Yes, exactly—van life is the way. It is a Neo-Confucianism unshackled from emperors and bureaucracies, unburdened by stale traditions, and reborn as a philosophy of movement, vitality, and stranger’s kindness. It is Confucianism in exile, on the road, refusing domestication, and learning from the world itself rather than from institutionalized doctrine.
1. Van Life as a Return to 道法自然 (Dao Follows Nature)
• Neo-Confucianism’s love of nature is meaningless if nature is a museum piece—van life actively seeks nature where it still breathes, adapting to its rhythms rather than controlling it.
• Instead of static rituals and hierarchical ethics, van life embraces fluidity, impermanence, and the necessity of movement—a Daoist wu wei 無為 (effortless action) within a Confucian framework of care and responsibility.
→ Van life is a Confucianism that walks, not one that kneels.
2. Van Life as Epistemology: Learning by Living
• 格物致知 (Gewu Zhizhi, Investigating Things to Extend Knowledge) was never meant to be confined to books—it should have evolved into a philosophy of exploration, direct experience, and adaptability.
• Van life is theoretical dérive in practice—one does not just learn about the world, one learns with it, through encounters, improvisation, and the constant challenge of survival.
• Unlike Neo-Confucian scholars who memorized texts to pass exams, the van philosopher learns by crossing landscapes, meeting strangers, and engaging with life’s unpredictable conditions.
→ Van life resurrects the Confucian spirit of knowledge, but without the scholar’s desk. It learns through experience, not recitation.
3. Van Life as Ethics: The Stranger’s Kindness
• Traditional Confucianism emphasizes 仁 (ren, humaneness), but within a rigid social hierarchy—family, state, ruler-subject relationships.
• Van life reclaims ren but without the hierarchy—a radical ethics of kindness toward strangers, transients, and those in motion.
• In a world where institutions collapse and states fail to care for people, the van philosopher trusts in fleeting acts of generosity, the open hand of the unknown other—not the fixed obligations of kinship and empire.
→ Van life embodies a new Confucian ethics: “The world is a family, but not a prison.”
4. Van Life as Rebellion: Rejecting the Emperor’s Throne
• The biggest betrayal of Confucianism is that it became the philosophy of the ruler, rather than the wanderer.
• Van life refuses the throne, refuses to be governed, refuses domestication.
• It is a self-governed life, neither anarchist nor statist, but something older and wilder—a life that acknowledges relational responsibility (Confucian ethics) but rejects the authority of power over one’s existence.
→ Van life is Confucianism after empire, after emperors, after the world we knew.
Final Thought: The Van as the Last Confucian Hermitage
Perhaps the last true Confucians are not in Beijing, nor in academic conferences discussing Zhu Xi, but on the road—somewhere in a van, in a fading landscape, watching the last rays of sunlight on a broken world, still holding onto vitality and stranger’s kindness.
Perhaps Confucianism was always meant to be nomadic—not the property of rulers but of travelers, those who seek wisdom not in libraries, but in mountains, deserts, rivers, and the unpredictable grace of fellow wanderers.
If Neo-Confucianism is to live, it will not live in the emperor’s court.
It will live on the road.
