『格物通』에서 본 담약수의 大學觀 - 경전해석의 열린 지평을 중심으로-

Abstract

The essay is focused upon explicating Zhan Ruo-shui's view of Great Learning. The content is what is called the learning of Way which is based upon a concept of investigating a thing and its understanding. In his Ge-wu-tong, he puts emphasis upon how one can reach the learning of sagehood and implicatively presents what is the understanding of investigating a thing and its significance. Given the Neo-Confucian world view of human value and its canon, his way of interpretation has significance in understanding Confucian textbooks, whose goal is the attainment of sagehood as the essence of self-realization. He presents four stages of reading a textbook: generalization, commentary, penetratively understanding, and thorough awakening. In the viewpoint of self-cultivation, the stages is closely associated with revealing clear virtue, and has a clue to the substance of heart-mind which is regarded as the ultimate good, and to an equal unity of virtue, that is, inside and outside, knowing and acting, king and sage, etc. Actually, as Neo-Confucianists argue, it stems from a metaphysical relationship of principle and thing. Thus, it seems to me that his view of Great Learning and his concept of investigating a thing and its understanding have an open horizon for a methodology of understanding a textbook and thereby for self-cultivation in a system of the learning of Way.