Wild Fox Confucianism: Obscuration (Bi 蔽), Self-Certification, and the Problem of Discernment in Late Ming Confucian Religiosity

Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) held that innate moral knowing (liangzhi 良知) knows every concern that arises, yet a person can obscure it, so that “though he may be said to know, he still does not know.” Studies of this puzzle have explained how liangzhi detects self-deception. I take up a harder question, asked by Wang’s student Ouyang De 歐陽德, who feared that a person might “take the thief for one’s son.” Even if liangzhi never errs, a person’s claim to speak from it can be wrong, and his certainty cannot settle the matter. Authenticating such a claim is a religious problem of discernment, distinct from the philosophical problem of self-deception and from the assessment of conduct. Chan Buddhism met it with the master’s seal, which gave another person standing to judge such a claim, a standing I call adjudicative externality. Wang’s teaching made room for such checks, but in the “ready-made liangzhi” of Wang Ji 王畿 a claim to awakening could become a claim to be beyond correction, which late Ming critics called kuangchan 狂禪. Ledgers of merit, and the societies that reviewed them, met this danger without certifying anyone’s awakening. Whatever a person claimed to have realized, his acts remained on the record.