王守仁
Out of Cheng-Zhu's Neo-Confucianism that was mainstream at the time, Wang Yangming developed the idea of "innate knowing", arguing that every person knows from birth the difference between good and evil. Wang claimed that such knowledge is intuitive and not rational. These revolutionizing ideas of Wang Yangming would later inspire prominent Japanese thinkers like Motoori Norinaga, who argued that because of the Shinto deities, Japanese people alone had the intuitive ability to distinguish good and evil without complex rationalization. His school of thought ("Ōyōmei-gaku" in Japanese, "Ō" stands for the surname "Wang", "yōmei" stands for "Yangming", "gaku" stands for "school of learning") also greatly influenced the Japanese samurai ethic.