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- Herausgeber: Passerino Editore
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Bresciani, Umberto,
Wang Yangming – An Essential Biography, Passerino Editore, 2016. This is a biography – the first in Western languages - of an extraordinary man, who has fascinated countless people in the last five centuries. Wang Yangming was a philosopher, a military and political leader, and a poet and artist; but most of all a spiritual master for all those who came to him in search for a guide on the path to wisdom. The stages of his eventful life are presented in twelve chapters, while three appendices illustrate the doctrines for which he has remained famous (Appendix 1), his spiritual and cultural legacy (Appendix 2), and various interpretations of such a complex figure, especially from the point of view of East-West comparative philosophy (Appendix 3).
Umberto Bresciani
1942 Born in Ca’d’Andrea, Cremona, Italy.
1962 High School Graduate (Maturità Classica), Liceo Ballerini, Seregno (MI), Italy.
1968 Licentiate of Philosophy & Theology, Studentato Teologico Saveriano, Parma, Italy.
1969 Entered Chinese Language Institute (Annexed to Fujen University, Taipei, Taiwan).
1973 B.A. (major: History; minor: Chinese Studies), University of Maryland (U.S.A.), Far East Division.
1975 M.A. Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
1983 Ph. D. Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Professor of Italian Language: National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei (since 1974).
Professor, Dept. of Italian Language & Culture, Fujen University, Xinzhuang, Taipei, Taiwan (since 2003).
Umberto Bresciani has lived in Taiwan for over 40 years.
His main interest is Chinese philosophical and religious thought and comparative theological studies.
Main publications
Books:
Xifang hanxuejia yanjiu wenshidongyi de shangdui (Evaluation of research by Western sinologists on the Wenshidongyi), dissertation for the Ph.D., Chinese Literature, Taipei: National Taiwan University, May 1983.
Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement, Taipei: Ricci Institute, 2001.
La filosofia cinese nel ventesimo secolo – I nuovi confuciani, Roma: Urbaniana University Press, 2009.
Il primo principio della filosofia confuciana, Ebook: Passerino Editore, 10 giugno 2014.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Umberto Bresciani
Wang Yangming: An Essential Biography
The Sky is the limit
Table of contents
Introduction
Main Dates in the Life of Wang Yangming
Main Sources
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Credits
Wang Yangming
An Essential Biography
by
Umberto Bresciani
2016
Introduction
Wang Yangming (1472-1529), along with Confucius, Mencius and Zhu Xi, has been regarded in China as one of the four greatest masters of Confucianism in history. He was the founder of the Yaojiang School or Yangming School of Mind, or also Lu-Wang School, which became one of the dominant schools of Confucianism in the middle and late Ming period and in later centuries, until our very times.
Wang Yangming was not merely a philosopher; he was an extraordinary man. Now and then, extraordinary men appear on this earth. Without mentioning the polyhedral genius of Wang’s contemporary Leonardo da Vinci (1459-1519), think of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 CE, who was at the same time a busy emperor of a huge empire and a stoic philosopher. Even today, two thousand years later, while his political accomplishments have been largely forgotten, there are people who read his philosophical Meditations. How about Lorenzo the Magnificent, the political leader of fifteenth-century Florence? He was a banker, a skillful politician and a consummate diplomat, but also a thinker, a good poet, and a great art connoisseur.
Wang Yangming was one of such extraordinary men, and among them a very extraordinary one; so much so that even nowadays in China he is often nicknamed “the almighty scholar ( quanneng da ru).” He was at the same time a legendary military leader and tactician, a wise governor of provinces, a hero against an evil government, a first-class Confucian philosopher, a spiritual guru to countless people, a refined poet, and a respected painter and calligrapher. One can admire in him so incredibly diverse qualities that Western languages lack a suitable word to use for this kind of persons. In Chinese there is the appellation shengren, which is close to the point. Usually shengren is rendered in translation either as saint or as sage, while actually it combines together the two.
In the Chinese tradition of thought there is no agreement about what is there for human beings in the afterlife. Since antiquity however there is agreement about a threefold way of achieving immortality: through virtue, deeds, and words, as first mentioned in the ancient classic Zuo Zhuan. Hu Shi (1891-1962) used to call them ‘the three W’ (Immortality of Worth, Work, and Words). A human being undoubtedly can become immortal because of his/her outstanding virtue, becoming a model for many generations; or because of his/her deeds influencing posterity, or because of the doctrines he/she taught and the books he/she wrote. Wang Yangming has achieved immortality through all three: he was a sage (outstanding virtue); he accomplished great deeds during his life; and he left his teachings to posterity through his own writings as well as through the writings of his many disciples.
