The Life and the Thought of Pan Pingge 潘平格

This paper is a result of preliminary research on Pan Pingge, a thinker of the Ming-Qing era. I have previously published a number of papers dealing with the history of ideas in which the Ningbo area was the stage for the argument or the subject of analysis. Unlike thinkers analyzed in those papers, Pan Pingge can be characterized a figure who was banished from Ningbo. A representative critic of Pan was Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲. Some of Huang Zongxi's pupils were attracted to Pan Pingge, and thus incurred Huang-Zongxi's wrath. Some then abandoned Pan Pingge, but others carefully guarded and preserved his writings. The main points of Pan Pingge's thought can be captured in a single thread ; "fixing one's will" (立志), "melding into the other" (格通人我), and "recovering unity with the whole of creation" (渾然天地萬物一體). Pan Pingge believed that by the effort of sincerely settling "one's will and clarifying one's own brilliant virtue forward the world" (明明徳於天下) divisions between self and others could be dissolved, human beings could regain the original state of being and realize that all things of the world were a single entity. Pan Pingge also criticized the schools that emphasized "concentrating mind and body" (主敬) and "demonstrating natural moral capability" (致良知), that is the traditions of Zhuzi 朱子 and Yangming 陽明. This criticism was grounded upon a consistent logical denial of the way of understanding that saw the shining heart-and-mind as settled into an isolated body, because he thought that this understanding of heart-and-mind and body became an obstacle to the unity of the whole of creation. His argument for "sincerity" (眞心) was his strategic solution to this obstacle. Pan Pingge thought that everything of this world was connected and the proof of this connection had already been manifested, and "sincerity" was the manifestation of the proof. Huang Zongxi criticized Pan Pingge, arguing that his thought was "Zushi Chan" 祖師禪 because Huang Zongxi saw that the essence of Pan's thought was his "sincerity" theory. Although Pan Pingge offered neither a grand cosmology nor an argument for constructive policy, he simply provided a theory of self-development that demanded steady effort ; his "struggle" should been recognized, and the fact that he in many sense embodied a turning point in the history of ideas in early modern China deserves further elucidation