waves of oppositional Neo-Confucians, Wang and his followers attacked the
standard of literary compositions and rote memorization. Wang drew the
inference from his philosophy that knowledge is identical with action; this was
turned into an attack on scholasticism: “Learning before they can act, they
never get to the end of it” (Chan, 1963: 678). Yet although Wang held that
the grind of examination study was incompatible with sagehood, he regarded
it as a necessary step for an official career, which would allow one to put one’s
ideals into action (Tu, 1976: 131). Wang’s idealism constitutes not so much a
cosmology as a pragmatism identifying moral ideals with the process of putting
them into effect. His philosophy glorifies intellectual activity outside the ex-
amination life, since truly experiencing moral ideas is already a form of action;
it also exalts action, thereby legitimating politics. Again opposition shapes the
line along which creativity emerges. Since the official philosophy tended toward
a secular and materialist rationalism, Wang Yang-ming turned toward subjec-
tivity and intuition.
Wang Yang-ming’s disciples became a quasi-religious movement, making
his philosophy the most popular in China during the next century. While the
Ch’eng-Chu rationalist Neo-Confucians remained dominant in the official
examination system, Wang Yang-ming’s idealist pragmatism was supported by
an underground, including secret societies gathered for political as well as
spiritual purposes. During the generation of Wang Yang-ming’s immediate
followers, there continued to be philosophical developments, following the
familiar path of splits into rival schools after his death. As the movement
became absorbed into politics, lay concerns again prevailed, and intellectual
creativity along this line came to an end. We will not follow the further
developments of Chinese philosophy, including the repudiation of Neo-Confu-
cian metaphysics in the late 1600s and 1700s, which shifted intellectual activity
toward materialism and historical scholarship in a purely secular vein.The Weak Continuity of Chinese Metaphysics
The idealism formulated by Lu Chiu-Yüan and Wang Yang-ming is an unusual
development within Chinese philosophy; the only truly comparable instance is
the Consciousness-Only doctrine of the mid-T’ang, a Buddhist philosophy
insulated from non-Buddhist thought. This absence of idealism is connected
more with the halting continuity of philosophical abstraction than with a
deep-rooted cultural trait. Idealism is never an early form but a sophisticated
philosophical construction. A halfway house between revealed religion and
rationalistic philosophy, idealism is couched at a level of abstraction which can
be attained only through a long cumulative development of an intellectual
network refining its concepts. The heyday of idealist philosophies in the Greek316 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths