Reseach Of Huang Wan’s Thoughts

Huang Wan(1480-1554), a member of Yangming School in the middle of Zhejiang province, is a rather controversial figure. In his early years he learnt firstly from Xie Duo, focusing on the Neo-Confucianism’s "restrain self and remove private lusts". Several years later, he learnt from Yangming School, and Wang Yangming became both his teacher and friend. Huang Wan and Wang Yangming became friends in1510when they met each other for the first time, in1522Huang Wan became Wang Yangming’s student officially, but in his later years, he is discontented with the late stage of Yangming School which is too similar to Zen, especially those theories which were advocated by Wang Ji etc., Huang Wan believed that this is neither consistent with Confucianism nor with Yangming School itself. Huang Wan noticed early about the disadvantage of zening(禅化)Yangming School, he also tried to correct it with " Gen Zhi and hold the mean "(艮止执中).So Huang Wan’s thought have unique value for studing Yangming School.Firstly, this dissertation makes a brief introduction of Huang Wan’s life, and discover Huang Wan’s characters, retrospect to his life time, the big history events in his life. As to Huang wan’s thought, this dissertation focuses on his theories of "self-perception","innate knowledge","using the knowledge you have to study natural phenomena ","Gen Zhi and hold the mean","confucian orthodoxy " etc., analyses the main source, threads and core of Huang Wan’s thought according to the history and social background, and also tries to discover the characters of his academic thought, the social problem his was faced, and his expectation for Ming Dynasty’s academy. This dissertation also makes comparative studies with Wang Ji’s thought in order to reveal the contents and characters of Huang Wan’s thought, and the influence and role of Huang Wan’s thought in the middle of Ming Dynasty’s Confucianism.Generally, Huang Wan use his theories of "self-perception","innate knowledge"to explain the ontology of Yangming School in his early time, and emphasize how exactly the ontology of innate knowledge implement on specific individual. In his late stage, Huang Wan focused on the elucidation of "Gen Zhi and hold the mean", he use "Gen Zhi and hold the mean" to refer to the ontology of innate knowledge. He thought the place of "Gen Zhi" was "spirit (Qiao)" in the Mind, and "Gen Zhi" was the keynote of Confucian orthodoxy. On the theory of moral effort, Huang Wan made a very creative synthesis and reconstruction of the Neo-Confucianism’s theory of moral effort and Yamgming’s theoty of "investigating things to extend knowledge". He expounded a quite new theory of investigating things to extend knowledge which is different from both Yangming School and the Neo-Confucianism. His purpose was to overcome the problem that the late stage of Yangming School Yangming emphasized too much on ontology and underestimated the moral effort. Based on his theory of "self-perception" and "Gen Zhi", Huang Wan attempted to reconstruct this concept of Confucianism both from the aspects of ontology and moral effort. Therefore, we believe that Huang Wan’s doctrines attribute to Yangming School. In a sense, his criticisms on Yangming, especially on the late stage of Yangming, actually maintained Yangming School.