WANG FU-CHIH

(7 OCTOBER 1619–18 FEBRUARY 1692)¹

Wang Fu-chih (Erh-nung; CHIANG-CHAI, CH’UAN-SHAN, YI-HU TAO-JEN, and HSI-T’ANG)— a classical scholar, philosopher, literary critic, anthologist, and poet—was a native of Heng-yang, Hunan province. Both his father, Wang Ch’ao-p’in (1570–1647), and an elder brother had achieved fame as scholars, and Wang Fu-chih followed in that tradition. He passed the provincial examination in 1642, but rapidly changing political conditions prevented his taking the final degree. When the Ming fell to the rebel armies of Li Tzu-ch’eng, he fled from Peking with his father. An ardent patriot, he joined the loyalist forces opposing the Manchu conquest, but the factionalism which plagued the southern Ming courts ultimately caused him to return to private life. For the next forty years, he secluded himself in his native place, where he cut himself off from national politics and devoted himself to his many scholarly pursuits. He was a prodigiously productive scholar and writer, but he had little influence on his own times, owing to the fact that most of his writings, which contained seditious ideas, remained in manuscript form until late in the Ch’ing era.

In breadth and profundity, Wang Fu-chih’s learning is no less impressive than his productivity and includes a valuable historical account of one of the Ming loyalist courts, a critique of traditional political and economic institutions, several short expositions of his political philosophy, and numerous studies of classical texts. He wrote commentaries on the works of the Sung dynasty Neo-Confucianist Chang Tsai (1020–1077), whose philosophical views he generally shared, and on the Chuang-tzu and several Buddhist sutras. In all of his historical and classical scholarship, he reflected the growing concern of his age for verifiable data and precise philological methods.

In addition to his philosophical writings, Wang Fu-chih was deeply concerned with the theory and practice of the literary arts. He compiled seven separate anthologies of poetry, which collectively span the entire range from ancient times to his own day, and he was a critic of remarkable perception. Especially celebrated was his theory on the fusion of ch’ing (emotion; i.e., inner experience) and ching (scene; i.e., externality) as a kind of “touchstone” for poetry. He considered them “inseperable” though “called by two different names”; and he insisted that in all good poetry “emotion” must reside in the external world being described and that all externality explored in a poem constitutes a poet’s inner experience. Directing all this is what Wang speaks of as the “mind” (yi) of the poet, or “thought,” which he considers as essential to a poem as “a general for the army, without whom the army is not an army but an inchoate mass of men.” Though anticipating the theory of “spirit and tone” (shen-yün) of Wang Shih-chen (q.v.) and later that of “worlds” (ching-chieh) of Wang Kuo-wei (q.v.), Wang Fuchih was essentially a Confucianist in his literary outlook. Yet he was never one-sided or partial; rather, he considered shih (events), li (principle of things), ch’ing (emotion), and chih (what is desired by the mind or heart) as the necessary complements of all good poetry. (For further discussion of his views, see Siu-kit Wong’s informative essay “Ch’ing and Ching in the Critical Writing of Wang Fu-chih” in Adele Austin Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature From Confucious to Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao.) Also a prolific poet, Wang left fifteen collection of shih poetry and three separate collections of tz’u, or lyrics, in which genre he is still much admired as a master. Chu Hsiao-tsang (q.v.), for instance, regarded the patriotic sentiments and elements of personal pathos in the poetry of Wang Fu-chih as belonging to the grand tradition of the Li Sao by Ch’ü Yüan, the archtypal Chinese poet.

(Irving Lo and William Schultz)

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1. S. H. Ch’i, ECCP, 2:817–819.