Child with an incredibly wide point of view

The size and height of everyday objects in daily life can look different depending on the width of your perspective. From a child's viewpoint, the mountains can look bigger than the moon. This nonsense way of judgment can be explained by the fact that the mountains are close, but the moon is far away. The poet considered that people's misunderstanding of the bigger size of the mountains than the moon is not attributable to a physical distance but to the differences in their viewpoints. If you have as wide a point of view as the sky, all the things in the universe come into sight. He might have delivered a message that this viewpoint can help humans overcome narrow-sightedness and ignorance to get closer to the essence of the world.

This poem was written impromptu when he was 11 years old at the request of his grandfathers’ friends. He wrote another poem prior to the requested one. “Gold Mountain as small as a fist/possibly cracking up the skies of Yangzhou mirroring on the water surface. Leaning on the moonlight on Miu Gou Toi/listening to the melody of a jade pipe beautiful enough to wake up the dragon.” The lines were written based on the wild imagination of the young poet inspired by the grand sceneries. His poetic language hints at his outstanding spirit and talent as a philosopher.

Wang Shouren, the founder of the teachings of Yangmingism, is well known by his pen name, Yangming. He argued that knowing is the starting point of action, which in turn completes knowing. His message is summarized as the concurrence theory between knowing and action.