Mencius
Mencius-in Chinese, Mengzi-is one of only two Chinese thinkers whose names have been conventionally Latinized, the other being Confucius. Such is a measure of his importance. The Mencius, written by Mencius with additions by his disciples, belongs together with the Analects as a basic text in the Confucian tradition. Like the Analects, it consists largely of anecdotes and conversations, but the selections are considerably longer than those in the Analects, and, though the book is in no sense a continuous philosophical treatise, arguments are more fully developed than those in the earlier book. Although Confucius and his teachings are the indispensable starting points for him, Mencius was born close to a century after Confucius died (Mencius’s dates are uncertain but are usually thought to be about 390-310 BCE), and the world of thought to which he was responding was richer and more complex than that which Confucius faced. Thus many teachings that we take for granted as Confucian were actually added by Mencius.
It is fair to say that Mencius took Confucius as his role model. Mencius too was an itinerant teacher, trying to persuade feudal lords, or quasi-illegitimately self-styled “kings,” to put his teachings into practice, accompanied by a group of students as Confucius had been. But whereas Confucius still hoped for a rejuvenation of the Zhou dynasty, Mencius had given up hope for that possibility and, in accordance with the spirit of his age, began to look forward to a new dispensation, one in which Heaven would give the mandate to a new ruler who would bring about the just society for which Confucius hoped. In accordance with ideas about earlier dynasties, the new regime would unite the whole world under one ruler-a universal ruler and a universal ethic would go together. As Benjamin Schwartz puts it, Mencius shared with many of his contemporaries “an apocalyptic expectation that the time is ripe for a restoration of the dao.“174
Although Mencius did not think much of the feudal lords of his day, he was always seeking one who, under his tutelage, could become virtuous enough to bring order to the world. The following account shows what Mencius was looking for.
Mencius saw King Xiang of Liang. Coming away, he said to someone, “When I saw him at a distance he did not look like a ruler of men and when I went close to him I did not see anything that recommended respect. Abruptly he asked me, `How can the world be settled?’
‘By unification,’ I said.
`Who can unite it?’
`One who is not fond of killing can unite it,’ I said.
`Who can give it to him?’
`No one in the world will refuse to give it to him. Does your majesty not know about young rice plants? Should there be a drought in the seventh or eighth month, these plants will wilt. If clouds begin to gather in the sky and rain comes pouring down, then the plants will spring up again. This being the case, who can stop it? Now in the world among the shepherds of men there is not one who is not fond of killing. If there is one who is not, then the people of the world will crane their necks to watch for his coming. This being truly the case, the people will turn to him like water flowing downwards with a tremendous force. Who can stop
In this passage, with its vivid imagery, Mencius does indeed strike an apocalyptic note.
It is also clear that Mencius had an extraordinary sense of his own vocation at this critical moment in history. As we will see, he, like Confucius, felt called by Heaven, but he, also like Confucius, felt thwarted by Heaven. It was his task to accept Heaven’s decrees, though not necessarily happily, as is suggested in the following passage:
When Mencius left Qi, on the way Chongyou asked, “Master, you look somewhat unhappy. I heard from you the other day that a gentleman reproaches neither Heaven nor man.”
“This is one time; that was another time. Every five hundred years a true King should arise, and in the interval there should arise one from whom an age takes its name. From Zhou to the present, it is over seven hundred years. The five hundred mark is passed; the time seems ripe. It must be that Heaven does not as yet wish to bring peace to the world. If it did, who is there in the present time other than me? Why should I be unhappy?“176
As Schwartz makes clear, Mencius did not think he or Confucius could actually become the Son of Heaven unless appointed by a sage king, as Shun had been chosen by Yao. But in their “exalted conception of the virtuous minister,” each could have been the mentor of such a king.‘77 One should note that, by Mencius’s count, Confucius lived at the appropriate 500-year mark, and he himself at the overdue 700-year mark. They thus had the aura of the savior king about them, even if Heaven had decided the time was not ripe.
