Portrait · Knowledge · 1508 / later teachings
Plate · Generated interpretation
The Street Is Full of Sages
A Ming official, after a night of failure at bamboo, turns the search for principle inward. Knowing, he later says, is already a kind of doing.
- Jiangxi, and later on the page from remaining works
- Ming China
Do not decide yet whether the bamboo is an object or a teacher.
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
In 1508, during exile at Longchang, Wang Yangming (Wang Shouren) records a turn: li, principle, is not to be sought as an object out there in the bamboo. Liangzhi, innate knowing, is already present. Later he teaches zhi xing he yi: knowledge and action are one. The bamboo story is told in later records of his teaching. Treat it as tradition’s scene, not a laboratory notebook.
Wing-tsit Chan, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings (Columbia, 1963). Chuanxi lu is a record, not a modern memoir.
This is not “look inside, the universe is you” as a poster. It is a claim in Neo-Confucian argument about where li is to be sought, after Zhu Xi’s investigation of things. The street is full of sages, in one of the sayings, because the knowing is not a rare substance.
English “intuition” is a poor host for liangzhi. Conscience is closer and still wrong. The term is doing Chinese work.
Whether a knowing that is already doing can fail, and what that failure is, is the ethical remainder.
A word
liangzhi
Chinese. Often rendered innate knowing. Not a synonym for intuition or for consciousness.
Distant echoes
Counterpoint
Early modern Europe · A stove-heated room in Germany, later on the page from the Netherlands
Beside the stove
Descartes subtracts until a thinking remains. Wang refuses to treat principle as an outer object that thinking then finds.
One question remains
Knowledge · What counts as knowing?
If knowing and doing are one, what name is left for the nights when they come apart?