Mencius

The Mencius (Mengzi) records the teachings, conversations and debates of Mencius (Meng Ke, c. 372-289 BCE), the most important follower of Confucius in the classical age and traditionally honoured as the "Second Sage" of the Confucian tradition. Living some two centuries after Confucius, in the turmoil of the Warring States period, Mencius travelled from court to court urging rulers to govern by virtue, and the book, compiled by his disciples, probably in the late fourth or third century BCE, preserves these encounters in a series of vivid dialogues far longer and more developed than the terse sayings of the Analects.

In seven books it presents Mencius arguing with kings, rival philosophers and students, defending and extending the Confucian vision against the competing schools of his day, above all the utilitarian Mohists and the self-interest philosophy associated with Yang Zhu. The Mencius is prized as one of the finest works of early Chinese prose, its arguments carried by memorable parables, sharp exchanges and a distinctive combination of moral earnestness and rhetorical wit.

The doctrine for which Mencius is best known, and his most influential contribution to Chinese thought, is the claim that human nature is innately good (xing shan). Against those who held that nature is neutral or self-interested, Mencius argued that every person is born with the "four sprouts" or beginnings of virtue: the feeling of compassion, which is the sprout of humaneness (ren); the feeling of shame, the sprout of righteousness (yi); the feeling of deference, the sprout of ritual propriety (li); and the sense of right and wrong, the sprout of wisdom. His famous illustration is that anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel a spontaneous alarm and pity: proof, he held, that moral feeling is native to the heart, not imposed from without.

Moral cultivation is therefore not the manufacture of virtue but the nurturing of these innate sprouts until they grow to maturity, as a farmer tends young plants. Mencius also taught that the ruler holds the Mandate of Heaven only so long as he cares for the people's welfare, and that a tyrant who loses their hearts may justly be removed.

For much of the imperial period the Mencius was one venerable text among many, but in the Song dynasty the great Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (1130-1200) singled it out, together with the Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, as one of the Four Books, the essential core of the Confucian curriculum, to be studied before the older Five Classics.

Through Zhu Xi's commentaries the Four Books, and with them Mencius's doctrine of innate goodness, became the foundation of Chinese education and, from the fourteenth century until the examination system was abolished in 1905, the basis of the civil service examinations on which official careers depended. Mencius's optimistic view of human nature became, in this way, something close to the orthodox anthropology of later Confucian civilisation across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, though it was always contested, most sharply by Xunzi, who held that human nature is bad and virtue the achievement of deliberate effort. Today the Mencius remains a foundational text of the Confucian tradition and a classic of world philosophy.