Abstract:
The essence of moral enlightening is to instruct people to do good rather than evil. Confucianism divided this object into theorizing the origin of evil and ridding oneself of evil in practice. Wang Yangming took the Qi as the presentation of the Character, totally giving up the rationalist view that the Character is the origin of evil, thus theoretically denying the origin of evil. Moreovrer, he also introduced the view of depending upon the good Conscience and thus debased the separate identity of effort of ridding oneself of evil, inevitably leading to an overall crisis of Confucianist moral enlightening.
