Dialogue with Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming

Author: Guo Meihua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-11-01
Features: The dialogue between modern people and ancient sages is naturally virtual. The reason why this series adopts this form lies in the name "ancient sages." The term "sage" refers to those who excel in morality, wisdom, and skills, serving as role models for ordinary people. Therefore, ancient sages are first and foremost the elite of Chinese history, the main carriers and representatives of our national cultural tradition. However, since "sages" are "ancient," they are separated from the "present" by a temporal distance and gap, necessitating the issue of "keeping pace with the times." This naturally refers to the intellectual resources they created, not their physical bodies, because intellectual dialogue can transcend time and space.
Don’t believe it? Think calmly about your daily thoughts and actions. Are they not connected, in some way, to those of people from a thousand years ago? These connections are, in fact, a silent, unconscious dialogue with the past. Our design is simply to make this unconscious dialogue, which occurs every day in your life and around you, more conscious, so that we can clear up some threads for further exploration from the confusion of unconsciousness.
In this way, the dialogue between modern people and ancient sages, though virtual, is not mere sophistry. In fact, this dialogue is not the product of a sudden inspiration but rather a form of intellectual pursuit and teaching that the ancient sages themselves found quite satisfactory. Not only in Chinese philosophy but also in the works of Confucius and Mencius, dialogues are common. Even Western philosophers, such as Socrates and Plato, who lived around the same time as Confucius and Mencius, left behind dialogues. Studies on literary forms often attribute the emergence of the dialogue form to the simplicity of the early stages, but this is not entirely the case.
Just look at how, after the establishment of the expository form, Chinese works on metaphysics, Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Mindology extensively used the dialogue form. Similarly, Western philosophers, including Hume, Diderot, and Duchamp, until the modern era, all left behind world-renowned works in the dialogue form. While the dialogue form may not be as grand as the expository form, it is precisely because it does not need to be "solemn" that it has its own enduring advantages.