Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
In this age and society beset by all kinds of uncertainties that trouble people’s hearts, The Most Magical Philosophy of Mind of Wang Yangming is undoubtedly a timely and fitting piece of “chicken soup for the soul.” Many people need to rely on it to soothe or numb the emotional crises brought on by interpersonal and social relations; this is understandable. Of course, in the same age and society, the sense of distrust derived from such emotional crises also leads many people not to buy into this at all. Modern society is pluralistic or fragmented, but people’s hearts are indeed restless, unstable, and in need of comfort—this is our most basic sense of reality. Now, “chicken soup for the soul” may not be a good term, but its existence is, of course, reasonable. Human beings are emotional animals that think with feelings; where there is external “stimulation,” there is bound to be an inner “reaction.” A set of “reaction rules” for dealing with reality produced by experience, once universalized and theorized, may be the generative mechanism behind various kinds of “chicken soup for the soul.” Put this way, so-called philosophy, religion, ideology, and so on, from God’s perspective, would also have to be said to belong to the “chicken soup for the soul” category. No wonder that when man begins to think, God laughs. For in the face of clumsy, shoddily made “chicken soup for the soul,” the humans who created God have to laugh as well.
Having heard so many truths, one still cannot live this life well. This sense of reality makes us begin to doubt, reflect on, and pick apart whether so-called life wisdom and philosophies of dealing with the world are disguised, fraudulent spiritual anesthetics that in fact do not benefit real life. Confucius’s “see much and hear much” still requires “withhold judgment where there is doubt,” which is precisely the talk of one who knows the world. With this attitude to examine The Most Magical Philosophy of Mind of Wang Yangming, we have to say that this book, which uses the topic as a pretext to provide footnotes for Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind, is truly unsatisfactory. The words on the cover, “Original work by Wang Yangming, compiled and written by Luo Zhi,” and the promotional insinuation that “by grasping this book, you will henceforth gain wisdom and move toward success,” make one inevitably feel contempt for this spokesperson for Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind who lapses into bombast. After truly finishing this cobbled-together, vague, sheep’s-head-dog’s-meat book, we realize that this is not a philosophy-of-mind reading meant to help people “make their intentions sincere,” “awaken to the Way,” or “extend innate knowing.” It should be left to live and die on its own; it is not worth wasting ink on a review. But as Wang Yangming pointed out: “The great chaos under Heaven arises because empty writing flourishes while real practice declines.” If, five hundred years later, we still cannot view the intellectual legacy of the sages with modern eyes, and instead allow works of this third-rate sort to “inherit excellent traditional culture” in a satirical way, then not only will Wang Yangming’s aspiration to convey the Way and clarify the Way through writing be betrayed, but we in fact can hardly be said to have made progress.
First, we must have a sense of reality and recognize that Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind was “gained from hundreds of deaths and thousands of hardships,” not something that sprang forth out of nowhere. Stripping away the later deifying gloss, from the Chronological Biography in The Complete Works of Wang Yangming, we see that Wang Yangming had great ambitions from childhood, was enterprising, broad-minded, and quite quick-witted; he read widely, had solid reserves of knowledge, and was a talented person with prospects. Wang Yangming’s official career was generally smooth; at twenty-eight he “passed the metropolitan examination and became a presented scholar,” but he also experienced several life setbacks of considerable significance. In particular, at thirty-five, when he was full of ambition and “submitted a memorial,” he offended the powerful eunuch Liu Jin, was “thrown into the imperial prison,” flogged forty times, and banished to Longchang in Guizhou for three years in a political incident that changed his life; his philosophy of mind took shape from this. As pointed out at the beginning of this article, “stimulation—reaction” is the most basic psychological cognitive model of human beings; Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind is precisely a set of self-salvation theories he produced at the lowest point of his life in response to a sharp gap in reality. This theory has its sources: it is a kind of comprehensive inheritance of the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius, the Neo-Confucianism of the early Song, and Buddhist and Daoist teachings, with Confucian thought as its root. Yet at the same time it is strongly personal and originally meaningful, with a firm stance and clear propositions, giving people a sense of “striking out on a new path.” This is also why, as the Instructions for Practical Living says, at first “the whole world’s slanders and criticisms gathered in full” and “the traces of friends were still sparse.” But as Wang Yangming’s later military achievements grew ever more prominent, the philosophy-of-mind system he upheld throughout his life and continually refined correspondingly displayed and proved its own powerful and unique vitality. Along with factors such as his social status and the promotion by his high-ranking official disciples, his doctrine ultimately gained historical recognition, and he became “immortal” through “establishing merit,” “establishing words,” and “establishing virtue.” Wang Yangming’s tremendous success in life and after death convincingly proves the rationality of his philosophy of mind, but to some extent it also caused a historical misunderstanding, leading later utilitarians to opportunistically believe that the philosophy of mind was the reason Wang Yangming succeeded, and that reading philosophy of mind would help one “gain wisdom and move toward success”—which is as laughable as thinking that reading physiology would help digestion. Wang Yangming repeatedly stated, “There has never been one who knows but does not act; if one knows and does not act, it is simply because one does not truly know,” emphasizing the practical character of his philosophy of mind. This life view of “the unity of knowledge and action” can be regarded as a pragmatic life creed with a sense of reality: it blends learning and life into one, integrates theory and practice, and does not engage in empty talk about which comes first or which is better or worse; it is the most humble and self-aware. But everyone is a unique individual with unique life experiences. Taking the fluke mentality of copying others’ success as an antidote to emotional crisis is probably “using effort in the wrong way.” Only this practical spirit of “the unity of knowledge and action,” however, can run through everything consistently—life is always walked out by oneself.
