for we are experiencing
something incessantly. Common metaphors of life — such as passage,
travel, voyage, and journey — are related to this kind of mobility in
our life-experience. What are the implications of Wang's redefinition
of the external world?
First, the most significant implication of this change in the meaning
of the external world is that Wang has in principle dismissed the
necessity of exploring the external world independent of the self.
Under this framework, to take the mind seriously is none other than to
do justice to the external world. Thus, Wang said, "The mind is the
master of Heaven-and-Earth and myriad things. The mind is none other
than Heaven. If we mention the mind, Heaven-and-Earth and the myriad
things all are also mentioned automatically."
Second, what we notice in Wang's redefinition of the world is a
reformulation of the relation between the mind as subject and the
world as object. Wang suspected that the distinction between the mind
as perceiving subject and the world as perceived object could, by
creating a gap between self and world, make genuine Confucian learning
liable to degenerate into "vulgar learning," which justified the
pursuit of external knowledge that was irrelevant to the self. Thus,
Wang saw our experienced and lived reality as constituted in and
through an inseparable relation between the mind and the world. In his
reconceptualization of this relationship, inner and outer were unified
because the mind was the world. This seamless conception of the mind
and the world overcame the gulf between the subject and the object
that "vulgar learning" engenderd.
Third, this rearrangement of the mind's relation to the world makes
the mind and the world coextensive. For Wang, the mind and the
external world are not fully distinguishable, for the world is no more
than that to which the operation of the mind is directed. This new
arrangement of the mind's relation to the world gives us total contact
with both the self and the larger world from the beginning. We can say
that the distance between the world and us is shortened in the sense
that our access to the world is unmediated, and there is no world that
exists beyond the scope of the self.
4. The Unity of Knowledge and Action
Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and action (zhixing heyi) is
probably the most well-known aspect of Wang's philosophy. Some of the
most puzzling aspects of Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and
action can be best understood by way of Wang's conception of self and
world.
The issue of the relationship between knowledge and action concerns
the relationship between knowledge about (moral) matters and doing
what the knowledge calls for. Traditionally, Chinese thought in
general, and Zhu Xi in particular, maintained that once one acquired
knowledge, one should do one's best to put such knowledge into
practice. In discussing Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and
action, however, we first need to make clear that by his theory of the
unity of knowledge and action, Wang was not asserting a traditional
idea. Indeed, this was precisely the position that Wang wished to
repudiate.
Despite the emphasis on the need for knowledge to be put into
practice, the traditional position presupposed two possibilities:
first, that one can have knowledge without/prior to corresponding
action; and second, that one can know what is the proper action, but
still fail to act. Because of these two possibilities, the traditional
position left open the possibility of separating knowledge and action,
but called for the overcoming of this separation.
However, Wang denied both possibilities. These two denials constitute
the essence of Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and action.
First, according to Wang, it is only through simultaneous action that
one can obtain knowledge: "If you want to know bitterness, you have to
eat a bitter melon yourself." Wang denied any other possible routes to
obtain knowledge.
According to Wang, it is not possible for one to put something into
practice after acquiring knowledge. This is because knowledge and
action are unified already, from beginning to end. We cannot unify
knowledge and action because they are already unified. Of course, Wang
was aware of the claims that "there are people who know that parents
should be served with filial piety and elder brothers with respect but
cannot put these things into practice. This shows that knowledge and
action are clearly two different things." Wang's answer was: "The
knowledge and action you refer to are already separated by selfish
desires and are no longer knowledge and action in their original
state." In other words, knowledge necessarily/automatically leads to
action in its original state. We cannot have knowledge while
preventing it from leading to action.
Understanding these two apparently non-commonsensical ideas is crucial
for understanding of Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and
action, for they are the points that differentiated Wang's position
from preceding positions. In order to understand them, we need to
examine what Wang meant by "knowledge" and "action." Furthermore,
considering Wang's view of self and world is indispensable to any
examination of Wang's notions of "knowledge" and "action."