As I will explain in one of the appendices (Appendix 2), Wang Yangming has been admired and celebrated by many as a paradigmatic figure in Confucianism, because he manifested in himself the two ideal dimensions of an accomplished Confucian personality, both the sage inside ( neisheng) and the king outside ( waiwang). Very few other figures in history had the will to pursue the Confucian doctrine and at the same time the opportunity to realize it in actual political life. Mencius was advisor to rulers; he never held any political power. Zhu Xi was a minor official for a short while; he spent most of his life teaching and writing books. Confucius himself occupied a political position only for a very short time, and it was not a powerful one.
In our imagination, normally a philosopher would live a dull and routine life, and achieve his philosophical discoveries in the quiet of his studio. Wang Yangming had a tempestuous life; he achieved his thought conquests in moments of political struggle, of distress, of torments, and physical difficulties. In the many trials of his life, it must have been of great help to him to meditate on the passage of the Mengzi that says: “When Heaven is about to confer a heavy responsibility on a man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to deprivation, place obstacles in the path of his deeds, so as to perturb his heart and toughen his nature, and enhance his character wherever he is unable.“ (6B15). Even though he was primarily a man of action, Wang Yangming cherished as well days or even months of solitude in meditation, preferably in contact with nature in some pristine panoramic location.
There are numerous books dealing with the philosophical achievements of Wang Yangming. Most of them include a short – five to ten pages – outline of the main events in his life; but to my knowledge there is no complete biography in Western languages. The moment I realized this, I immediately started to put together the present biography. It is not bulky, and not extremely detailed; but enough to give a fairly good idea of the man, of the life he lived, and of his main achievements. Even though there are obscure points in his thought, and debatable episodes in his life, we are dealing with a man who has fascinated and influenced many people in the past and who will continue influencing countless people in the future; therefore, a biography was long overdue.
The present biography narrates, with critical awareness, the basic facts of his life. Given the position of importance of Wang Yangming’s ideas in the history of Chinese philosophy, I could not ignore the subject. At each major step in his life, I have mentioned briefly any new development in his thought and eventual writings. I have developed a bit more the progressive stages in Wang’s thought in one special chapter (Appendix 1). Those who are interested primarily in Wang’s biography can easily skip this as well the two other appendices. Appedix 2 ( Wang Yangming’s Legacy), briefly illustrates Wang’s spiritual and cultural legacy, which is undoubtedly manifold exactly as manifold was his personality. Wang’s thought is suited for interesting and creative works of comparison between Western and Eastern thought patterns, as I have shown in the last appendix (Appendix 3: Interpretations) by mentioning comparative research on Wang Yangming and Francis Bacon, Joseph Butler, and Christine Korsgaard.
I suspect, however, that throughout I did not stress one aspect, yet the most meaningful, of the legacy of this extraordinary man, so that I feel the need to mention it here. The Ming Dynasty was an age of great achievements and of serious problems. It ended in misery. Historians have been studying the probable reasons for its demise, but in the end they are drawn to conclude that the root of the problem was morality. It was corruption in the ruling class and in society at large that destroyed the Ming Empire. We discover that in his age Wang Yangming had already a clear perception of the root of the problem, when he wrote that “the world today is totally degenerate. It does not differ from a sick man approaching death.” Therefore, even though Qing Dynasty scholar Gu Yanwu (1613-1682), and many after him, stated that the doctrines of Wang Yangming were the cause of the fall of the Ming (we do not go into this issue here), we could as well conversely argue that it was sheer luck if, after Wang Yangming’s time, the Ming Dynasty survived another century. Or perhaps it was thanks to the movement of spiritual renewal launched by Wang Yangming that the moribund Ming dynasty earned an extra century of life.
Wang Yangming was convinced that moral cultivation of each person is the main way to social well-being. Besides doing all he could to improve the overall level of education, he instantly made it clear that any person aspiring to a post of social or political responsibility should first of all make up his/her mind to pursue sagehood. As an earnest follower of Confucius, he was convinced that a radical commitment to human moral perfection is the best or the only foundation for managing a sound and lasting political entity.
Wang Yangming spoke to the people of his age and inspired or unsettled their lives. He can say many things also to the human beings who are busy organizing their lives in today’s world. He can remind them that the human search for ultimate truth is an ideal worth living for; that human beings in their life-long search for ultimate truth can shop around by all the great leaders-teachers-prophets of the past and of the present; but that in the end one has to follow his/her own conscience:
The thousand sages pass as shadows,
My liangzhi ( conscience) alone is my guide.
