From “Xu and Qi Are Inseparable” to “the Unity of Knowledge and Action”

In Chinese culture, “the unity of Heaven and Human” is the highest pursuit. However, it’s connotations are different in every times. For example, in the new established stage of Neo Confucianism, the unity of Heaven and Human is the unity of nature and reality, and reflected in the combination and unity of Zhang Zai’s ontology and cosmology that represented by Xu (“虚”) and Qi (“气”) are inseparable, then the ontological cosmology of Neo Confucianism was established. In the era of Zhu Tzu, the unity of Heaven and Human was characterized by the inseparability of Li (“理”) and Qi are neither too familiar nor too distant. However, the two categories of “what is the reason why” and “what it should be” have different emphasis that meant treasuring one’s innate virtues and accumulating one’s knowledge, ontology of Li and cosmology of Qi were divided. Until Wang Yangming analysed the phenomenon of the common internal and external antinomy between officialdom and academia, and discovered the root that knowledge and action are two things. Therefore, he started from the “unity of knowledge and practice” of the one of body and mind, and completed the structure from knowledge and action to body and mind, subject and object, including the original and the real world by the intuitive knowledge. Nevertheless, starting from Luo Qinshun, who criticized Cheng-zhu school for failing to “one is conformed”, he started from the inseparable characteristics of Li and Qi, insisting the theory of Qi. In this way, the philosophy of the mind and the Qi are not only two different trends of the pursuit of the unity of Heaven and Human in Chinese culture, but also represent the dual resources in the pursuit of modernization of the Chinese nation.