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Mencius (Translations from the Asian Classics)

The Life and Teachings of Mencius: The Chinese Classics, Vol. Previous Page 1 2 Next Page. Free Shipping by Amazon. Include Out of Stock. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations.

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For the early Chinese c. Thus, theistic justifications for conquest and rulership were present very early in Chinese history. Mencius' faith in Tian as the ultimate source of legitimate moral and political authority is unshakeable. Like Confucius, he says that " Tian does not speak - it simply reveals through deeds and affairs" 5A5. He ascribes the virtues of ren co-humanity , yi rightness , li ritual propriety , zhi wisdom , and sheng sagehood to Tian 7B24 and explicitly compares the rule of the moral king to the rule of Tian 5A4. Mencius thus shares with Confucius three assumptions about Tian as an extrahuman, absolute power in the universe: To the extent that Mencius is concerned with justifying the ways of Tian to humanity, he tends to do so without questioning these three assumptions about the nature of Tian , which are rooted deep in the Chinese past, as his views on government, human nature, and self-cultivation will show.

The dependence of Tian upon human agents to put its will into practice helps account for the emphasis Mencius places on the satisfaction of the people as an indicator of the ruler's moral right to power, and on the responsibility of morally-minded ministers to depose an unworthy ruler. In a dialogue with King Xuan of Qi r. The people are to be valued most, the altars of the grain and the land [traditional symbols of the vitality of the state] next, the ruler least.

Hence winning the favor of the common people you become Emperor…. When the ruler makes a serious mistake they admonish. If after repeated admonishments he still will not listen, they depose him…. Do not think it strange, Your Majesty.

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Your Majesty asked his servant a question, and his servant dares not fail to answer it directly. Mencius' replies to King Xuan are bracingly direct, in fact, but he can be coy. When the king asks whether it is true that various sage kings Tang and Wu rebelled against and murdered their predecessors Jie and Zhou , Mencius answers that it is true.

The king then asks:.

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In other words, Wu was morally justified in executing Zhou, because Zhou had proven himself to be unworthy of the throne through his offenses against ren and yi - the very qualities associated with the Confucian exemplar junzi and his actions. This is an example of Mencius engaging in the "rectification of names" zhengming , an exercise that Confucius considered to be prior to all other philosophical activity Analects While Mencius endorses a "right of revolution," he is no democrat.

His ideal ruler is the sage-king, such as the legendary Shun, on whose reign both divine sanction and popular approval conferred legitimacy:. When he was put in charge of sacrifices, the hundred gods delighted in them which is Heaven accepting him. When he was put in charge of affairs, the affairs were in order and the people satisfied with him, which is the people accepting him. Heaven gave it [the state] to him; human beings gave it to him. Mencius proposes various economic plans to his monarchical audiences, but while he insists on particular strategies such as dividing the land into five-acre settlements planted with mulberry trees , he rejects the notion that one should commit to an action primarily on the grounds that it will benefit one, the state, or anything else.

What matters about actions is whether they are moral or not; the question of their benefit or cost is beside the point. Here, Mencius reveals his antipathy for - and competition with — philosophers who followed Mozi, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Confucius who propounded a utilitarian theory of value based on li benefit:. Why must Your Majesty say "benefit" [li]?

I have only the co-humane [ren] and the right [yi]. In the end, Mencius is committed to a type of benevolent dictatorship, which puts moral value before pragmatic value and in this way seeks to benefit both ruler and subjects. The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively 4A1. Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures good laws, wise policies, correct rituals and in terms of inner motivations placing ren and yi first.

Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order. The question is, how does Mencius account for this optimism in light of human nature? Mencius is famous for claiming that human nature renxing is good. As with most reductions of philosophical positions to bumper-sticker slogans, this statement oversimplifies Mencius' position. In the text, Mencius takes a more careful route in order to arrive at this view. Graham, one can see his argument as having three elements: Mencius' basic assertion is that "everyone has a heart-mind which feels for others.

Appealing to experience, he says:. Supposing people see a child fall into a well - they all have a heart-mind that is shocked and sympathetic.

It is not for the sake of being on good terms with the child's parents, and it is not for the sake of winning praise for neighbors and friends, nor is it because they dislike the child's noisy cry. It is important to point out here that Mencius says nothing about acting on this automatic affective-cognitive response to suffering that he ascribes to the bystanders at the well tragedy. It is merely the feeling that counts.

Going further and appealing to reason, Mencius argues:.

Mencius (c. 372—289 B.C.E.)

Judging by this, without a heart-mind that sympathizes one is not human; without a heart-mind aware of shame, one is not human; without a heart-mind that defers to others, one is not human; and without a heart-mind that approves and condemns, one is not human. Thus, Mencius makes an assertion about human beings - all have a heart-mind that feels for others - and qualifies his assertion with appeals to common experience and logical argument.

This does little to distinguish him from other early Chinese thinkers, who also noticed that human beings were capable of altruism as well as selfishness. What remains is for him to explain why other thinkers are incorrect when they ascribe positive evil to human nature - that human beings are such that they actively seek to do wrong. Mencius goes further and identifies the four basic qualities of the heart-mind sympathy, shame, deference, judgment not only as distinguishing characteristics of human beings - what makes the human being qua human being really human - but also as the "sprouts" duan of the four cardinal virtues:.

A heart-mind that sympathizes is the sprout of co-humanity [ren]; a heart-mind that is aware of shame is the sprout of rightness [yi]; a heart-mind that defers to others is the sprout of ritual propriety [li]; a heart-mind that approves and condemns is the sprout of wisdom [zhi]….