(From the poem On Immortality, transl. Ching, 246)
If we wish to convey in two sentences his spiritual message to humankind, the above two lines are the words to highlight. The best eulogy of Wang Yangming that was ever delivered was probably that by his friend and disciple Huang Wan:
“By nature, he was endowed with an extraordinary intelligence, and could retain by memory whatever he had once read. In youth, he was fond of knightly ventures; in adulthood, of prose and prosody, and of Daoism and Buddhism. After taking upon himself the mission of [restoring] the true way [of Confucius], and holding the belief that sagehood is attainable, he changed his ways and corrected his faults. He responded courageously to the difficulties and challenges of the times, assisting, with his learning, the sovereign above, and serving the people below. Earnest and untiring, he counseled others to the practice of the good, desiring by ren to save all living beings under Heaven. He showed no ill will toward those who hated him. Even when he was in a position of wealth and honor, he frequently manifested a desire to leave all things and retire into the mountains. Money was to him as mud and grass. He regarded with the same equanimity the amenities and comforts accompanying high rank, such as rare food, silk robes, and a spacious dwelling, and the inconveniences of poverty and lowliness, such as coarse soup, hemp garments, and a thatched roof. He was truly a born hero, and stands high above all others of the world. There has not been anyone like him in recent ages.” (Ching, 35)
Main Dates in the Life of Wang Yangming
1472: Wang Yangming is born in Yuyao, Zhejiang.
1482: The family moves to Beijing.
1484: Death of Wang Yangming’s mother
1486: Tour of the Great Wall
1488: Trip to Jiangxi to get married.
1489: Visit to the philosopher Lou Liang.
1492: Wang passes the provincial examination.
1499: Wang passes the metropolitan examination.
1501: Visits numerous Buddhist and Daoist temples in Jiuhua Mountain, Anhui.
1502: Retires to Yuyao (Yangming Cave); practices Daoist cultivation.
1504: Returns to official life and to Confucian principles.
1505: Begins to receive disciples as a Confucian teacher.
1506: Emperor Wuzong ascends the throne.
1507: Wang is flogged and imprisoned.
1508: Exiled to Longchang, Guizhou. Wang’s enlightenment.
1509: Begins to speak of the Unity of Knowledge and Action.
1510: Magistrate of Luling, Jiangxi. Return to Beijing.
1511-1516: Minor official posts; teaching philosophy in Beijing.
1517-1518: Military campaigns in Southern Jiangxi. Pacification of bandits.
1518: Publication of the Inquiry on the Great Learning.
1519: Wang captures the Prince of Ning. Emperor Wuzong travels south.
1520: Emperor Wuzong returns to Beijing.
1521: Accession of Emperor Shizong.
1522: Death of Wang Yangming’s father.
1522-1527: Six years in retirement.
1527-1528: Military Campaign in Guangxi.
1529: January 9, Death of Wang Yangming.
Main Sources
The primary source for the life and deeds of Wang Yangming is the two-volume Complete Works, diligently compiled by his outstanding disciples Qian Dehong (1497-1574) and Luo Hongxian (1504-1564), and printed the first time in Suzhou in 1536 in 38 juan with a preface by Huang Wan (1480-1554). Inside it, first of all his nianpu (chronological biography), completed by Qian Dehong in 1567; and also his xingzhuang (record of conduct) written by Huang Wan. The text of the Complete Works has been repeatedly revised and completed through further research by scholars of the past and present. Now it contains 41 juan.
As a rule, whenever life data materials come from this source, there is no indication in this essential biography. I will indicate the source when data or opinions come from other biographers or writers. Direct quotations from the nianpu usually come from Chan (Wing-Tsit Chan, see here below), whose excellent English translations even other authors, such as Tu Wei-ming and Julia Ching, often quote. Dates are indicated according to the Western calendar, except for some possible oversight.
