Thinkers Timeline

Zhu Xi was a Chinese philosopher, teacher, and government official of the Southern Song dynasty. He was born on 18 October 1130 in Youxi, in Fujian province. His father was a minor official who lost his job shortly before Zhu Xi was born. The family was not rich, but his father valued education and taught his son the Confucian classics. Zhu Xi was a gifted student. He passed the highest civil service exam, called the jinshi, at age eighteen. Most people who passed this exam did so around age thirty-five. As a young man, he studied Buddhism and Daoism as well as Confucianism. In his late twenties he met a teacher named Li Tong, who convinced him to commit fully to Confucianism. Li Tong came from a new wave of Chinese thinkers called the Neo-Confucians. Zhu Xi absorbed their ideas and went much further, producing a grand philosophical system that would shape Chinese thought for centuries. He held government posts only for about nine years in total. He preferred teaching and writing. He rebuilt and taught at the famous White Deer Hollow Academy. He edited and wrote commentaries on classical texts. His sharp criticism of corrupt officials earned him enemies. In 1196, his opponents attacked his teachings as 'false learning' and stripped him of his posts. He died on 23 April 1200, aged 69, still in political disgrace. Several thousand people braved official disapproval to attend his funeral. Within a few decades of his death, his teachings were rehabilitated. They then became the official philosophy of China for more than 600 years.

Wang Yangming was a Chinese philosopher, scholar, and military general. He is one of the most important Confucian thinkers of the second millennium CE. His ideas about knowledge, action, and the human mind shaped Chinese, Japanese, and Korean thought for centuries. He was born in 1472 in what is now Zhejiang province, in eastern China. He died in 1529, aged 56. His full name was Wang Shouren. 'Yangming' is a name he later took from a place where he lived for some years. He came from a scholarly family. His father had passed the highest level of the imperial civil service examinations. Wang Yangming was clever from childhood. He passed the highest examinations himself in 1499. For most of his career he served as an official in the Ming dynasty government. He was sometimes successful, sometimes in trouble. In 1506 he protested against a corrupt eunuch official at court. He was beaten with bamboo rods and exiled to a remote post in southwestern China. The exile lasted three years. During this time, in a bamboo hut in the mountains, he had what is sometimes called his philosophical awakening. He understood, he said later, that the principles of right action were already inside the human mind. They did not need to be sought outside, in books or in the external world. After his return from exile, he continued government service. He became a respected military commander. He put down major rebellions in the Ming Empire. Despite this success, he had political enemies. He was repeatedly given difficult assignments and then attacked when they were not perfectly resolved. He died in 1529 from illness, far from home, on his way back from another military campaign. His philosophy survived him and reshaped East Asian thought.