HUMAN NATURE: Mencius (Part 1)

If anyone having the four sprouts within himself knows how to develop them to the full, it is like fire catching alight, or a spring as it first bursts through. If able to develop them, he is able to protect the entire world; if unable, he is unable to serve even his parents. Now the complexity of Mencius' seemingly simplistic position becomes clearer.

What makes us human is our feelings of commiseration for others' suffering; what makes us virtuous - or, in Confucian parlance, junzi - is our development of this inner potential. If our sprouts are left untended, we can be no more than merely human - feeling sorrow at the suffering of another, but unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

If we tend our sprouts assiduously -- through education in the classical texts, formation by ritual propriety, fulfillment of social norms, etc. This is the basis of Mencius' appeal to King Hui of Liang r.

Has Your Majesty noticed rice shoots? If there is drought during the seventh and eighth months, the shoots wither, but if dense clouds gather in the sky and a torrent of rain falls, the shoots suddenly revive. When that happens, who could stop it? If that does happen, the people will go over to him as water tends downwards, in a torrent - who could stop it?

Mencius devotes some energy to arguing that "rightness" yi is internal, rather than external, to human beings.

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He does so using examples taken from that quintessentially Confucian arena of human relations, filial piety xiao. But as it happens, shifts in external circumstances can effect changes in status; one's younger brother can temporarily assume the status of a very senior ancestor in the proper ritual context, thus earning the respect ordinarily given to seniors and never shown to juniors. For Mencius, this demonstrates that the internal orientation of the agent e.

Having made a teleological argument from the inborn potential of human beings to the presumption of virtues that can be developed, Mencius then offers his sketch of moral psychology - the structures within the human person that make such potential identifiable and such development possible. The primary function of Mencius' moral psychology is to explain how moral failure is possible and how it can be avoided.

Cua has noted, for Mencius, moral failure is the failure to develop one's xin heart-mind. In order to account for the moral mechanics of the xin , Mencius offers a quasi-physiological theory involving qi vital energy - "a hard thing to speak about" 2A2 , part vapor, part fluid, found in the atmosphere and in the human body, that regulates affective-cognitive processes as well as one's general well-being.

It is especially abundant outdoors at night and in the early morning, which is why taking fresh air at these times can act as a physical and spiritual tonic 6A8. When Mencius is asked about his personal strengths, he says:. It is interesting to note the apparent link between powers of suasion - essential for any itinerant Warring States shi , whether official or teacher - and "flood-like qi. Mencius goes on to describe what he means by "flood-like qi ":. It is the sort of qi that is utmost in vastness, utmost in firmness. If, by uprightness, you nourish it and do not interfere with it, it fills the space between Heaven and Earth.

It is the sort of qi that matches the right [yi] with the Way [Dao]; without these, it starves. It is generated by the accumulation of right [yi] - one cannot attain it by sporadic righteousness.

If anything one does fails to meet the standards of one's heart-mind, it starves. It is here that Mencius is at his most mystical, and recent scholarship has suggested that he and his disciples may have practiced a form of meditative discipline akin to yoga.

Mencius (Translations from the Asian Classics)

Certainly, similar-sounding spiritual exercises are described in other early Chinese texts, such as the Neiye "Inner Training" chapter of the Guanzi Kuan-tzu , c. It also is at this point that Mencius seems to depart most radically from what is known about the historical Confucius' teachings.

While faint glimpses of what may be ascetic and meditative disciplines sometimes appear in the Analects , nowhere in the text are there detailed discussions of nurturing one's qi such as can be found in Mencius 2A2. In spite of the mystical tone of this passage, however, all that the text really says is that qi can be nurtured through regular acts of "rightness" yi.

In short, here is where Mencius' case for human nature seems to leave philosophy and reasoned argumentation behind and step into the world of ineffability and religious experience. There is no reason, of course, why Mencius shouldn't take this step; as Alan K.

Chan has pointed out, ethics and spirituality are not mutually exclusive, either in the Mencius or elsewhere. To sum up, both biology and culture are important for Mencian self-cultivation, and so is Tian. Guided by the examples of ancient sages and the ritual forms and texts they have left behind, one starts to develop one's heart-mind further by nurturing its qi through habitually doing what is right, cultivating its "sprouts" into virtues, and bringing oneself up and out from the merely human to that which Tian intends for one, which is to become a sage.

Nature is crucial, but so is nurture. Mencius' model of moral psychology is both a "discovery" model human nature is good and a "development" model human nature can be made even better:. Detailed discussion of Mencius' key interpreters is best reserved for an article on Confucian philosophy. Nonetheless, an outline of the most important commentators and their philosophical trajectories is worth including here.

Gaozi, who is known only from the Mencius , evidently knew Mencius personally, but Xunzi knew him only retrospectively.

Both disagreed with Mencius' views on human nature. Gaozi's dialogue with Mencius on human nature can be found in book six of the Mencius , in which both Mencius' disciples and Gaozi himself question him on his points of disagreement with Gaozi. Gaozi - whom later Confucians identified, probably anachronistically, as a Daoist -- offers multiple hypotheses about human nature, each of which Mencius refutes in Socratic fashion. Gaozi first argues that human nature is neither bad nor good, and presents two organic metaphors for its moral neutrality: Challenging the carved wood metaphor, Mencius points out that in carving wood into a cup or bowl, one violates the wood's nature, which is to become a tree.

Does one then violate a human being's nature by training him to be good? No, he says, it is possible to violate a human being's nature by making him bad, but his nature is to become good.