Main Reference Books:
Brook: Brook, Timothy, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998.Chan: Wang Yangming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, transl. with notes by Wing-tsit Chan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.Chan/1: Chan, Wing-tsit, “How Buddhistic is Wang Yangming?”(Philosophy East and West, Vol. 7, pp. 203-216, Dec. 1962).Chan DMB: Chan, Wing-Tsit, “Wang Shou-jen”, in Dictionary of Ming Biography, L. Carrington Goodrich, Chaoying Fang, Editors, Columbia University Press, 1976.Chan/2: Chan, Wing-Tsit, “Wang Yangming: A Biography”, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1972), Hawaii University Press, pp. 63-74Chang: Chang, Carsun (Zhang Junmai), Wang Yangming, Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth-Century China, New York: St. John’s University Press, 1962.Ching: Ching, Julia, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yangming, New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.Ching/1: Ching, Julia, ed., The Records of Ming Scholars by Huang Tsung-hsi, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.Ching/2: Ching, Julia, The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yangming, Transl. and Annotated, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.Ching/3: Ching, Julia, The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000.Chung: Chung Tsai-Chun, Wang Yangming sixiang zhi jinzhan, Taipei: Academia Sinica, Research Department of Literature and Philosophy, 1993.Dardess: Dardess, John, Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011.DMB: Dictionary of Ming Biography, L. Carrington Goodrich, Chaoying Fang, Editors, Columbia University Press, 1976.Dong: Dong Ping, Wang Yangming de shenghuo shijie [The world in which Wang Yangming lived], Beijing: Zhongguo renmin chubanshe, 2009.Fang: Fang Zhiyuan, Kuang shi da ru wang yangming [Wang Yangming, the most prominent Confucian of his age], Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2000.Feng: Feng Menglong, Huang ming da ru wang yangming, ed. by Zhang Zhaowei, Beijing: Jiuzhou Press, 2014.He: He Keyong, Wang Yangming, Xianggang: Zhonghua shuju, 2003.Huang: Huang, Ray, 1587: A Year of No Significance – The Ming Dynasty in Decline, Yale University Press, 1981.Israel: Israel, George Lawrence, On the margins of the grand unity: Empire, violence, and ethnicity in the virtue ethics and political practice of Wang Yangming (1472--1529), UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2008.Is: Israel, George Lawrence, Doing Good and Ridding Evil in Ming China: The political career of Wang Yangming, Leiden: Brill, 2014.Ivanhoe: Ivanhoe, Philip J. (trans.), Readings from the Lu–Wang School of Neo–Confucianism, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009.Ivanhoe2: Ivanhoe, Philip J., Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mengzi and Wang Yangming, Second Edition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002.Liu: Liu, Shuxian (Shu-Hsien Liu), Understanding Confucian Philosophy – Classical and Sung-Ming, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.Qian: Qian Ming, Ruxue Zhengmai: Wang Shouren Zhuan [The Orthodox Line of Confucianism: A Biography of Wang Shouren], Hangzhou: Zhejiang Renmin Chubanshe, 2006.Qian/1: Qian Ming, Wang Yangming ji qi xuepai lunkao [Debate and Research on Wang Yangming and his School of Learning] , Beijing: Zhongguo renmin chubanshe, 2009.Tiwald: Tiwald, Justin and Bryan W. Van Norden (eds.), 2014, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy: Han to the Twentieth Century, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.Tsai: Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.Tu: Tu Wei-ming (Du Weiming), Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yangming’s Youth, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.Chapter 1
Historical Setting
Wang Yangming lived and died in the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is worthwhile to take a good look at the historical background of our man by paying a virtual visit to the Ming Dynasty first.
From Yuan to Ming
After conquering half of Europe and the Middle East, the hordes of Genghis Khan coveted the conquest of China. It was Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, who succeeded in occupying Northern China, at the time dominated by the Liao, a Tungusic dynasty. Kublai Khan proclaimed the start of the Yuan Dynasty (1271), establishing his capital city at Khanbaliq (modern day Beijing). In the following years gradually the south (Southern Song Dynasty, with Hangzhou as capital) was conquered as well and China unified under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. (1279)
The Mongol domination over China had some good points, such as facilitating international trade, but it was oppressive and cruel. It exerted racial discrimination, dividing the population in four classes, where the Han people – the majority of the Chinese - were the lowest. After a few decades, the subjected people, especially in the prosperous and thickly inhabited areas of the Yangtze Delta, were restless. In the middle of the 14th century, with famine, plagues, and peasant revolts sweeping across the country, one of the rebel leaders named Zhu Yuanzhang rose to command the force that conquered China and put an end to the Yuan Dynasty, forcing the Mongols to retreat to the central Asian steppe. In 1368 Zhu conquered the Yuan capital Khanbaliq and, claiming to have received the Mandate of Heaven, established the Ming Dynasty, with Nanjing as its capital. He took the name Hongwu (Great Martiality). The new emperor made it a point to abolish the hated Mongolian laws and customs, and even their names and garments, and return to Chinese traditions; nevertheless, certain habits remained, such as excessive cruelty in punishments, and even a suttee of all his concubines at Zhu Yuanzhang’s death (1398). He established an absolutist and centralized form of government, setting up a secret police service and dealing with exterminating purges toward any actual or suspected challenge to his power. At the beginning he ruled with a prime minister at his side, then abolished the prime minister and administered in person the huge country with the help of grand secretaries.
The Hongwu Emperor reigned for a long number of years and had twenty-seven sons. Trusting only his family, he made his first born his heir and arranged for all the other sons and their families to take possession of large fiefs in the rich Yangtze River Valley or along the northern frontier. In this way he thought that they could help to give stability to the empire. At the same time, since his sons lived a life of luxury in their fiefs at a certain distance from each other, he thought he prevented political trouble in the form of rebellions or coups d’état by some ambitious member of his progeny.
