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Your letter says: 'You teach extending knowledge and brightening virtue but warn against exhausting principle in things. Were the dim to sit alone in deep seclusion, hearing no instruction, would they reach extended knowledge and bright virtue? Even if stillness brings some awareness, a glimpse of nature — that is but the useless seeing of Chan stillness; could it truly know past and present, meet changing affairs, be of real use to state and world? And your words — knowledge is the substance of intention, things are intention's employment; ge is as in correcting the ruler's erring mind — though transcendent and untrammeled by old views, I fear they miss the Way.'

My doctrine of extension and investigation is precisely for exhausting principle; I never forbade the exhausting of principle for idle sitting. Exhausting principle in things, as the 'pursuing the outward, losing the inward' of before — that alone I disallow. If the dim truly examine this mind's heavenly principle affair by affair, thing by thing, so extending their innate knowledge, then though dull they will grow bright, though weak strong; the great root stands, the reached Way moves, the nine standards thread through without remainder — where is the lack of practical use? Those dead-set on vacancy and stillness, precisely because they cannot thus examine and extend, abandon human relations, take extinction and nothingness as constant — hence they cannot order family, state or world. Who says the sages' learning of exhausting principle and fulfilling nature carries that defect?

The mind is the body's master; its empty, numinous, bright awareness is the innate knowledge in itself. Stirred by response, it is called intention. Knowledge first, then intention; no knowledge, no intention — is knowledge not intention's substance? Intention's employment must have its object, and the object is the affair: intention on serving parents, serving parents is the thing; on governing the people, governing is the thing; on reading, reading; on hearing lawsuits, the hearing. Wherever intention is, there is a thing; the intention present, the thing present; absent, absent — is the thing not intention's employment?

Of ge, some gloss it as 'arrive': arrived at the Ancestral Temple, the Miao came. But arriving at the Temple means pure filial sincerity and reverence, everything rightly ordered in the seen and unseen worlds, and only then ge; the wild Miao came only when civil virtue was spread wide — the sense of 'correct' is mixed in, not exhausted by 'arrive'. In correcting the erring heart, correcting the ruler's erring mind, it is wholly rectifying the incorrect to return to the correct — not 'arrive'. And how do we know the Great Learning's ge was not glossed 'correct' rather than 'arrive'? On 'arrive' one must say exhaust-arrive at the principles of things before it parses — the pivot of effort in exhaust, the field in principle. Drop the exhaust above and the principle below and say extension of knowledge lies in arriving at things: does that parse?

That exhausting principle fulfills nature is the sage's settled teaching in the Commentaries. Were investigating things simply exhausting principle, why did the sage not say outright extension of knowledge lies in exhausting principle, instead of this winding, unfinished phrase to open later ages' defects? The Great Learning's ge shares the great aim of exhausting principle yet differs subtly: exhausting principle comprises investigation, extension, sincerity and rectification as its work. Say exhausting principle and all four are included; say investigating things and extension, sincerity and rectification must be jointly named before the work is complete and tight. To single out investigating things and call it exhausting principle assigns exhausting wholly to knowledge and denies investigation any action — losing not only the intent of ge but the sense of exhausting itself. Hence the later split of knowledge and action into first and second halves, daily more fragmented, the sagely learning daily more broken and dark — the source lies just here. You too, heir to long habit, may well deem it 'not to fit the Way' — not wrongly.