The Issue of “Three Types of People” in the Theory of Self-Cultivation in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism

Discourses on self-cultivation in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism frequently distinguish three types of moral practitioners: those who “are born with knowledge and act with ease”, those who “attain knowledge through learning and act to their advantage”, and those who “attain knowledge through hardship and act with effort”. This tripartite framework originates in Confucius’s classification of learners according to their innate endowments, and underwent significant reinterpretation from Zhu Xi through Wang Yangming to Gu Xiancheng, gradually shifting from a typology of “three kinds of people” toward an understanding of “three aspects manifested within a single practitioner”. Zhu Xi insisted that even sages must undertake the arduous discipline of “attaining knowledge through hardship and acting with effort”, thereby qualifying any absolute distinction among the three types. Wang Yangming universalized “being born with knowledge” as the innate moral knowing (liangzhi) inherent in all persons, arguing that practitioners of all three types are ultimately engaged in the same task of extending liangzhi. Gu Xiancheng, through his doctrine of “comprehensive disclosure” (quan ti), further ontologized “being born with knowledge” as the ground of moral nature while universalizing the effortful practice of “attaining knowledge through hardship” as a necessary stage for all. In doing so, he reduced the “three kinds of people” to three successive phases within the moral development of a single self-cultivating subject, thereby articulating the Confucian ideal of “learning to become fully human”.