ABSTRACT

Chinese classical scholarship was the ruling doctrine of the Chinese Middle Ages. Yangming scholarship had a similar revival in early modern China. Chinese intellectual circles adopted the Japanese practice and gave the name Yangming scholarship to the school of Ming neo-Confucianism associated with Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming. A considerable number of the well-known progressive scholars of the time made the surprising conclusion that this strength came from Yangming scholarship. “The scholars who engineered the restoration of the emperor and the overthrow of the shogunate were all deeply versed in Yangming scholarship, and were not necessarily familiar with Western law at all.” The Wang scholarship that emerged in the early sixteenth century was a new force within neo-Confucianism that opposed the theories of Zhu Xi. In the late Qing a Song neo-Confucian named Zhu Ciqi emerged from the very home village of the pioneer of Wang scholarship in the Ming period, Chen Xianzhang.