A Complete Reading of Wang Fuzhi's Commentary on the Book of Documents

Wang Fuzhi, known by the literary name Jiang Zhai and honored as Master Chuanshan, lived through the fall of the Ming dynasty. Deeply affected by the turmoil of the times and the people's suffering, he resolved to write and publish his ideas. The six volumes of Shangshu Yinyi contain fifty essays, each addressing a separate topic without being linked to the others. By extending certain ideas from the Ancient Text of the Book of Documents, Wang Fuzhi set out his own thought.

Beginning with the relationship between philosophy and politics, the book draws lessons from the rise and fall of successive dynasties. It criticizes the idealist thought of metaphysics, Buddhism, and Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism, and presents Wang's materialist theory of knowledge in concentrated form. In discussions of many categories, such as Heaven and humanity, capacity and its object, and knowledge and action, he seeks to reveal the contradictions between subject and object, and between understanding and practice, within the process of knowing. He proposes the model of thought that