Wang Yangming Thought as Cultural Capital: The Case of Yongkang County
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPIn the early sixteenth century, when the learning of Wang Shouren (henceforth, Wang Yangming [1472–1528]) was drawing intense attention and debate, two literati of Jinhua Prefecture, Zhejiang Province, were among the first to correspond with him.1 Soon thereafter, ten more Jinhua literati crossed the prefectural border to meet with him at Yuyao. Interestingly, they were all from the same district (xiang) in Yongkang County, and most of them were tied to one another by blood and marriage. As early as the 1520s, the members of this narrow network established the Wufeng (Five Peaks) Academy at a location more or less equidistant from their respective family residential sites. To the best of our knowledge, no one else in Jinhua showed such enthusiasm for Wang's teaching at the time.
The impact of this new intellectual trend on local society has special significance in this case. In his research on the literati of Taihe County during the Ming Dynasty, John W. Dardess concludes that they were quick to lose interest in cultural issues specific to their local areas, shifting focus instead to this new intellectual trend.2 Jinhua literati, by contrast, refreshed their memory of the past and reconstructed their local identity on the basis of their distinctive local legacy.3 In the late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, in particular, influential local scholars imbued the local literati with a long-established, but now renewed, collective identity constructed exclusively upon the foundations of a local, but nationally renowned, Daoxue legacy.4 This legacy supplied the later revivalists with the foundation from which to contest contemporary [End Page 41] deviations from the orthodox interpretation of Daoxue—a challenge posed by both Chen Xianzhang (1428–1500) and Wang Yangming. Thus, while the intellectual tradition of Jinhua made it an unlikely venue for the development of Wang Yangming thought, the new teaching managed to make inroads into Jinhua, and the Wufeng Academy was founded, leading to intellectual, and sometimes personal, tensions.
As this article intends to focus on the moment when the new translocal trend confronted the long-established local tradition, the first question I address is how a relatively minor group of Wang Yangming followers in Yongkang County established their new trend locally during the high tide of the Daoxue revival. In studying the spread of Wang Yangming Learning, scholars have concentrated either on the social and cultural transitions that it reflected5 or on Wang's philosophy as it was accepted and transformed by individuals or local groups.6 Recently, some scholars have noted the vital role of local-level activism—academies, the community compact, and local assemblies (jianghui)—in promoting this bottom-up movement.7 To date, however, no study has explored in depth how this once "unorthodox," translocal movement took root in a specific locality or examined how it reshaped the sociocultural landscape of that region. By following the tension caused by the confrontation between the old and the new, we can trace the process of this intellectual and cultural transition of a local society with exceptional clarity.
The second question I discuss concerns the social and cultural dynamics of a local society involved in the local establishment of this new, translocal trend. Timothy Brook, John Dardess, and other social historians have pointed to the significance of the cultural sphere and the lineage organization as sources of local authority beyond the power derived from wealth and examination degrees.8 In doing so, they have focused on the continuity of long-established [End Page 42] lineages, viewing both lineage organization and cultural involvement as strategic instruments for local gentry to maintain their local dominance. In contrast, the history of the Wufeng Academy illustrates how typical newly emerging families, riding the coattails of a new intellectual movement with origins outside their immediate locality, gradually expanded the range of their cultural authority in local society and transformed themselves into lineages with cultural prestige...
