Zhu Xi Turned "Loving the People" into "Renewing the People"｜How Wang Yangming's Non-separation of Inner and Outer Breaks the Order of the Cheng-Zhu School

At the top of this section, I wrote that the place the Confucian sages arrived at was not trying to change others but first setting their own hearts right. This time I want to take a brief look at what lies beyond that place, because a person who is complete only on the inside will, in the end, change nothing. Self-containment may bring self-satisfaction, but it cannot change the fact that nothing changes. Pressing on this point gives us the key to understanding, at the root, why Zen and Taoism cannot change the world.

The man who pressed on it most sharply was Wang Yangming (1472–1529).

The debate played out over the Great Learning. The text was originally a single chapter of the Book of Rites, one of the central Confucian classics, but in the Song dynasty it was raised to the rank of the Four Books and became the gateway to learning across East Asia. It opens with the famous Three Guiding Principles.

The way of the Great Learning lies in illuminating bright virtue, in loving the people, and in coming to rest in the highest good.
【大學之道，在明明德，在親民，在止於至善】

To illuminate bright virtue is to let the virtue we are born with shine forth without any clouding. To love the people is to draw close to them. The highest good is where all of this arrives. The trouble of interpretation arose over the second of the three, and even today, whenever we speak of Confucianism, which reading of it we choose changes the whole character of the thought.

The Song was an age in which Confucianism underwent an explosive revival. Its central figure, Zhu Xi (1130–1200) of the Southern Song, followed the reading of Cheng Yi (1033–1107) of the Northern Song and wrote in his commentary that “親 ought to be written 新.” He was saying that the character 親, “to love,” was a copyist’s error for 新, “to renew.” By reading the phrase not as “loving the people” but as “renewing the people,” he set out to build a philosophy of his own upon it.

He changed one character, nothing more. Yet that single character opened a rift that split the world in two, and it went on to shape the whole of East Asian history that followed. This is why the Cheng-Zhu school, the line of thought descending from Zhu Xi, and Yangmingism, the line descending from Wang Yangming, stand on different foundations. Here are the two side by side.

◯ First illuminate your own bright virtue, then extend it to others and make them cast off the stains of their old habits (the Cheng-Zhu school)
◯ To illuminate bright virtue is, in itself, to love the people (Yangmingism)

Placed side by side, they show that the Cheng-Zhu school separates. In it, illuminating bright virtue is set down as the root and renewing the people as the branch. To have a root and a branch is to have a before and an after, an inside and an outside. Those who have finished polishing themselves move on, as “the next stage,” to renewing those who are still soiled. The moment this order is in place, the self is assigned to the side of the acting subject, and the people to the side of ignorant objects waiting to be improved. A hierarchy has been built in.

This was not the only place where Zhu Xi made such a move. It would be truer to say that “loving the people” slid into “renewing the people” here precisely because his thought already presupposed separation. In Confucianism, changing a single character carries tremendous weight, since it can turn the teaching at its root toward the good or toward the bad. You could say, quite literally, that the world is transformed.

The Cheng-Zhu school, in other words, is a philosophy of sequence. And because a body of thought that lays out its steps in order fits so well with legal institutions, it is always adopted by those in power. It was only natural that Ieyasu Tokugawa, who founded the Edo shogunate, seized on it, for no other philosophy was so elegant, so finished, and so well suited to governing. Even now, the Cheng-Zhu school quietly reigns as the absolute philosophy of the Japanese bureaucracy.

What Wang Yangming spent his life tearing down was exactly this sequence, this separation. In 1527, late in his life, he dictated the Inquiry on the Great Learning to his disciples, and there he writes as follows.

To illuminate bright virtue necessarily lies in loving the people, and loving the people is the very means by which one illuminates one’s bright virtue.

The act of illuminating bright virtue always shows itself as the act of loving the people, and loving the people is, in itself, the illumination of one’s own bright virtue. It is not that the inner comes first and the outer after. The inner is the outer, and the outer is the inner. Inner and outer, in short, cannot be separated.

Wang put this in terms of substance and function. Bright virtue is the substance of loving the people, and loving the people is the function of bright virtue. Substance and function are not two separate things but only the two faces of a single matter. So he declared that to speak of illuminating bright virtue while failing to love the people is the view of the Buddhists and the Taoists, and not true bright virtue at all. Speaking from the Confucian side, he judged the inner perfection that Buddhism, Zen above all, and Taoism strive for to fall short.

You settle your own heart into peace, reach a state of perfect clarity, and rest content there. This is beautiful, certainly. But as the decline of Zen in the West into mere mindfulness after D. T. Suzuki makes plain, unless you grasp this one point, it is nothing but self-satisfaction. It looks noble, yet it is only self-absorption. An inner life perfected without once meeting the world is not even a true inner life. This is the position of Yangmingism, and it is why Yangmingism tolerates neither the Buddhist retreat from the world nor the Taoist habit of steeping oneself in nothingness.

What makes Yangmingism what it is comes down, in the end, to this absolute non-separation. The inner illumination of bright virtue and the outer loving of the people are always mediating each other. The moment you pull either one out on its own, both of them die. This is Yangmingism, and this is what Confucianism was in the first place.