First, knowledge in Wang's theory of the unity of knowledge and action
may not necessarily be the knowledge we conventionally imagine. What
Wang meant by knowledge in his discussion of knowledge and action is
not grasping information that was "out there" — which is prevalent in
what Wang characterized as "vulgar learning." What Wang meant was
knowledge of how to act in a given situation, as we will confirm in
Wang's statements concerning the unity of knowledge and action. Where,
then, does knowledge of how to act come from? This question brings us
to Wang's theory of philosophical anthropology and his notion of
liangzhi. Liangzhi is supposed to provide that kind of certainty for
action. The English translation of liangzhi is innate knowledge or
innate knowing, which suggests that we already possess all the
knowledge we need to have. We do not have to spend any time to acquire
knowledge. Precisely speaking, we cannot acquire knowledge, for we, as
self-sufficient moral agents, already possess it from the very
beginning. Thus, it would be nonsense to say that we need to know
before in order to act. In this sense, what we mean by "knowing" is
not to attain from outside what is previously absent but to experience
the operation of our innate knowledge/knowing in the concrete
situations of our own lives. "To 'obtain' means to get in the mind; it
is not infused from without." From this we can understand Wang's
strange idea that it is only through simultaneous action that one can
obtain knowledge. For action is the process of activating our innate
knowledge. Thus, Wang said, "Can anyone learn without action?" What we
conventionally think of as attaining knowledge is nothing other than
experiencing knowledge that we already have.
But what, precisely, is action? Wang did not think of moral action in
terms of willing and then performing an action. For him, the true
perception of a situation automatically and immediately sets action
into motion. In emphasizing the setting-in-motion of action followed
by the perception of a situation, the action in Wang's theory does not
exactly correspond to the kinds of acts we have conventionally in
mind. For Wang, action means all responses to a given situation. This
includes studying, which was not conventionally regarded as belonging
to the realm of action.
At the same time, Wang tended to consider action as responses to given
situations rather than action in a vacuum. This point is evident in
his examples of responses to such things as color, smell, and taste.
When action is conceived largely as a response to a given situation,
we cannot avoid acting. We never depart from the "situation" in which
we find ourselves.
To understand further why Wang conceived of action as a response to a
given situation, we need to remember his redefinition of the world. To
describe the actual fabric of life that Wang had in mind, we have
invoked the sense of movement, which posited an alternative to the
more static conception of experience — one that deceived one into
thinking that one stood outside the actual world. For Wang, our lives
consist of living in the moment.
With this understanding of Wang's notion of knowledge and action in
mind, let us imagine the situation in which one acts with one's
knowledge. First of all, one does not spend any time to attain
knowledge. All one needs is to respond to a given situation. Knowledge
is not fixed knowledge, but consists of ever-changing responses to
shifting situations: "Innate knowledge is to minute details and
varying circumstances as compasses and measures are to areas and
lengths. Details and circumstances cannot be predetermined, just as
areas and lengths are infinite in number and cannot be entirely
covered." Wang is invoking "the radically context sensitive and
particularist nature of moral judgement." Accordingly, the knowledge
is intuitive. As action is the natural inner workings of liangzhi in
the form of reaction, there is no gap between knowledge and action.
Keeping the above understanding of knowledge and action in mind, we
can understand the aforementioned two idiosyncratic points in Wang's
theory of the unity of knowledge and action. First, it is only through
simultaneous action that one can obtain knowledge. This is because one
already possesses knowledge. What seems to be a process of obtaining
knowledge is in reality the process of activating innate knowledge.
Knowledge is activated through the contact with the situation, and
this is called "action." Second, knowledge necessarily/automatically
leads to action. For Wang, knowledge means knowing how to respond to a
given situation and action is responding to a given situation.
Furthermore, one cannot help responding to the world because one is
"moving" in every moment. Action is no longer an operation subsequent
to the formulation of knowledge of the world, but a fundamental mode
of human life. Given that one innately has knowledge of how to act in
all situations, and that one cannot help acting, knowledge necessarily
leads to action. When knowledge and action appear to be separate, it
is because one has not activated one's true knowledge — a result of
delusion due to selfish desire or false learning: "There have never
been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know
but do not act simply do not yet know."
