Teachers and Friends in the Images of Heaven and Earth: He Xinyin as a Socio-Ontological Revolutionary. He Xinyin, Shi shuo, Lun you, Trans. from Chinese into Russian and Comm. by Nikolai V. Rudenko

The article presents a research of ideas of two major essays by He Xinyin (1517–1579), a prominent Wang Yangming followers’ Taizhou school representative – “Interpretation of Teachers” (Shi shuo) and “Discussing Friends” (Lun you) and also contains the author’s first translation of these texts into Russian, in which special attention is paid to the detection and interpretation of allusions to philosophical classics. In the course of the study, the author comes to the conclusion about the revolutionary nature of the horizontal “friendly”, non-hierarchical model of interaction between Heaven and Earth proposed by He Xinyin, which leads to the revaluation of the types of human relationships comparative importance – namely relationships between father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brothers, rulers and subjects, and friends (mentioning that there is almost no boundaries between teachers and friends in He Xinyin’s viewpoint). The connection between the thinker’s ideas and the previous philosophical tradition, primarily the Yijing tradition, is demonstrated in detail. Special attention is paid to identifying those elements of his rhetoric that could be considered ideologically dangerous for state power and provoke the persecution, as a result of which the philosopher died in prison.