Wang Yangming.
He sat in front of bamboo for seven days trying to investigate its principle as Zhu Xi seemed to instruct, made himself ill, and concluded the method was wrong: principle is in the mind, moral knowledge is innate, and knowing and acting are one thing rather than two. He also won wars, which his critics found difficult to argue with.
Wang Yangming is the great internal challenge to Zhu Xi and his philosophy begins from a documented failure. Instructed by Zhu Xi's programme to investigate things to extend knowledge, he and a friend attempted to investigate bamboo directly, sitting before it in search of its principle; the friend fell ill after three days and Wang after seven. He concluded that principle is not lodged in external objects awaiting discovery but is present in the mind, and developed from this the doctrines of innate moral knowing, liangzhi, and the unity of knowledge and action — the claim that to know something and not act on it is not to know it at all. Exiled to a remote post station in Guizhou after offending a eunuch, he had a decisive realisation there in 1508. He was also an unusually effective general and provincial administrator, which made his critics' charge of Chan Buddhist quietism awkward. His school became dominant in late Ming China and enormously influential in Japan, where Ōyōmei thought shaped a number of the samurai who made the Meiji Restoration.
The same ground, other faiths
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