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The ideal of human life as a life of sagehood is the core of Confucian thought. In neo‐Confucianism the stress is on the self‐perfectibility of man, and the central concern of neo‐Confucianist thinkers has accordingly been with the question of how man can cultivate his own potentiality to be a sage. The different answers they give are in the form of teachings about the ‘way’, these teachings incorporating different philosophical views of mind, human nature, and the universe. The author outlines the views of successive neo‐Confucianists and their versions of the ‘way’, seeing their teachings as developments towards the doctrine presented by Wang Yang‐ming (b. 1472), whose thought can be seen in particular as a synthesis of the views of Chu Tzu and Lu Shiang‐shan.