China & East Asia · 12th – late 19th c.
School of Mind (Lu–Wang school)
Moral principle is not out in things but in one’s own mind; everyone has innate good knowing (liangzhi), and true knowing is inseparable from acting.
Where is moral principle found: in things, or in the mind?
Lu Jiuyuan debated Zhu Xi at Goose Lake Temple in 1175, objecting that Zhu’s step-by-step study of external things fragmented moral life. Three centuries later Wang Yangming, after failing to find principle by contemplating bamboo and then enduring exile in Guizhou, had an awakening in 1508 that the mind itself is principle.
Filial piety is not found in one’s parent but in one’s own caring mind, so moral principles belong to the mind itself. Everyone already has innate good knowing; and to know the good without doing it is not yet to know it, so knowing and acting form one unity.
- The mind is principle (xin ji li).
- Knowing and acting are one.
- Extend your innate good knowing.
It swept through late Ming China and, as Yōmeigaku, inspired activists in Japan up to the Meiji Restoration; twentieth-century New Confucians revived it.
Thinkers
1139–1193Lu Jiuyuan (Lu Xiangshan)Song scholar who taught that the mind is principle1472–1529Wang YangmingMing official, general and master of the School of MindKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstNeo-Confucianism (Cheng–Zhu school)Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming rejected Zhu Xi’s search for principle in external things and located it in the mind itself.Grew out of
ConfucianismWang Yangming’s “innate good knowing” (liangzhi) is a term taken from Mencius.Borrowed from
Chan / Zen BuddhismCritics from Zhu Xi on charged that the stress on the original mind and sudden insight was Chan in Confucian dress; the resemblance is real, though the school insisted on moral action in the world.
What it led to
Carried on byNew ConfucianismXiong Shili and Mou Zongsan placed the Lu–Wang teaching of the moral mind at the heart of their renewed Confucianism.
Its answers to the big questions
KnowledgeHow can we know anything?Innate knowing (liangzhi) is already in the mind; knowledge and action are one.Mind & selfWhat is the self?The mind is principle: the moral order is found in the heart-mind, not outside it.On the record
The School of Mind is drawn from the 12th to the 17th century, ending in 1700.
Wang Yangming learning (Yōmeigaku) went on in Japan: Nakae Tōju (1608–1648) and Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691) in the 17th century, and a line of “Yangmingists” from Ōshio Heihachirō’s Osaka uprising of 1837 into the Meiji era and beyond. The end date is moved to the late 19th century.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Japanese Confucian Philosophy” · University of Tokyo, review of Kojima Tsuyoshi, The Wang Yangming School in Modern Japan