- Lived:
- 1619–1692 · Hengyang, Hunan province, China
- Tradition:
- Neo-Confucianism — its materialist, historicist rebel wing; Ming loyalist thought
- The Big Idea:
- There is no realm of pure principle floating above the world. Reality is qi — matter-energy in ceaseless transformation — and pattern, history, and even human nature exist only inside its flow, which never runs backward.
- In their words:
- "The world consists of nothing but concrete things."
- If you remember one thing:
- He watched his civilization die, fought for its ghost, then hid for forty years in the hills writing over a hundred books almost nobody read for a century and a half — and when China finally opened them, it found the most modern mind of its old world.