According to Wang, the normative picture of the universe is that moral
agents are living their lives actualizing their liangzhi in the form
of the unity of knowledge and action. In this picture, the betterment
of society depends on the expansion of the self's ability to respond
morally to the world. Thus, Wang repeatedly reasserts the validity of
the Neo-Confucian promise — the salvation of the world through
personal morality — which is based on the assumption that "Governance
depends on human beings (wei zheng zai ren)."
In his own time, Wang's teaching was enthusiastically received.
Although Wang's new mode of thinking was rapidly gaining currency
among intellectuals, for those who did not subscribe to his ideas
Wang's formulation was nothing more than a mistaken answer to the
problem. Thus, Wang came to serve as a catalyst for complex and
wide-ranging debates and controversies. No matter how later generation
of thinkers would evaluate the legacy of Wang's learning, it could
hardly be denied that with Wang Yangming the tradition of Chinese
philosophy became richer and more complex.
5. Recent Scholarship on Wang Yangming
Leaving aside Wang Yangming's importance in his own time, he deserves
attention because of his tremendous, long-lived influence on Chinese
intellectual history. Not surprisingly, therefore, important studies
of Wang Yangming have been produced all the way up to the present.
In Anglophone scholarship, the work of Frederick Goodrich Henke (1916)
and Wing-tsit Chan (1963) has made available translations of Wang's
major works. Wing-tsit Chan (1970) provides a bird's-eye view on the
flow of thought from the early Ming through Wang's era by scrutinizing
the evolution of "the learning of mind" in early Ming thinkers. Wang's
thought also has been explored by Tu Weiming (1976) in terms of the
interaction between his life history and the formation of his major
doctrines. Wm. Theodore de Bary (1970) has discussed the progression
of thought in the late Ming in terms of the unfolding of "Wang
Learning." The work of Julia Ching (1976) also merits consideration.
More recently, P. J. Ivanhoe (2002) has discussed Mencius' and Wang's
philosophies from a comparative perspective.
In Japanese scholarship, the compilation of Yōmeigaku Taikei
(Compendium of Yangming Learning) is most prominent among many works.
In his classic study, Shushigaku to Yōmeigaku (Zhu Xi Learning and
Yangming Learning) (1967), Shimada Kenzi attempts to compare the
thought of Wang with that of Zhu Xi. However, his analysis does not
pay attention to the specific historical contents of their
philosophical movements, while Togawa Yoshio's Jukyōshi (A History of
Confucianism) (1987) pays relatively more attention to this issue.
In mainland China, Wang's thought has been interpreted as subjective
idealism and criticized by Marxist scholars despite the fact that the
influence of Marxist ideology has become relatively weak since the end
of Cultural Revolution (c. 1966-1976). Yang Guorong (1990)
diachronically narrates the development of the structure of Wang's
philosophy. The work of Chen Lai (1991) also is worthy of attention.
6. References and Further Reading
* Araki Kengo, et al, comp. Yōmeigaku Taikei. 12 vols. Tokyo:
Meitoku shuppansha, 1971-73.
* Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. Instructions for Practical Living and
Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963.
* Chan, Wing-tsit. "The Ch'eng-Chu School of Early Ming." In Self
and Society in Ming Thought, ed. W. T. de Bary (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1970): 29-51.
* Chen Lai. Youwuzhijing: Wang Yangming zhuxue de jingshen (The
Realm of Being and Non-being: The Spirit of Wang Yangming's
Philosophy). Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1991.
* Ching, Julia, ed. To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
* de Bary, W. T. "Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming
Thought." In Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. W. T. de Bary (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1970): 145-247.
* Henke, Frederick Goodrich. The Philosophy of Wang Yang-Ming.
Chicago: Open Court, 1916.
* Ivanhoe, P.J. Ethics in the Confucian Tradition. 2nd ed.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002.
* Shimada Kenji. Shushigaku to Yōmeigaku (Zhu Xi Learning and
Yangming Learning). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967.
* Togawa Yoshio, et al. Jukyōshi (A History of Confucianism).
Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1987.
* Tu Weiming. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's
Youth (1472-1509). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1976.
* Yang Guorong. Wangxue tonglun (A Comprehensive Study of Wang
Learning). Shanghai: Shanghai sanlianshudian, 1990.
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