Although his political intent was central to his vocation, political disappointment did not deter him from the equally Confucian concern for selfcultivation. In the end, what one would achieve in the world was up to Heaven, but what kind of person one would become was up to the individual. He expresses his position succinctly as follows:
Extensive territory and a vast population-the gentleman may desire this, but his [true] delight is not here. To stand in the center of the empire, to bring peace to the people within the four seas-the gentleman may delight in this, but what makes up his nature is not here. What the gentleman has as his true nature cannot be added to even by the greatest deed [rulership] and cannot be diminished even by dwelling in poverty. This is because he is certain about his task. What the gentleman has as his true nature-humaneness [ren], justice [yi], ritual [li], and wisdom [zhi]-is rooted in his heart [xin].178
Mencius shows a surprising blend of elitism and populism. What is “rooted in the heart” of the gentleman, the four primary virtues-humaneness (ren), justice (yi), ritual (li), and the knowledge of good and evil (zhi)-have at least the beginnings, as we will see below, in everyone’s heart. Human nature is fundamentally common to all:
All palates have the same preference in taste; all ears in sound; all eyes in beauty. Should hearts prove to be an exception by possessing nothing in common? What is common to all hearts? Reason and rightness. The sage is simply the first man to discover this common element in my heart.179
Nonetheless, the gentleman, due to self-cultivation, will, as we saw above, maintain his virtuous heart in spite of hardship or adversity, whereas the people “will not have constant hearts if they are without constant means.“8° It is the responsibility of the ruler, and of the gentleman in so far as he is an effective advisor to a ruler, to assure the people of “constant means.” Thus Mencius attacks the rapacious ruler who reduces the circumstances of the people to misery, not only for his inhumanity, but for depriving the people of the possibility of being virtuous.
Mencius can be as scathing in his social criticism as were the Daoists. As he said to King Hui of Liang:
There is fat meat in your kitchen and there are well-fed horses in your stables, yet the people look hungry and in the outskirts of cities men drop dead from starvation. This is to show animals the way to devour men … If, then, one who is the father and mother to the people, in ruling over them, cannot, in ruling over them, avoid showing animals the way to devour men, wherein is he father and mother of the people?181
Here Mencius tells King Hui rather bluntly that he is not a king.
Nothing angers Mencius more than the incessant warfare of the period in which he lives and the reasons for it:
In wars to gain land, the dead fill the plains; in wars to gain cities, the dead fill the cities. This is known as showing the land the way to devour human flesh. Death is too light a punishment for such men.182
Another time King Xuan of Qi asks Mencius, concerning Zhou, the evil last king of the Shang dynasty killed by King Wu, whether regicide is permissible. Mencius replied:
A man who mutilates benevolence [ren] is a mutilator, while one who cripples rightness [yi] is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an “outcast.” I have indeed heard of the punishment of the “outcast Zhou,” but I have not heard of any
The idea that an evil king is not a king, and so killing him is not regicide, is not unique to ancient China, but it is no
t an archaic idea. Mencius, however, is not preaching revolution, even though the implications of his teaching were revolutionary enough to lead some later leaders, not only in China but also in Japan, to expurgate the offending passages in his text. His advice to advisors of unjust rulers is to withdraw from service if possible, and if not, to do what they can to mitigate the ruler’s evil intentions. But the populist side of Mencius makes it clear that in the long run it is the people who decide:
The people are of supreme importance; the altars to the gods of earth and grain come next; last comes the ruler. That is why he who gains the confidence of the multitudinous people will be the Son of Heaven. 114
In Mencius’s nonviolent view, an evil ruler will simply be abandoned rather than overthrown because the people will turn to a good ruler “like water flowing downwards with a tremendous force,” as we saw above.
