Negotiating orthodoxy: Wang Shouren's Buddhist and Daoist engagements in the making and reception of a Confucian identity

Abstract

This thesis re-examines the Ming Confucian Wang Shouren, better known as Wang Yangming (1472–1529), through the twin lenses of self-presentation and reception history. It shows how his recorded encounters with Buddhism and Daoism served—first as retrospective narratives in his own writings, later as malleable evidence for Ming–Qing interpreters—to construct, contest, and perpetually renegotiate a Confucian identity. The argument unfolds in three interlocking movements. Self-presenting: close readings of official memorials, prefaces, letters, and recorded dialogues reveal Wang staging his “detours” through non-Confucian teachings to claim the authority of one who has tested, transcended, and thus validated the Confucian Way. Engaging: drawing on disciples’ notes to corroborate these claims, the study reconstructs Wang’s evolving engagement with non-Confucian traditions—from exploratory syncretism to a hierarchical model that treats Buddhism and Daoism as provisional aids rather than rivals. Being received: a survey of Ming–Qing biographies and polemics shows later scholars selectively quoting, omitting, and re-ordering his life to advance their own doctrinal and political agendas. Methodologically, the thesis models a “negative-definitional” approach: it clarifies Confucian identity by tracing the boundaries negotiated with rival traditions. More broadly, it offers a framework for analysing intellectual identity as a historically contingent process shaped by self-articulation and external reinterpretation. Substantively, it reintroduces Wang not as a fixed exemplar of syncretism or orthodoxy but as a mobile site of doctrinal contestation—one whose meaning was, and remains, produced in the very act of being read.