<B>Greetings Louis,
I hope you’ll share some information about the writings of Ming dynasty thinkers you found.
</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Greetings Yuri,
Outside of the Yang Forty Chapters use of “conscious movement,” I first came upon the term zhijue yundong a few years ago when I was reading a book about the late Ming thinker, Wang Fuzhi, in a book by Alison Harley Black, _Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-chih_ (1989, University of Washington Press). Wang Fuzhi was a very advanced thinker. Although he was grounded in the Neo-Confucian tradition from the Song and Ming periods, he was in many respects quite innovative and iconoclastic. His thought was empirical, rational, and down-to-earth; some say he helped lay the groundwork for modern Chinese materialist thinking. Black keys in on a phrase Wang Fuzhi used in a commentary he wrote on Mengzi: zhijue yundong zhi lingming “the light of ordinary intelligence.” Black states, “The phrase translated as ‘ordinary intelligence’ [zhijue yundong] is repeatedly used by Wang Fuzhi to denote the mind’s basic powers of perception and ‘movement.’ It [the larger phrase] literally means something like ‘clarity or efficacy of the activities of knowledge and awareness,’ that is, of the basic or ordinary cognitive activities characteristic of all knowing creatures. . . .” (p. 195)
When I first encountered this, I immediately thought of its recurrence in the Yang Forty, and wondered if Wang had been the source of the idea as used by the Yang Forty author. However, Wang’s vast writings remained unpublished until the mid-1800s, so it is unlikely they would have been available to the author of the Yang Forty.
More recently, I discovered that the Song Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi (1130-1200) also used the phrase zhijue yundong in his own commentary to Mengzi. In what context did Zhu Xi use the zhijue yundong phrase? It was his commentary on Mengzi 6A, containing a debate between Mengzi and a fellow named Gaozi, in which Mengzi basically shreds Gaozi’s view of human nature using brilliant logic. Without getting into the whole dynamic of the debate, I’ll just say it’s about what in modern sociological terms may be termed “nature vs. nurture”—what is inherent in human nature, what is the role of environment, educational guidance, etc. Zhu Xi uses the phrase zhijue yondong several times. For example, when Gaozi states: “Life is what we call nature,” Zhu Xi comments, ‘“Life” refers to that by which a person senses and moves (zhijue yundong). In all of Gaozi’s theory of human nature, this is his main point. It is somewhat similar to present day Buddhists’ assertion that “actions are life.”’ I’m not very certain of this last phrase (zuoyong shi xing zhe), zuoyong being “actions, use, process, function,” etc, but here it is evidently a special Buddhist term.
Whatever the intricacies of the argument, I think there is substantial evidence that Zhu Xi may have been the source of inspiration for the use of the “conscious movement” phrase in the Yang Forty Chapters. Adding to that evidence is the presence of other terminology in the Yang documents (and other taiji classics) that appear to have been directly borrowed from Zhu Xi, and the fact that Zhu Xi’s use of the phrase appears in a commentary to a debate about innate human capabilities—the very subject of Yang Forty text #3, which discusses “natural endowment” and the need for its recovery through attention to “conscious movement.”
Take care,
Louis