“The Dao Has Long Not Been Unified”: A Discussion of Wang An-Shih’s Discourse on “Unifying the Dao”

Although Neo - Confucians often criticized Wang An - Shih, saying that he "did not know the Dao," in this paper I present three ways in which we can see that Wang had his own highly developed concept of the Dao. First, in terms of his fundamental thought, Wang advocated "unifying the Dao". Due to his own highly practical character, even though he recognized both the Dao of Heaven and the Dao of Man, he emphasized the Dao of Man. But his final ideal was to completely unify the Dao of Heaven and the Dao of Man, as well as unifying Dao and Chi ( 器 ). For example, he transformed Lao-Tsu's concept of "inaction" ( 無為 ) into a Dao -shu ( 道術 ) theory of "composed inaction", which could arise after willful action. This example also shows Wang's strength at combining and transforming schools other than Confucianism. Secondly, Wang considered that "the Dao is now not unified," and he advocated setting up a society based on "unified Dao", proposing two ways of setting it up. One way was that the government should develop an educational system to unify literati values to eradicate the disorder of people's individual values. The other was by calling upon literati to study not only the Confucian classics, but to unify the Dao through widespread study of other schools and grasping experiential reality. This shows that Wang's conservative notion of "unified values" also had a positive and open character. Thirdly, Wang's theory of "unified Dao" was apparently to compete with the theory of "transmited Dao," which had become increasingly popular since its promulgation by Han - Yu. Wang believed that "Dao had been divided" and not that "Dao had been lost in its transmission". Thus, he did not stress the lineage of "transmission of the Dao" but advocated broad study of all schools, including Buddhism and Daoism. As a basic theory of hsin hsueh ( 新學 ), the aim of Wang's discourse of Dao is totally different from the Ch'eng Brothers' discourse on Dao. In fact, one of the reasons that Ch'eng Yi advocated the theory of "transmission of the Dao" was to establish the Ch'eng brothers thought as orthodox Confucianism, displacing the hsin hsueh of Wang from its preeminent position. Subsequently, with the flourishing of Neo -Confucianism, Wang An-shih's theory of "unifying the Dao" was neglected.