Having outlived his first son and designated heir, the Hongwu Emperor chose his grandson as successor. He also took care of publishing a book of Ancestral Injunctions ( Huangming zuxun) establishing rules for his descendants regarding rituals and etiquette for various occasions. The introductory chapter was composed by the emperor himself, to admonish his sons always to exert a strict government in a legalist way. In order to save the dynasty for the future, he admonished future emperors to live a life of austerity and to keep a watchful eye not only on ancestral veneration and the various ritual performances, but also on relatives, mighty officials (civil and military), and empresses.
The Hongwu Emperor accepted the Confucian traditional viewpoint that agriculture, not commerce, should be the country's source of wealth. As a result, after the destruction caused by the Mongol rule and then by the civil war, the Ming founder undertook a huge effort at economic reconstruction, to restore agriculture, with innumerable projects for irrigation, tree planting, dyke restoring and control of water-courses. The emperor fostered the creation of self-supporting agricultural communities. He wanted to protect the peasants and help them prosper. So he forced many to migrate to settle other places. He instituted public work projects. He tried to distribute land to peasants. During the middle part of his reign, Hongwu made an edict that those who brought fallow land under cultivation could keep it as their property without being taxed. By the end of his reign, cultivated land grew substantially. This made peasants prosper because they sold their produce to the growing cities. During his reign, the population increased quickly. Taxation during the Ming was also of the agrarian type. However, Hongwu’s prejudice against merchants did not diminish the number of traders. On the contrary, commerce increased significantly during the Hongwu Era due to the growth of industry throughout the empire. This growth in trade was due in part to poor soil conditions and the overpopulation of certain areas, which forced many people to leave their homes and seek their fortunes in trade.
The Hongwu Emperor was opposed to military action abroad. He refused to intervene in a Vietnamese invasion of Champa to help the Chams; he only rebuked the Vietnamese for their invasion. He specifically warned future Emperors not to engage in military campaigns for glory and conquest. In his 1395 Ancestral injunctions, Hongwu specifically wrote that China should not attack foreign countries and should instead concentrate on defending against the barbarians", rather than attacking.
The Ming Dynasty (First Period)
At the founder’s death, as soon as his grandson Emperor Jianwen occupied the throne (1398), he undertook at once ambitious plans to remake China both politically and morally. One plan was to recentralize power by ridding the realm of the militarized princedoms the founder had recently created in the mistaken belief that, because they were ruled by his sons, they would serve reliably as a bulwark for his dynasty. The young emperor Jianwen sensed that his uncles were not all happy about the arranged succession. Therefore he thought of further curtailing their political and military power by new measures. The Jianwen government suppressed the weaker princedoms first, leaving the strongest, the princedom of Yan, for last. That was a strategic blunder. His uncle Zhu Di, the prince of Yan, had time to prepare and take to arms. On July 13, 1402, after three years of civil war, the prince of Yen's army burst into Nanking. The Jianwen emperor's palace went up in flames. No sure trace of the emperor was ever found again, though there were recurrent rumors that he had escaped. The Jianwen Emperor’s reign had been very short (r. 1398-1402).
The prince of Yan seized supreme power and ruled as the Yongle Emperor until his death in 1424. He established Yan as a secondary capital and renamed it Beijing, constructed the Forbidden City, and restored the Grand Canal and the primacy of the imperial examinations in official appointments. Beijing was raised to main capital in 1521, but it became such in reality only in 1450, with the completion of the Grand Canal.
Hongwu had kept eunuchs underneath, forbidding them even to learn reading and writing. Yongle rewarded his eunuch supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar bureaucrats. In this way the eunuchs were granted a promising future; their power at court in time kept growing, so that they became a serious source of trouble in the political life of the empire for the rest of the Ming dynasty.
On the whole the new dynasty fared well, thanks mainly to the careful rule of the founder and of his unwanted successor the Yongle Emperor. The solid foundations of the Ming Empire allowed it to last for almost three centuries, even though numerous emperors, after the above two, were mediocre figures, and political life was often strained by strife between the powerful eunuch class and the Confucian literati.
The Ming Dynasty (Middle Years)
The two most salient historical facts regarding the middle period of the Ming are the eunuch usurpation under Wuzong (r. 1505-1521) and the Great Rites Controversy under Jiajing (r. 1521-1567). We will meet both Wuzong and Jiajing along the life of Wang Yangming. We will have the opportunity to understand what actually happened and what were to be the consequences of the above two facts for the future of the Ming Empire. A relevant characteristic of this period was the habit of the emperors – especially Wuzong and Jiajing – of enjoying life in their pleasure quarters or travelling for leisure while totally abstaining from holding court, leaving the conduct of political affairs to eunuchs and favorites.
Mongols in the north around Hohhot (in what is today Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China) had united under Altan Khan, a descendant of Genghis Kahn. With China's military capability reduced, in 1542 the Mongols penetrated the Great Wall, burned homes, stole cattle and horses and massacred more than 200,000 people. In 1550 the Mongols once again crossed the Great Wall and advanced to the gates of Beijing, looting and burning its suburbs. The Ming government eventually appeased them by granting special trading rights.
Emperors in the Life of Wang Yangming (1472-1529)
Personal nameLivedReignedTemple nameEra nameZhu Jianshen1447-14871464-1487XianzhongChenghuaZhu Youtang1470-15051487-1505XiaozongHongzhiZhu Houzhao1491-15211505-1521WuzongZhengdeZhu Houcong1507-15671521-1567ShizongJiajingThe Ming Dynasty (Last Period)
The third period (also called decadence) of the Ming Dynasty begins, according to some historians, with the accession to the throne of the Wanli Emperor (1572). Most Chinese historians view its beginning in 1581, when Emperor Wanli’s Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng (1525-1582) enacted the single whip law ( yitiao bianfa), a large scale fiscal reform. Given that Wang Yangming died in 1529, this last period should be of no interest to our biography. However, it is relevant for the fortunes of Wang Yangming’s philosophy. After his death his ideas spread throughout China, so that for about a century his doctrine was predominant, with ups and downs, in the country, and it was exported also abroad to Korea and Japan.
The last period of the Ming was a period of thriving development in business, in the arts, in literary activities, but also of gradual worsening of the political situation. Caught in the middle of strife between literati parties (especially the Donglin) and eunuchs, the country dragged its life along, until one day the very chief of the imperial army, because of a trifling personal grudge, opened the gates of the Great Wall to the Manchu army waiting for a chance to enter. The Manchus invaded and conquered China, and put an end to the Ming Dynasty.
The state ideology of the Ming Empire
Chapter 2
Birth and Childhood (1572-1582)
Wang’s Birth and Ancestry
His real name was Wang Shouren. In his age he was widely known by his “courtesy name” Wang Boan. He took for himself the nickname Wang Yangming later in life, while he was living a hermit life in a place called Yangming Ravine ( Yangmingdong), near his home town in Zhejiang. He was born on October 31, 1472 under the reign of the Ming Emperor Chenghua (r. 1464-1487) in the small town of Yuyao, not far from Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, into a family of the local gentry. Wang Hua, his father, a student preparing for a government career, was away on a teaching assignment. His mother, surnamed Zheng, was from a local Yuyao family. His birth drew a sigh of relief from grandfather Wang Lun and his wife surnamed Cen, both extremely worried about their daughter-in-law already pregnant for fourteen months.
The Wang family could boast of a long tradition of political figures and literati since very ancient times, going back to a Wang Lan (205-278 CE), a Jin Dynasty (265-420 CE) high official originating from Shandong. Among its most illustrious members one could mention Wang Xizhi (303-361), arguably the most famous calligrapher in Chinese history. It was during the life of Wang Xizhi that the family emigrated south of the Yangzi River, moving to several places along the generations, eventually settling in Yuyao. According to some historians, Wang Xizhi was more precisely a relative, not a direct ancestor of Wang Yangming. Another illustrious ancestor was Wang Fan (1036-1103), a friend of the poet Su Dongpo (1037-1101).
The Chinese are fond of their family trees, which often reach to very distant times, although at times some doubts remain about their historical correctness. As for Wang Yangming, data become much more reliable regarding his sixth generation ancestor Wang Gang (1302-1372), a talented literary person, also knowledgeable in military matters, longtime friend of Liu Ji (1311-1375). Liu Ji was a scholar and poet, as well as a military strategist, who joined the revolution against the Mongol regime. The revolution was successful and Liu Ji became a statesman and the main advisor to Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368).
In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, a rebellion had started in Chaozhou, Guangdong. At the age of seventy (1371), Wang Gang was called by the newly established Hongwu emperor’s Court in Nanjing and appointed advisor to the Guangdong governor and supervisor of military supplies. Wang Gang travelled south, taking along with him his son, the sixteen-year old Wang Yanda. The next year, after accomplishing his mission and convincing the rebels to surrender to the Emperor, Wang Gang started his return trip by sea. Unfortunately, on the way he met the boat of a famous pirate, of a local minority (Miao people), who wanted at any cost to make him their leader. The pirate erected an altar and forced him to sit in the middle and worshipped him. Wang Gang scolded the pirate, instantly urging him to change his life, until finally the pirate killed him. His fellow pirates were going to kill also his son, but the chief pirate stopped them: “This man was a loyal person, his son is a filial person; it would not be auspicious to kill him.” They let the boy go on his way and bring home the body of the dead father wrapped in a sheepskin, so as to bury it in his home town.