It is Mencius’s clear elevation of a moral standard above the existing political status quo that makes him exemplary of the axial turn in ancient China. Without abandoning the courtesies that political hierarchy demands, he nonetheless places the true gentleman above any ruler when it comes to virtue. Mencius recounts approvingly the response of Zisi, the grandson of Confucius and perhaps a link in his own disciple lineage, to an inquiry from Duke Mu of Lu:
Duke Mu frequently went to see Zisi. “How did kings of states with a thousand chariots in antiquity make friends with Gentlemen?” he asked. Zisi was displeased. “What the ancients talked about,” said he “was serving them, not making friends with them.” The reason for Zisi’s displeasure was surely this. “In point of position, you are the prince and I am your subject. How dare I be friends with you? In point of virtue, it is you who ought to serve me? How can you presume to be friends with
The Confucians apparently agreed with Aristotle that friendship is possible only between equals, not between superior and inferior. Here the gentleman provisionally accepts the dubious legitimacy of the ruler while insisting on the superiority of his own virtue.
Thus although Mencius believes the people have the last word-indeed, he expresses a version of vox populi, vox dei, as when he quotes the Documents, “Heaven sees with the eyes of the people. Heaven hears with the ears of the people,“186 and is thus in some sense legitimately seen as a populist-he nonetheless believes firmly in the existence of an elite of virtue. Let us consider more closely how he can hold both beliefs.
Mencius is famous for arguing that human nature is good, particularly in contrast to Xunzi, who is said to believe that human nature is evil. This is a complex issue with a long history of argument that I need not explore at length in this chapter.187 What is clear is that Mencius believed that everyone has the “beginnings” of virtue by nature, along with a lot of other beginnings that may not turn out to be virtuous. As Graham has pointed out, what the Chinese meant by “nature” [xing] is not exactly what we mean by “inborn nature,” but rather the potentiality for development over the life course.188 So here “the goodness” of human nature consists in the fact that everyone has the potentiality for the development of the primary human virtues if they are properly nurtured. In the famous passage where he describes the universal presence of moral possibilities, he begins, “No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the sufferings of others.“89 Because “heart” (xin) is a key term in Mencius’s moral psychology, let us examine it further, as it is the key to a better understanding of Mencius’s argument.190
We have already seen that “heart” is a key term in the proto-Daoist Neiye, which is a chapter in the collective work Guanzi that is believed to have been produced by a group of scholars in the state of Qi in the fourth century and later. Mencius spent some time late in the fourth century at what is known as the Jixia Academy in Qi, the perhaps overly pretentious name for this group, and there is internal evidence that Mencius read the Neiye, because some fairly technical terms were common between them. The Neiye, unlike the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing, lacks any polemical attack on Confucianism. Graham speculates that the Mencius may, therefore, date from a period before the split between Confucianism and Daoism had become clear. In short, Mencius may have advocated methods of self-cultivation not too different from those of the progenitors of Daoism.191
In particular, Mencius discusses the cultivation of qi, the vital energy that is the source of our possibility of moral action, using a term that is almost identical with a term in the Neiye-namely, “floodlike” or “vast” qi (hao ran zhi qi), which, when properly nourished, “will fill the space between Heaven and Earth.“192 Such extraordinary qi, says Mencius, “is born of accumulated rightness [yi],” the standard of which “is set in one’s heart.“193 Here we have a kind of self-cultivation that, though clearly related to that of the Neiye, is linked to morality in a way absent in that text. And for Mencius, the heart is the source of moral feelings, capable of discrimination if properly developed, and thus includes what we would think of as mind as well as heart, although it is moral, not primarily cognitive, intelligence that is at issue here. The point then is that, though everyone has the potentiality to develop an advanced moral consciousness, only the hard work of moral self-cultivation is likely to succeed in realizing it. Ordinary people, pressed by the needs of survival, have the moral instincts but lack the time and energy to develop them fully. Thus, if a virtuous ruler should arise and radiate his “virtue,” de, in its archaic sense of almost physical energy, then the people can respond. Otherwise it is the gentleman, who can persist in virtue through prosperity and poverty, who is its keeper.
