(This article is originally published in Huffpost, 12/06/2017)

When early Catholic and Protestant missionaries came to China in the 16th through the 19th centuries, they found that something called the “Mandate of Heaven” (天命) was frequently mentioned in the early Confucian classics (such as the Book of Documents and the Classic of Odes). Consequently, some of them thought that Confucians believed in the same god as the God of Christianity. It is hardly necessary to say that they made a terrible mistake.

The Chinese character 命 is a combination of 口, mouth and 令, command. The literal meaning of 天命, often translated in English as the “Mandate of Heaven,” is thus premised upon a certain degree of personification of Heaven. After all, if Heaven is not a person, how could it announce any commands to its people? However, as virtually every religious comparativist inevitably tends to be, these early missionaries were biased in their understanding of ‘God.’ They thus tried to grasp Confucianism through a Christian lens, and so it is not surprising that they tried to find a monotheistic element in Confucianism and remained blind to the fact that Confucianism, during the process of its formation, was actually moving away from monotheism to mono-non-theism. This means that ‘Heaven,’ in the mainstream understanding of Confucianism as it was molded by Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi all the way up to the Song-Ming neo-Confucians, is not a person, but an all-encompassing, constantly creative cosmic acting without any actor who is behind the scenes.

One important reason which propelled Confucianism away from a monotheistic type of religiousness was theodicy. The religion of the early Zhou dynasty (approximately 1046-256 B.C.E) was pretty much similar to the Abrahamic religions, especially the stories from the Hebrew Bible. Heaven is Lord, and kings ought to obey moral laws enacted by Him. Obeisance will be awarded and violations will be punished. If an immoral king did not continue to take good care of his people, he would lose his Mandate of Heaven, and his dynasty would then be overthrown. This theology was employed by the Zhou dynasty to explain and vindicate their succession over the prior Shang dynasty. However, this theology is dramatically undermined if, no matter how diligently kings pursue moral self-cultivation, their dynasty still continues to decline. This happened to the Zhou dynasty and its kings after 771 B.C.E, when an ethnic minority invaded and plundered Zhou’s capital, killed King You (幽王), and forced the royal court to relocate in another city far to the East. In this period, which is replete with political turmoil and unattended natural disasters, we find plenty of verses in the Classics of Odes (詩經) expressing individual laments in the face of divine injustice. These are very similar to Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, as, for example, when the text quotes complaints such as, “Since I have not been immoral, why has Heaven punished me?”

There are two solutions to this conundrum of theodicy, and they generally are what demarcate the three Abrahamic religions from Confucianism. The seemingly unjust divine punishment can be conceived to be a temporary ‘test’ of the people’s righteousness and faithfulness: if righteous people cannot be rewarded immediately, they will be rewarded in the afterlife, the final Day of Divine Judgement. Alternately, Heaven was no longer to be conceived as a personal God: Although there are values and attractions in Heaven which are worthy of human worship, the Heavenly creation in this case is not conceived of as having any anthropomorphic sort of plan, purpose or agency. In this case, good and evil are defined primarily from the perspective of human beings and not from the perspective of God. Thus, if human beings themselves do not reward goodness, then good in its reciprocal form will remain unrewarded. By the same token, if humans do not punish evil behavior, then evil will remain unpunished.

This type of human religiousness may be expressed as ‘religious naturalism + humanistic ethics’ and replaced the pre-Confucian monotheism of the early Zhou dynasty. This process began with Confucius, garnered its mature form in Mencius and Xunzi, and finally achieved a systematic elucidation in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism.

At the same time, a re-formulation of the concept of ming (命) was underway. In general, Confucianism employs three meanings for the term ming. The first meaning of ming is talent (稟賦). Everyone is talented, one way or the other. It is primarily manifested by the deep, even uncanny, interest a person often shows toward a particular realm of human life. It is also illuminated by the ease, passion, and happiness that a person feels when he or she consistently pursues his or her interest without any concern for reward. In Confucian terms, everybody is born in a specific place and time, and thus their mental and physical conditions are formed by a specific portion of the cosmic matter-energy (qi, 气). That’s the reason, in this view, that people are talented in different ways. Understood as such, one cardinal function of education is to help people find their own special talents. Confucius is quite excellent at mentoring his apprentices in discovering and fostering a variety of talents (Analects 11.3). In addition, Confucius teaches that we ought to use our talents to serve multiple purposes and to offer good to all human beings, rather than behaving like a utensil, merely serving a fixed range of purposes and thereby being unable to broaden the value of their talents (Analects 2:12).

