Study On Wang Yangming’s Concept Of Ghosts And Gods

For Confucianism,the problem of ghosts and gods is related to life and death,belief and other major philosophical issues,which are the fields that Confucian scholars have to face.The religionization of Confucianism in the Last Yangming School has gradually become a recognized fact in the academic circle.The reason lies in the subjectivism and individuation of conscience.Later Confucians have no reference on the high ground of pursuing conscience and need to borrow ghosts and gods again to urge the realization of moral practice.Wang Yangming’s view of ghosts and gods wasn’t proposed without ground.On the one hand,it inherited Confucius and Mencius’ s views on ghosts and gods,on the other hand,it absorbed and accommodated the officially recognized Neoconfucianism and the doctrines of Buddhism and Taoism at that time,and finally cleverly integrated the ghosts and gods with the conscience theory of the mind.Last Yangming School inherited Wang Yangming’s thought of ghosts and gods in the process of the democratization of Confucianism and used it as the ideological basis of the movement to persuade goodness.In addition,during the gradual maturation of science,people’s worship of ancestors’ ghosts and gods still exists,which embodies people’s deep emotion for their families and relatives.The rational attitude in Wang Yangming’s view of ghosts and gods has important implications for the worship of ghosts and gods in modern society.Therefore,this paper will take the Wang Yangming’s all works as the main historical data,synthesize the research status of the Confucian view of ghosts and gods in the Ming and Qing dynasties and the research results of Wang Yangming’s mind,analyze and sort out Wang Yangming’s discussion on the concept of ghosts and gods,to explore the mind connotation of Wang Yangming’s view of ghosts and gods.The first part mainly explores the theoretical origin of Wang Yangming’s view of ghosts and gods by the humanistic characteristics of pre-Qin,the rational characteristics of ghosts and spirits in Song Dynasty and the thoughts of Buddhism,Taoism and ghosts and gods in Ming Dynasty.The second part mainly analyzes the theoretical construction of Wang Yangming’s concept of ghosts and gods,including the elucidation of the concept of ghosts and gods,and the attitude and stance towards ghosts and gods.The third part demonstrates the application of Wang Yangming’s concept of ghosts and gods in practice from three aspects: the goal,the way and the characteristics of the concept.The fourth part starts with the influence of Wang Yangming’s ghosts and gods concept on his disciples and later generations,and analyzes the influence of Wang Yangming’s ghosts and gods concept on Yangming Scholars,the movement of advising goodness and the sacrificial tradition in the new era.