Record of Teaching and Practice
Xu Ai's Introduction
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For all the explanations of “investigating things” in the Great Learning, the Master takes the old text as correct—the very text earlier scholars called the “mistaken version.” When I, Ai, first heard this, I was startled; then I doubted. After exhausting my attention and thought, comparing and connecting the passages and putting my questions to the Master, I came to know that his account is as certain as water's coldness and fire's heat: something that “could await a sage a hundred generations hence without perplexity.”
The Master's illumination and insight are Heaven-given. Yet he is harmonious, joyful, open and easy, unconcerned with outward polish. People see that he was bold and unrestrained in youth, that he ranged through literary composition and entered and left the teachings of the two schools. Suddenly hearing this account, they all regard him as cultivating difference and novelty, and carelessly fail to examine it. They do not know that, during three years among the border peoples, enduring hardship and nourishing stillness, his work of refinement and oneness had already carried him into the sages' domain, returning in purity to the great Center and utmost correctness.
Morning and evening I have received teaching at his door. I have seen only this of the Master's Way: approach it and it seems easy, yet look upward and it grows higher; see it and it seems coarse, yet explore it and it grows finer; draw near and it seems close, yet advance into it and its inexhaustibility increases. In more than ten years I have not even glimpsed its outer fence.
Some gentlemen of the age have met the Master only once; some have not even heard him clear his throat; some already harbor contempt, anger or resentment. Yet on a brief conversation or a report heard from others, they wish to make conjectural judgments and remote estimates. How could this be possible?
Those who follow him often hear his teaching and grasp one part while losing two. They see a horse's sex and its black or yellow coat and discard the very thing that makes it a thousand-li horse. Therefore I have recorded fully what I have heard in daily life, privately to show those who share our purpose. Let us examine and correct it together, hoping not to fail the Master's teaching.
Written by his disciple Xu Ai.
Reading note
The Master is Wang Yangming; Master Zhu is Zhu Xi. Yueren is Xu Ai's courtesy name. “Mind” in this edition includes moral feeling, attention and intention. “Principle” translates li; “innate moral knowing” translates liangzhi. “Investigating things” is retained as the shared name for gewu, whose meaning the following dialogues dispute. The two schools here are the Buddhist and Daoist teachings. The horse comparison concerns judging inward capacity through outward marks; it does not add another version of the horse story to the source.
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