Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming: Separation and Non-separation

The difference between them shows most clearly in Zhu Xi's "knowledge first, action after" against Wang Yangming's "unity of knowledge and action." This needs much insight too, but for readers here I will put it as "Zhu Xi = knowledge first, action after = separating thought" against "Wang Yangming = unity of knowledge and action = non-separating thought." The former is called "shushigaku," the latter "yomeigaku." These two schools still exert a profound influence not only on China but on Japan, so understanding both is indispensable for insight into Japan.

In the glosses of the Han dynasty, learning was awakening, and to learn was understood as to wake up.

Let me unpack this. The character xiao [效] means to copy, to follow the example of. Zhu Xi interpreted learning not as waking up oneself but as "imitating the conduct of those who have awakened first."

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.

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.

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.

Shin soku ri means that the mind is ri and ri is the mind. It is a thought of non-separation that takes everything as one: the mind is ki, ki is ri. From this thought of non-separation come back alleys, drinking quarters that arise by themselves, and chance meetings in plazas. Call this a Yangmingist theory of the city, different from the Zhu Xi one.

Were human beings really born for that alone?

This is what I truly want to ask again. And here lies the decisive break between Wang Yangming and Buddhism and Daoism. In his youth Wang Yangming was in fact drawn to Zen and Daoism and was no great believer in Confucianism. But while banished to a remote post and living at the very limit, he suddenly reached awakening. That awakening was simple and clear.

"There is no answer outside." That was Wang Yangming's awakening.

What he criticized most thoroughly was Buddhism, Zen above all, and Daoism. Both put great weight on introspection, but both tend to stay steeped in the pleasure of their own awakening, with its energy never turning outward. Since Confucius, Confucianism had long criticized that attitude as self-absorbed and selfish.

The point is not which is good and which is bad. What we must really ask is where a daily life of endless inner exploration through introspection finally lands. Creating peace in your own heart is certainly important and precious. Most people cannot even do that much, so in itself it is wonderful. But what Wang Yangming taught was "what comes after." When you have understood yourself through introspection, how do you stand toward the world?