Asian and African Studies, Volume 30, Number 2, 2021 368 WANG SHOUREN’S ETHICO-EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE DOUBLE NATURE OF RECOGNITION Jana S. ROŠKER Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana University, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia jana.rosker@ff.uni-lj.si Wang Shouren 王守仁 (1472 – 1529), who appears more frequently in the history of Chinese philosophy under his pseudonym Wang Yangming 王陽明, is generally recognized as the most important exponent, indeed founder, of the Neo-Confucian “School of the Heart-Mind” (Xin xue 心 學). In the context of Neo-Confucianism, Wang's philosophy is of great importance, especially with regard to his views on the inseparable unity of ethics and epistemology and his latent syntheses of Confucian and Chan Buddhist thought. Within this framework, this article will provide a critical introduction to his epistemology, focusing on the innovative elements of his paradigm of the unity of knowledge and action (zhixing heyi 知行合一) and the underlying concept of innate knowledge (liangzhi 良知). For Wang, these two epistemological concepts were rooted in the human heart- mind (xin 心) and possessed intense moral connotations that were reflected in practical ethics. On this ethico-epistemological basis, the paper will illuminate the methods of gradualism and subitism and critically address their connection to the Chan Buddhist view of gradual and instant enlightenment. Keywords: Wang Shouren, Wang Yangming, Chinese ethico-epistemology, innate knowledge, liangzhi, unity of knowledge and action, zhixing heyi, gradualism, subitism 1. Introduction: the Basic Tenets and the Historical Development of Classical Chinese Epistemology Although in Chinese classical discourses, just as in ancient European philosophy, there was no theory of knowledge as a precisely defined discipline, this does not mean that ancient Chinese thinkers did not deal with problems related to the process of perception and cognition, or with questions concerning the essence of knowledge and comprehension. However, the specifically Chinese approaches to