Wang Yangming 1472 – 1529

Wang Yangming was a 15th and early 16th-century Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher, statesman, and military general of the Ming dynasty, the most influential Confucian thinker of the late imperial era. Against the dominant Cheng-Zhu interpretation of Confucianism, which emphasised the investigation of external things, he developed an idealist Confucianism centred on the doctrines of innate moral knowledge and the unity of knowledge and action. He held that genuine moral knowledge necessarily issues in moral action, and that the search for the principle of things is a search within the mind itself. His Instructions for Practical Living records his teaching in dialogue form. His thought decisively shaped late imperial Chinese, Korean, and especially Japanese intellectual life through the early 20th century.