When at Court they learned what happened to Wang Gang, they had a memorial shrine built in the place where he had been killed. After such a terrible experience, his son Wang Yanda abstained for all his life from joining public life. He lived a quasi-hermit life, tilling the fields and eating and dressing very simply. He left the advice for his descendants to do the same.
Wang Yangming’s great-great grandfather Wang Yuzhun followed the advice, although he was a good scholar who authored a prestigious study on the Book of Change. His great grandfather Wang Jie received a licentiate and entered the National Academy in Nanjing. He was the author of several books on the Confucian Classics.
Wang Yangming’s grandfather Wang Lun continued the family tradition of both book learning and abstaining from public life. Even though he was widely read, he did not take part in any public examination. He acquired fame as a good teacher and the families of the local gentry contended his service; and so he made a living by private teaching. He also became well known as a student of the Book of Change and expert in divination. Some friends advised him to take part in government examinations; he himself realized that the family was living in extreme poverty; that it was going to become poorer and poorer, if they did not take some official job. All that was left of the family’s property were two large chests of books inherited from his ancestors. Therefore, he was happy when he had a son, Wang Hua, who was quite gifted at learning. As soon as the boy started to speak, he would recite poems to him, and the child could easily repeat them right away. He took good care of his son and trained him for the government examinations.
Wang Lun was fond of poetry, wine, and bamboo. He loved to recite poems while drinking wine among bamboo trees. He was a man who disregarded luxury and power and cherished anonymity and simple life. He was known as a kind of Tao Yuanming (the bucolic poet, 365-427), or the like of the recluse Song poet Lin Bu (967-1028). He was an assiduous reader of the Book of Rites and of the Shiji (Records of the Historian) and a good prose writer, the author of two books of essays. He was also quite generous any time he saw somebody in straitened circumstances, sharing his own clothes with him. Although without power or riches, the Wang family enjoyed a very good name in town.
Wang Yangming’s father Wang Hua (1446-1522) was a brilliant young man and an avid learner, gifted with a prodigious memory. After reading a page, he could remember each word from the first to the last. There is a story for his youth, revealing his self-conscience and character, of a man not ready to go along with the trends. When Wang Hua was still a boy of fourteen, there spread the hearsay that at night there were spirits roaming around the Longquan temple. Nobody dared to pass by there anymore. Only Wang Hua was fearless; he liked to study there and stayed in the temple even until late at night. The next day people would ask him: “Everybody fears the spirits and is afraid to get hurt. Do you mean that you were not afraid at all?” He replied: “What should I have been afraid of?” “Late last night, after everybody else left, did you see anything strange?” “What should I have seen?” “Then you must be a heavenly creature. In the future you will have a very fortunate life.”
There are some indications that in his youth Wang Hua was influenced by the philosophy of Lu Xiangshan (1139-1192). His fame of a very cultured man started to spread around soon; when he was around thirty, he was already contended among the distinguished families of the area as an instructor for their young. In 1481, at the age of 35, he passed the metropolitan examination with the first place ( optimus) on the list. The examination was the door to a future official career, and passing with the best grade was premonitory of high places in the government. Right away, he was employed as a compiler in the Hanlin Academy, the highest learning institution in the country. Soon later, he became an official in a Court ministry and then one of the instructors to the emperor’s son (the future emperor Xiaozong). Wang Hua was also known as Mister Longshan, from the simplified name of mountain Longquan (Longquanshan) near his home, where he liked to study since his youth.
Wang Hua was earnest and outspoken. He was an upright figure in the court, not inclined to flatter the rich and powerful. He had a rather smooth and successful official career, until he met the age of eunuch Liu Jin (1506). When eunuch Liu Jin wielded absolute power in the country, many were going to his residence to pay homage; only Wang Hua did not go. Expectedly, Liu Jin did not appreciate him, and after a while, he received the order to resign. Wang Hua was the author of numerous books (46 volumes zhuan). He was a serious Confucian scholar. He wrote poems and essays without indulging in flowery compositions, but always straight to the point.