Second, Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind is essentially an ethical doctrine, concerning the ways of the world and the human heart. It attempts, through the personal cultivation pursuit of “extending innate knowing” and “becoming a sage,” to reach the ultimate goal of unceasing sagely learning and social harmony, embodying the traditional Confucian literati’s cosmic compassion of regarding the people as kin and all things as one body, and the sense of social responsibility to aid the world. Wang Yangming said: “I truly relied on Heaven’s numinous aid, and by chance gained some insight into the learning of innate knowing, believing that only by this could the world be governed… The people of the world, seeing it thus, then together mocked and slandered it, taking it to be merely the ravings of a sick and deranged person… The people of the world are all my heart; among the people of the world there are still those who are sick and deranged—how could I then deny the sick and deranged?” This is the best example. Therefore, he unhesitatingly and with a “if not me, then who?” attitude took himself to be the orthodox succession of the Way after Confucius and Mencius, directly “continuing the lost learning for the past sages.” His claim that “My writing of Zhu Xi’s Late-Year Settled Conclusions was also something I could not avoid. The exact years early or late in the middle I have indeed not fully verified; though it need not all come from the late years, it is indeed mostly from the late years,” is merely another version a thousand years later of Mencius’s “Do I delight in disputation? I am compelled to,” that is, what is called “reforming institutions under the guise of antiquity.” What we must see is that as personal daily cultivation, although the traditional scholar-official’s cosmic compassion of regarding the people as kin and all things as one body—or say, moral superiority—need not exist and perhaps should not exist, in today’s atomized society, the sense of social responsibility to aid the world is necessary. This is because humans are social beings: the sound development of an individual depends on the healthy development of the whole society; cultivating oneself alone is impossible. Qu Yuan’s “standing alone and not shifting” kind of independent personality is not a problem, but his “alone without a match” kind of isolated personality led to his own disillusionment; Rousseau, who broke with society, ultimately died of mental illness, and only before death, in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, did he realize that “I can only feel happy when everyone is happy.” Jung has the famous formula “I+We=Fully I” (I + We = fully I), which may be the best contemporary annotation of regarding the people as kin and all things as one body, not without the flavor of Kantian ethics’ categorical imperative within it. This is also where the real significance of Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind lies in today’s society.
Finally, the core idea and fundamental purpose of Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind lies in “extending innate knowing,” and the basic method to achieve this purpose can be explained with “What to think, what to worry; neither force it nor forget it.” “What to think, what to worry” is not “think nothing, worry nothing,” but that what one thinks and worries about is only one thing: “innate knowing” (“heavenly principle”). And “neither force it nor forget it” means that “extending innate knowing” is a consciously pursued, daily process; this process proceeds step by step, and one can neither pull up the sprouts to help them grow, doing it deliberately, nor be half-hearted and give up halfway. And the highest realm of this pursuit accords with human nature and also accords with nature (“mind is principle”). Wang Yangming’s theoretical presupposition is that “there is no nature that is not good, therefore there is no knowing that is not good,” and that “in each person’s chest there is a sage.” But because of society’s obscuring, or because of one’s own “lack of confidence,” one buries that sage in one’s chest “all by oneself.” As for the sage, he “exhausts the mind, knows nature, knows Heaven, knows by birth and acts with ease,” reaching without pursuit the highest realm said above of accord with human nature and with nature, and at the same time proving that this realm is something humans are born already endowed with, accordant with human nature and with nature. This doctrine of Wang Yangming, not without a metaphysical and mystical color, for the present, has the meaning of pointing out to readers that life is an active process of pursuing truth, continually “disenchanting,” and continually doing subtraction, rather than adding ornament upon tasks, troubling oneself like a mediocre person, and muddling along in “busy when there are affairs, busy even when there are no affairs.” Only thus can life become “vastly open and impartial; when things come, respond in accord,” so that no matter how complex and chaotic the world is, I can handle it with ease without being burdened by things, actively engage the world without passively escaping, and no emotional crisis is enough to injure me with nihilism. This kind of cultivation, akin to minimalism, of course requires a lifetime of resolute and focused pursuit, pursuing the maximization of self-realization. This can also be called “the unity of knowledge and action.”
In sum, the outline-style comments above merely show readers the basic attitude that one ought to have when reading Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind: a sense of reality, and self-knowledge. As for what Wang Yangming’s philosophy-of-mind theory is really like, this is not something that can be clearly understood by reading this piece of writing and that book The Most Magical Philosophy of Mind of Wang Yangming; the key is to read the original works.
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