Hunan scholar who raised troops against the Qing and served the Southern Ming Yongli court, then spent decades in mountain seclusion writing on the classics and history
Mural guide
A thatched pavilion open on three sides stands among tall bamboo; one person sits with their back turned at the veranda rail beside a zither and a stack of bamboo slips, while a stone path runs to a calm pond reflecting clouds and distant hills.
Wang Fuzhi, courtesy name Ernong, came from Hengyang in Hunan; because he spent his last years beneath Stone Boat Mountain he became known as Master Chuanshan. He passed the provincial examination in 1642. When Qing forces entered Hunan he raised troops at Hengshan in 1648, then joined the Southern Ming court of the Yongli Emperor, but factional strife nearly cost him his life and he went home. After years moving between refuges in southern Hunan he settled in a thatched study at the foot of the mountain and wrote for the rest of his life. His works include an Outer Commentary on the Changes (Zhouyi waizhuan), a commentary on Zhang Zai, and the historical essays Reading the Comprehensive Mirror (Du Tongjian lun) and On the Song (Song lun); he argued that principle exists only within qi. He died early in 1692 with most of his writings unpublished, and they became widely read only after Zeng Guofan and Zeng Guoquan printed his collected works in Nanjing in 1865.
Wang Fuzhi approached learning by taking the Han Confucians as the gate and the five Song masters as the inner hall. His Daxue yan and Zhongyong yan both strongly rejected the doctrine of realizing innate knowing, in support of Zhu Xi, and he felt a special affinity with Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng. His writings ran to 320 chapters, and only when Zeng Guoquan printed them in Jiangnan in the second year of Tongzhi did scholars elsewhere see the complete works.
Ming
Qing
Literature · Prose