Right after Wang Hua was forced to resign, some friends advised him to retreat to a mountain place and live the life of a Daoist hermit, to keep safely away from Liu Jin’s temper. He replied that “people live happily in this world because in their houses they have parents and children, brothers and wives, relatives and clansmen; outside their homes they have rulers and subjects, friends and social relations and duties, and they have exchanges among themselves and do not leave each other. If I abandon everything and go to live alone on a mountain until my death, what difference is there with actual death? The real teaching of the sages is to keep one’s heart pure and control one’s desires, so as to refresh one’s spirit and strengthen one’s will. I peacefully accept and follow the will of Heaven, is this not the path to longevity?”
Soon after his retirement, Wang Hua strove hard to put together some money and build a small villa. The work was hardly finished, when a fire caused it to burn to the ground. Relatives and friends came to help. Wang Hua entertained them, and in a relaxed mood chatted and laughed with them as if nothing had happened. This shows the maturity and self-control of this man, and lets us know from whom Wang Yangming learned his celebrated self-mastery. Wang Yangming himself declared in one well-known poem ( Song desheng shufu gui yao) how much he learned from his father in his youth in the company of his young uncle Wang Desheng.
When Wang Yangming was about nine or ten, his father Wang Hua moved his household from Yuyao to nearby Shaoxing, because he loved the natural environment there and recalled that his ancestors had lived there. However, the family kept also the house in Yuyao. Wang Rong and Wang Gun, Wang Hua’s two brothers, continued to live there. Thereafter Wang Yangming also lived in both places. (Dong, 7)
Biographer Qian Ming stresses the role Wang Yangming’s grandmother – Wang Lun’s wife – must have had in his education. A devout Buddhist believer, she was a strong and intelligent woman. After the early death of Wang Yangming’s mother, the young boy was entrusted to her care. Once he grew up, she helped Wang Yangming start his teaching career by advertising his talent and encouraging relatives and neighbors to send their young to learn from him. She lived until 96, alert and vivacious to the last.
Legends
Perhaps because Wang Yangming was such an extraordinary person, and after he had accomplished legendary military feats and had attracted many disciples and fans, several legends started to circulate about him. Some of them were even recorded in his official biography ( nianpu). Around the moment when he was going to be born, his grandmother was asleep. She had a dream: she saw a heavenly fairy clothed in a purple silk cassock decorated with jade, appearing out of the clouds and descending slowly through falling snow, accompanied by music, toward the Wang mansion, bringing with her two hands a charming and lively child to her in the form of a heavenly gift. At this point, she woke up and heard the newborn child’s cry. Because of this, his grandfather gave him the name Yun (cloud), and as the story spread around, the villagers called his birthplace “the Auspicious Cloud Mansion ( ruiyun lou).” By the way, an almost similar story of a dream had been recorded at the birth of his father Wang Hua by his father’s grandmother; accordingly, at the time they had given the boy the name Hua (splendor, or prosperity). The recurrent mention of dreams should not surprise. “The special concern with dreams looms significantly in Ming literature. Accounts of dreams are many and varied.” (Lienche Tu Fang, DMB 442)
Since his birth, Wang Yangming was in frail health. After he started eating solid food, he never stopped taking pills and prescription drugs. Quite often, he would have a fever or was coughing. His growth was slow. He was unable to speak until past the age of four. This was somewhat embarrassing for the family. Legend has it that one day a wandering monk in a threadbare cassock passed by. After staring for a long while at the child playing with the other kids but without speaking, the monk lightly patted the child’s head and sighed: “What a wonderful boy! Too bad, that his name has been revealed!” The monk’s exclamation refers to a Daoist belief that a child could be endowed at birth with some special heavenly power, but if such power is divulged beforehand, he may lose it. Upon hearing about this, his grandfather decided to change his name. Instead of Yun (cloud), he named him Shouren. The name Shouren is a quotation from Confucius’ Dialogues, to say that “The power that can be obtained through knowledge, if it is not retained ( shou) through goodness ( ren), will certainly be lost in the end.” (XV, 33) As the saying goes, from then on, Wang Yangming started to speak.
This last anecdote, same as grandmother’s dream of a fairy at Wang’s birth, is a clear indication that the environment where Wang was born was saturated with popular Daoism. No wonder then that Wang Yangming at eight was already dreaming of becoming a fairy or an immortal, as he mentioned in a letter written thirty years later in reply to someone asking whether spirits and immortals exist: “Actually, ever since the age of eight, I have been interested in such matters. More than thirty years have passed since then…” (Ching/2, 4).
Another legend refers that one day, when he was about seven or eight, Wang Yangming recited loudly some passages from the Classics beloved by his grandfather. The bystanding family members were startled and asked him how he could know those passages. He replied that earlier, when he heard his grandfather read them aloud, he listened attentively and memorized them.
While his father was often away on government assignments, grandfather taught the child Wang Yangming to read and write, [...]