The second meaning of ming is fate (命運). No matter how talented a person may be, he or she can only be talented in certain ways. Also, no matter how consistently a person pursues his or her talent, the degree of his or her accomplishment is restricted by the time, the environment and by his or her personality. In other words, the portion of cosmic matter-energy that Heaven gifts to each person also limits them. Consequently, humans have to accept the radical contingency of human existence, and to find ways to reconcile their always finite life-situations with their ideals, many of which may be of infinite extension. In this regard, Confucianism teaches us to begin with what is nearby. We need to begin by trying to promote and harmonize the growth of our own persons, our own families, our own communities, and then gradually expand outwards to the world so as to enrich the value of all human lives. In other words, Confucianism acknowledges the realities that constrain human life.

Nevertheless, these constraints can never determine human life. This leads to the most important third meaning of ming as mission (使命). Among all the talents with which Heaven endows human beings, the most valuable one is an irresistible capacity to persist in creativity, situated in the human mind-heart (心). Confucians believe that no matter how constraining the situation is, the human mind-heart can always find ways to transform it in some degree for the better. In the terms of the early Confucian text, Zhong Yong, the mission of human life is to assist in the cosmic creation that remains uncompleted by Heaven and Earth, and thus human beings are seen to form a triad with Heaven and Earth. This means that humans have a responsibility to manifest the One principle of the Heavenly creation in a specific humane (仁) way. Therefore, when we feel deeply frustrated about our lives, the best way to rebound from distress is to exert our unique talent to promote the well-being of other people who are near at hand: our families, our communities and our friends. For Confucianism, the personal creativity which is to be infused into the universal well-being, defined by a widening range of human-human and human-cosmic relationships, is the ultimate meaning and power of human life.

In a word, Confucianism is neither voluntarism, extolling the infinite compass of human free will, nor is it fatalism, denying any possibility for human creativity. In the Confucian view, human beings are endowed with various talents. We learn, interact, fulfill and finally improve our ‘fate,’ expressed as a series of constraining realities. During this process, the human mission to assist in the cosmic creation of Heaven and Earth is an ideal which stands as an eternal allurement, always going beyond any fixed form of human creativity. Understood in this way, to be a Confucian is to be ‘destined’ and ‘commissioned’ as a non-violent warrior and fighter for the realization of dynamic harmony in the world. Relying upon our various unique talents, let us continue to fight against and break through any constraining life-situation, and thereby to create new forms of dynamic harmony to serve the common good of all human and cosmic beings!

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song in the course of “Ru and Confucianism” at Washington College.

In this unit, we will discuss Xunzi, the last major Ru philosopher in the pre-Qin period of the tradition.

As indicated by my teaching experience, beginning readers of the Ru tradition in the west normally find Xunzi (circa. 310-235 B.C.E)’s thought quite congenial. This is mainly because in a way blatantly contrary to Mencius, Xunzi thinks human nature is bad, and hence, the process of education and self-cultivation should not be envisioned as a course of re-discovering and nurturing something that is already within us. Rather, for Xunzi, to be a fully human is to find a teacher of authority to inculcate rituals and rules from without, so as to transform one’s uncultivated inborn dispositions to something different. While presenting his moral philosophy, Mencius likes to use metaphors from the industry of farming to describe that moral development is like the process to prepare soil, sow seeds, grow sprouts and therefore, after all human efforts are duly executed, it would be up to the nature to take care of everything else. However, in a very contrastive way, Xunzi thinks the process of being humanized is like one to straighten a piece of shapeless wood using knife and file or to temper a chunk of metal stone using fire and water. In these cases, the craftsmen have to input their blueprints into raw materials so as to transform them into something with form and order. Emphatically, the power of transformation by no means belongs to those raw materials themselves.

Since Mencius thinks education is to rediscover and enlarge something that is innate to each human individual, the role of teachers, books, and all other pedagogical measures is best to be thought of as being facilitative and heuristic, rather than being deterministic. Therefore, regarding the Classic of Documents which was looked at highly by the Ru school, Mencius said that “I would rather have no such a book called ‘documents’ if I have to believe everything in it.” (Mencius 7B) Similarly, the most honored teachers in the Ru traditions are called “sages” or “sage-kings”; however, since the role of teachers for one’s education was thought of by Mencius as being facilitative and heuristic, he did not believe sages were flawless, perfect and semi-divine beings. Instead, he commented that sages actually share the same innately good part of human nature with every other human being, and the excellence of sages consists in their persistent will to perfect themselves once they make mistakes. (Mencius 2B). Most importantly, since he thinks the nature plays a significant role in the process of one’s humanization, Mencius is pious towards the all-encompassing “heaven” (天, cosmos), and describes the process of education as one of “preserving one’s heartmind, nourishing one’s human nature, and ultimately, serving heaven.” (Mencius 7 A)

