王阳明 · Wang Yangming

Wang Yangming (1472–1529) is the figure who split Neo-Confucianism. Where Zhu Xi held that moral knowledge comes through investigating external things (格物 — study the world to find the pattern), Wang argued the opposite: that moral knowledge is innate in the mind (心), and the task is not to acquire it but to recover it by stripping away the obscuration of selfish desire. His most famous doctrine is 知行合一 (the unity of knowledge and action): to truly know the good is already to do it, and the gap between knowing and doing reveals that what you call knowledge is not yet real. The two schools — 程朱理学 (school of principle) and 阳明心学 (school of mind) — define the Song-Ming philosophical rivalry, the way Xunzi vs. Mencius defines the classical one. His recorded conversations are gathered in the Chuanxi Lu (传习录, Instructions for Practical Living). Reserved placeholder: the Chinese text exists on ctext.org but is not yet ingested.