Abstract

Chan Kan-ch'uan was a leading Neo-Confucian thinker in the Ming dynasty with a wide following on both the personal and the institutional level. He actively participated in the philosophical debate of the mid-Ming and had intimate ties with Ch'en Hsien-chang and Wang Yang-ming , the two "fountainheads" of Ming thought. ;He was a principal disciple of Ch'en, and his philosophy, though directly inspired by Ch'en, was more deliberate and rigorous in its formulation and presentation. His twenty-four year relationship with Wang best exemplifies the coherency that existed within the divergent tendencies of the Neo-Confusian tradition. They maintained a close friendship in spite of doctrinal differences and a highly publicized debate on the issue of the investigation of things . ;The present study uses the ko-wu debate as a means of probing the sources from which Chan and Wang derived their separate visions. The theoretical basis of this approach resonates with Ch'eng I's famous aphorism, "Principle is one; its particularizations are diverse." The two philosophies are presented as two paths of arriving at the same end of "forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and all things." ;Beyond the comparative effort, this work attempts to develop a context within which Chan's concept of the all-embracing mind and his formulation of the principle of Heaven can be understood in their own terms. An examination of Chan's intellectual antecedents confirms the fact that he continued that line of Confucianism which took spontaneity as its underlying theme. ;An annotated English translation of selections from the Chan Kan-ch'uan hsien-hseng wen-chi makes up the Appendix. The pieces, chosen on the basis of their philosophical significance, include sixteen letters to friends and disciples and exerpts from the Recorded Questions and Answers of the Hsin-ch'uan Academy, as well as the short treatise An Explanation of the Diagram of Mind and Nature. They are found, respectively, in chuan 7, chuan 8, and chuan 26 of the 1580 edition of Chan's Wen-chi