Three Immortal Criteria: Virtue, Meritoriousness, and Words - Who is more perfect, Wang Yangming or Zeng Guofan?

We all know that in Chinese history, only two and a half people have reached the three immortal standards of "virtue, meritorious deeds, and words": Confucius, Wang Yangming, and Zeng Guofan are half of them. Confucianism believes that there are only four people who have reached the standard of saints in history: Confucius, Mencius, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming. It is still generally accepted that there are only two saints in Chinese history: Confucius and Wang Yangming. 

Wang Yangming
meritorious service : he has quelled the rebellion for the imperial court many times, and he has never been defeated. He is an outstanding military strategist of the Ming Dynasty.
Lide: Propose to conscience, the unity of knowledge and action, and the peach and plum are all over the world.
Liyan: The creation of a mind study that rivaled Cheng and Zhu's Neo-Confucianism and became another Confucian school.

Zeng Guofan's

meritorious deeds : defeating the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and turning the tide for the Qing Dynasty.
Lide: Take Confucianism as the motto, cultivate self-cultivation every day, exercise self-discipline, and guard against arrogance and independence.
Liyan: Zeng Wenzheng's official collection.

    ◎The couplet in Wang Yangming's former residence is the summary of his life by later generations:     Li Virtue,

   meritorious deeds, true three immortals  ,
    Mingli clearly know that Mingjiao is the teacher of ten thousand

   people     As a teacher and as a master,     Wang Yangming's talent is different from ordinary people, and he is a genius that cannot be produced in a hundred years. Zeng Guofan, on the other hand, with moderate capital, with hardships and patience, opened up a world in the cracks. Later generations have high evaluations of the two giants, saying that they are immortal. But relatively speaking, Wang Yangming is recognized as the true three immortals, and Zeng Guofan is half of the two and a half perfect people. Compared with Zeng Guofan, Wang Yangming has his own characteristics. Among them, the most prominent is that Zeng Guofan's thought is to serve him as an official, "how to be an official", "how to be a big official" and "how to be a stable official" are always the core issues he considers. etc. are all serving this goal.                             





    Wang Yangming is different. Wang Yangming has his own social ideals and his own views on individuals, countries, history, and society. His office is to serve his ideals. When an official conflicts with this ideal, he will choose the latter without hesitation.                                              
    So, in essence, Wang Yangming was a scholar and Zeng Guofan was an official. Both Zeng Guofan and Wang Yangming had suppressed peasant uprisings, and both belonged to the behavior of loyalty to the monarch. But Wang Yangming's actions were more to stabilize the social order than to make the emperor feel at ease as the emperor. This is very different from Zeng Guofan's clinging to the Qing emperor's thigh.
    Wang Yangming and Zeng Guofan are both smart people, but they are very different.                         
    Zeng Guofan's career as an official can be regarded as wily, and he will never take action until the critical moment. However, this is only the shrewdness of the officialdom, not the smart and witty that is said in daily life.
    Wang Yangming is a smart man in handling official business, and a witty man in dealing with people. After he served as governor of southern Gansu, he first found the local "old officials" to understand the situation. He also pays attention to winning by surprise in his use of soldiers, and he has never failed in his use of soldiers in his life. After finding that someone was being followed, he tactfully used the method of "self-sinking" to get rid of it. These strategies are not possessed by Zeng Guofan.
    However, Wang Yangming is not so scheming as an official. Because he has never regarded being a high-ranking official as his life goal, nor will he give up his ideals and ideas for the sake of being an official. Therefore, when Emperor Jiajing came to power, he fully affirmed him, as long as he expressed the at least loyalty of his courtiers on the issue of Jiajing raising his father, he could become a college student. To be loyal to Emperor Jiajing was not only the responsibility of the ministers, but also consistent with his theory of painstaking efforts. However, he did not do so, showing the "stupidity" of nerdy intellectuals and keeping his personality and independent personality as intellectuals. This personality and independent personality made him famous through the ages. This is Wang Yangming's "smartness". Comparing Wang Yangming and Zeng Guofan, it can be said that what a person wants to pursue directly determines their behavior.
    Wang Yangming has his own theoretical system, but Zeng Guofan does not.
    Wang Yangming successfully established his own psychology system. He has his own view of everything in the world. A student once asked him why the sage was so smart and seemed to know everything. He replied that it was because the sage mastered the principles. Wang Yangming can solve so many problems in the world because he has mastered the principles. It is in his view that everything is in the heart and does not move. If the mind does not move, then everything does not exist, and it is meaningless to the Lord of the mind. Therefore, there is no need to pursue distant things, and there is no need to pursue illusory things. Fame and fortune are all external things. Why bother with it? Gained fame and fortune, changed the heart, may not be able to have happiness. This allows Wang Yangming to always do things according to his own understanding, to do everything with peace of mind, and to deal with any humiliation calmly. Wang Yangming also pointed out that the way of the sage is self-sufficiency in the heart. This requires people to attain the realm of a saint, without reading the Four Books, nor copying the ancients, nor blindly copying their superiors, but should use their own practice to answer and explore according to their own conscience. Conscience is hidden in the heart, as long as you are willing to find it, you can find more and more. Since everyone can be found as long as they are willing to look for them, then everyone can be a saint. This places great emphasis on the role of practice. Therefore, Wang Yangming's knowledge is a knowledge that attaches importance to practice. According to Wang Yangming's theory, everyone will be full of self-confidence (because everyone can become a saint), and everyone will attach great importance to action. This gave Wang Yangming's knowledge a foundation and motivation. Throughout Wang Yangming's life, it can be said that building a complete ideological system has always been his goal. This is very intellectual madness.

    Compared with Wang Yangming, Zeng Guofan has no knowledge of his own. Everything about him comes from his predecessors and current saints. For example, his "jing" word kung fu comes from Japanese benevolence. Zeng Guofan's "modest retreat" comes from Taoism. Knowing that in officialdom, only those who know how to "retire" will have good results. When Zeng Guofan first joined the group training, he also adhered to Confucianism. The thought of diligence and thrift expressed in Zeng Guofan's home book also came from the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation. Throughout Zeng Guofan's thought throughout his life, there are few originalities. Zeng Guofan's success lies in the combination of various schools of thought to form his own world outlook, outlook on life and values. This is also commendable, and it was something no one else could do at the time.

    Why can't Zeng Guofan have his own independent thought, but Wang Yangming can?
    This is the different starting point of Wang Yangming and Zeng Guofan.
    Zeng Guofan always wanted to honor his ancestors. It is for the sake of being an official and a virtuous person, and even a little heretical idea will be consciously rejected. Afraid of bringing disaster to his family, this is the role of officials. Because of the "official", they dare not think and cannot think. Therefore, Zeng Guofan was able to kill more than 500,000 innocent people after the capture of Tianjing, so that "...the sound of the screams was inaudible. I can't help but say that this is one of his major shortcomings, so he can only be regarded as half a saint.

    Wang Yangming had the ambition to be a sage since he was a child, and took the world as his responsibility. He was an official in order to realize his independent personality and realize his ideals. He is also more confident than Zeng Guofan in the military. He has the arrogant saying that "breaking the thief in the mountains is easy, breaking the thief in the heart is difficult." Production, establishment of education, tax reduction and tax reduction, rest and recuperation. Therefore, later generations evaluated him as: the ancestor of Xinxue, the integration of the four schools, the perfect all-rounder, and the undisputed saint who entered the world.