Throughout the discussion of central moral issues there is a recurrent reference to Heaven in Mencius. Such references are also to be found in Daoist texts, where they are often assumed to have become simply another way of referring to nature, or perhaps Nature. In Confucianism generally, but surely in Mencius, though naturalizing tendencies are not absent, a theistic element is firmly present. 114 A key passage is this:
Mencius said, “For a man to give full realization to his heart is for him to understand his nature, and a man who knows his own nature will know Heaven. By maintaining a firm hold on his heart and nurturing his nature he serves Heaven. Whether he is going to die young or live to a ripe old age makes no difference to his steadfastness of purpose. It is through awaiting whatever is to befall him with a perfected character that he stands firm in his proper destiny.“195
Mencius was prepared to accept the verdict of Heaven as to when a new and better age might dawn, an age where a virtuous king, or one capable of accepting the advice of virtuous advisors, would unify the realm and bring a better life, material and moral, to the people. Such was not to be the way that unification would actually come, but the ideal that Mencius stood for would never subsequently be forgotten. To sum up his teaching, I will quote what is perhaps the most famous passage in the Mencius, and in its finest translation, that of Arthur Waley:
The Bull Mountain was once covered with lovely trees. But it is near the capital of a great State. People came with their axes and choppers; they cut the woods down, and the mountain has lost its beauty. Yet even so, the day air and the night air came to it, rain and dew moistened it till here and there fresh sprouts began to grow. But soon cattle and sheep came along and browsed on them, and in the end the mountain became gaunt and bare, as it is now. And seeing it thus gaunt and bare people imagine that it was woodless from the start. Now just as the natural state of the mountain was quite different from what now appears, so too in every man (little though they may be apparent) there assuredly were once feelings of decency and kindness; and if these good feelings are no longer there, it is that they have been tampered with, hewn down with axe and bill. As each day dawns they are assailed anew. What chance then has our nature, any more than that mountain, of keeping its beauty? To us, too, comes the air of day, the air of night. Just at dawn, indeed, we have for a moment and in a certain degree a mood in which our promptings and aversions come near to being such as are proper to men. But something is sure to happ
en before the morning is over, by which these better feelings are ruffled or destroyed. And in the end, when they have been ruffled again and again, the night air is no longer able to preserve them, and soon our feelings are as near as may be to those of beasts and birds; so that anyone might make the same mistake about us as about the mountain, and think that there was never any good in us from the very start. Yet assuredly our present state of feeling is not what we begin with. Truly,
Xunzi
Xunzi is the third great Confucian thinker of the Warring States period, ranking with Confucius and Mencius, even if his reputation has suffered more ups and downs than theirs. The relatively well-preserved book that goes by his name differs from that of his great Confucian predecessors in that it is primarily a collection, not of anecdotes and dialogues, but of well-reasoned essays-covering the major issues of Warring States thought and staking out his own position in critical response to most of the other major thinkers of the period. David Nivison says that he is “the first philosopher in China who could be described as `academic’ in the modern sense,” and A. C. Graham says that “no other pre-Han thinker has organized the full range of his basic ideas in such coherently reasoned essays.“197 Chronologically Xunzi brings the Warring States period to a close: one conjectural set of dates has him born in 310, possibly the year of Mencius’s death, and dying in 215, six years after the Qin unification of the empire. As Mencius’s life spanned most of the fourth century, Xunzi’s spanned most of the third.
The social conditions that Xunzi faced in the third century were, if anything, even worse than those that Mencius faced in the fourth, and he continues the tradition of sharp social criticism. Even though his conception of social order is hierarchical, with great emphasis on the obligations of inferiors to superiors, and, like all Confucians, he cannot conceive of a good social order without monarchy and the guiding hand of an ethical elite, he, like Mencius, still takes the people as a barometer of the legitimacy of a ruler:
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