Research On The Ming Confucian Cai Runan’s Mind Thought

Cai Runan was a famous scholar of the mind in the middle and late Ming dynasty.He devoted his whole life to learning and aspired to Confucius and Mencius.He believed that our study was self-sufficient,by aspiring to morality and purely using of virtue in the daily life of human relations could enable themselves self-fulfilling.Therefore,the essence of his study was to put the theory of self-cultivation into practice.However,at that time,in the process of implementing the core of this theory,there were many disadvantages of deviation in the academic circle,such as: the prevalence of utilitarianism,Confucianism was heavily infected by the thoughts of Buddhism and Taoism,the dichotomy of neo-confucianism and the existence of the fragmentation of the outside,the study of mind was partial to the interior,with the disadvantages of sublimity and emptiness,and neglecting material affairs and so on,so that the holy meaning was unclear,the holy learning was gradually far away,the road was not.In the analysis and understanding of neo-confucianism and the philosophy of the mind,he didn’t stick to the opinions of every family,reconciled and compromised the theories of various schools,mended the partial and saved the disadvantages,reformed from the bottom and then returned to Confucius and Mencius.In this process,Runan gradually formed three theory characteristics,including a theoretical orientation of "learning to save the disadvantages",a learning method of advocating "unity",and a theoretical feature of combining Zhan Ganquan’s theory and Wang Yangming’s theory which were inseparable,jointly contributed to the Runan’s mind thought’s formation,whose feature was that On the ontology,it advocated the unity of mind and matter,both essence and end,and on the theory of moral cultivation,it advocated the unity of body and the use,which the former came first and the latter came later in terms of timing.The value of Runan’s thought of mind is mainly reflected in two aspects: first,as one of the representatives of Ganquan’s later theory,he not only inherited Ganquan’s theory,but also made a reasonable transformation which developed Ganquan’s theory;second,While absorbing and drawing lessons from the study of yangming,he made a reasonable discrimination and clarification of the defects of deviation in the later study of yangming,and spontaneously maintained the positive study of Confucius and mencius and promoted the development of mind study.Starting from the life background and works of Cai Runan,this paper explores the specific contents of his mind thought,analyzes the internal logic of his mind thought,and makes a brief positioning and evaluation of the value contribution of his mind thought.