Liangzhi xue de zhankai--Wang Longxi yu zhongwan Ming de Yangming xue (review)

Reading this substantial book brings to mind Borges' parable of a map that grows to be as large as the territories it represents, for one wonders if Peng Guoxiang's hefty tome does not rival the scale of the oeuvre of the book's protagonist, Wang Ji (style name, Longxi) (1498-1583), who was famously and justifiably known as one of the most important disciples of Wang Yangming (1472-1529). Its substantiality pertains not merely to physical size but also to narrative richness and interpretive rigor, as the book judiciously grafts philosophy onto intellectual history. While the centerpiece of Peng's study is no doubt Wang Ji's thought, the author conscientiously situates this thinker's ideas in the intellectual context of the time. What results is not simply a thick and vertically in-depth examination of one man's views, even though they merit focused and stand-alone attention, but also a panoramic and horizontally expansive survey of the intellectual motifs and trends generated by Wang Yangming's architectonic meta-ethics and philosophical anthropology, which captivated a generation of scholars in the sixteenth century.

This suitably corpulent book, comprising seven chapters and two appendixes (a biographical chronology, or nianpu, and a selection of essays not in Wang Ji's Collected Works), is organized and structured in such way that the author's catholic interests and broad concerns are capaciously accommodated. The first four chapters are devoted to identifying the principal threads and patterns that constitute the intricate and elaborate philosophical fabric of Wang Ji's thought. Chapter 1, the introduction, apart from establishing the analytic agenda and describing the narrative structure, denotes the author's main hermeneutic stratagem, which is to treat Wang Ji's thought as a "text" that is in turn located, reflected, and refracted in the larger "texts" of the intellectual culture of the mid-late Ming period, or, to put it another way, the dynamic context of sixteenth-century Chinese intellectual history.

Chapter 2 examines Wang Ji's own take on the leitmotif of Wang Yangming's teachings: the notion of liangzhi, or innate knowledge of the good, which, according to the author, Yangming late in his life increasingly expounded in terms of its "non-being" (wu). Wang Ji's main contribution in transmitting his teacher's central idea is his articulation and elucidation of the "non-being" of liangzhi by way of the tropes of "emptiness" (kong), "nothingness" (wu), "vacuity" (xu ), and "stillness" (ji). In so doing, Wang asserts the fact that the "substance" or "quintessence" (ti) of liangzhi is "neither right nor wrong" (wushi wufei). However, this vigorous claim of liangzhi's transcendent nature, to the extent that it is beyond ordinary right and wrong (and, by extension, good and evil), by no means amounts to his denial of its "being" (you) in the ontological sense. What Wang wants to emphasize is liangzhi's supreme spontaneity in a phenomenological sense as it is brought to bear on daily actions, which are unfortunately often compelled and governed by the subjective, and hence relative, moral and ethical stances of the actors; or else, their actions are trammeled by stale conventions and stultifying protocols. The moral and knowing agent can only be truly moral and knowing if one's action transcends artificial and artful deliberation by realizing the knowledge of the good that naturally inheres in one's deepest being, so much so that one spontaneously and creatively responds to circumstances and expediencies.

Chapter 3 tackles this very question of the realization of the innate knowledge of the good to the utmost (zhi liangzhi) through effort (gongfu), which is a profound moral enterprise that begins with the...