Scholars › Philosopher / Thinker
Wang Ji
Ming disciple of Wang Yangming from Shanyin who argued the 'four negations' at the Tianquan Bridge debate and spent four decades lecturing on his teacher's learning
Mural of the event “Wang Yangming's Mind-Learning”, which this person took part in.
By mid Ming the Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism had increasingly ossified into an examination tool, and the literati grew daily skeptical of the outward-seeking Way of investigating-things. Wang Yangming, exiled to Longchang Station in Guizhou, fell into spiritual anguish and urgently sought a new path for Confucianism.
Also known as Zi Ruzhong · Hao Longxi
Wang Ji, courtesy name Ruzhong, sobriquet Longxi, came from Shanyin in Zhejiang. Having passed the metropolitan examination in 1526, he skipped the palace examination and went home to study with Wang Shouren (Wang Yangming), helping to guide newcomers to the school. In 1527, on the eve of Wang Shouren's campaign to Sitian, the master heard him debate the 'four-sentence teaching' with Qian Dehong on the Tianquan Bridge: Wang Ji held that mind, intention, knowledge and things are all beyond good and evil, the so-called four negations. He gained the jinshi degree in 1532 and became a director in the Nanjing Ministry of War, but resigned after the grand secretary Xia Yan denounced his teaching as false learning. He then lectured across Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Nanzhili for over forty years and died in 1583 at eighty-six. Huang Zongxi's *Records of Ming Scholars* (*Mingru xue'an*) lists him among the Zhejiang followers of Wang.
Life and times
Dates 1498 CE–1583 CE
- 1508Wang Yangming's Mind-LearningTook partage 10