A Complete Reading of Wang Fuzhi's Commentary on Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng

Annotations on Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng is a major work by Wang Fuzhi, a philosopher of the late Ming dynasty. Through his commentary on Northern Song thinker Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng, Wang inherited and elevated Zhang's naive materialist thought, securing the work an important place in philosophy.

Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng is the distillation of his philosophical thought. Although Zhu Xi's Commentary on Zhengmeng appears to praise it, it distorts Zhang's theories to a considerable extent. The commentaries that followed, by Gao Panlong and Chen Boda in the Ming dynasty, and Li Guangdi and Ran Jinzu in the Qing dynasty, also fell short of Wang Fuzhi's precision. In Annotations on Zhang Zai's Zhengmeng, Wang analyzes and fully elucidates Zhang's thought, offers original interpretations of some of the source text's ideas, corrects numerous textual errors, and further develops Zhang's philosophy.

In his cosmology, Wang gives the category of qi a clearer philosophical definition and refines materialism's account of the fundamental substance of reality. He argues that the universe contains only the material qi, which is