Because Xunzi holds a fundamentally different view from Mencius on the point of human nature, he disagrees with Mencius on all the points mentioned in last paragraph as well. Firstly, since the process of humanization does not involve the facilitating role of the nature, the Ruist term, Tian (天), lost its religious connotation in Xunzi’s thought. Instead, Tian was understood by Xunzi as a purely natural process of life-generating; it provides the raw materials for human civilization to thrive. However, whether humans can manage and utilize these materials for their own purposes entirely depend upon human efforts. Xunzi claims that “Rather than following heaven and praising it, why not manage the mandate of heaven, and then, utilize it!” (Xunzi, chapter 17) Secondly, in Xunzi’s pedagogical and political visions, it is up to the teacher with an absolute authority who relies upon their extraordinary intelligence to perceive principles which harmonize the relationships among human and comic being. Therefore, it is also these teachers who design civilizing rituals and rules to transform ordinary human beings’ under-human, inborn dispositions. Accordingly, Xunzi thinks sage-kings, as the most honorable teachers in the Ru tradition, are impeccable, semi-divine figures, and people should never challenge their authority. For instance, when explaining why Yao and Shun did not need to abdicate their thrones, Xunzi denies that these sage-kings could be too old to retain their strength fit for a ruler. He says that:

“As for the Son of Heaven (such as Yao or Shun), his power has the utmost weight, and his body has the utmost ease. His heart has the utmost happiness, and nowhere his intentions suffer being turned back. …. Thus, when he inhabits the palace, he is like a supreme spirit, and when on the move, he is like a heavenly deity … And so I say: there is such things as old age for the feudal lords, but there is no such things as old age for the Son of Heaven.” (Xunzi, Chapter 18, translation adapted from Eric L. Hutton.)

In other words, since the entire country provides the best for their supreme leaders to preserve their life and execute their heavenly intelligence, none of them needs to relinquish their political power to others, and the country would be always governed in a superb way under their leadership.

After I sketch the differences between Mencius and Xunzi as such, I believe you would understand better why, at the beginning of my lecture, I reported that starting readers of the Ru tradition in the west normally feel congenial to Xunzi’s thought. This is because Xunzi’s conception of bad human nature and his related thought on human transformation and government are not only similar to the Christian narrative of human fate as deriving from original sins, but also to the fundamental tenet of liberal philosophy that the state of nature of human beings always involves problems, and thus, it needs a contractual process of sociality and governance to rectify them. Nevertheless, seen from the emic perspective of the Ru tradition, Xunzi’s view that rituals derive from the source of a super-human intelligence alien to ordinary human beings’ inborn dispositions is a significant deviation from his Ruist predecessors. Although it is a good philosophical question to ask which of the contrasting views of Mencius’s and Xunzi’s is the right one from a non-temporal perspective, we still need to contextualize Xunzi’s thought in its historical situation, and thus, ask ourselves: how did this deviation of Xunzi’s thought come about at the first hand?

In order to answer this question, it is helpful for us to recall all the major figures that our course has focused upon so far in the timeline since the beginning of the Ru tradition. They are the sage-kings Yao and Shun, the Duke of Zhou, the philosophers Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), and Xunzi. From an institutional perspective, there were three different kinds of political regimes each of these figures lived in, and thus, the difference surely influenced how these Ru masters envisioned and articulated their Ruist ideals of human society.

In the time of Yao and Shun, the political institution is called the one of abdication, by which a supreme leader, while taking into consideration recommendations made by an assembly of tribal leaders, relinquished their power to a worthy human who normally did not share the same family name with them. The principle of Ru philosophy to embody in this institution is particularly “to treat worthies as worthy” (贤贤), or “to respect worthies” （尊贤）.

However, the institution of abdication cannot be sustained for long since if one tribe becomes much more powerful than others, it may just refuse to abdicate their political powers and instead, take on patrilineal inheritance as the new standard of power transition. This was exactly what happened after the time of Yao and Shun, and Duke of Zhou had furnished the best philosophical articulation of this new feudal system. In the ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou to fit the feudal society, members in the same royal family are enfeoffed; as local leaders, they need to pay regular tributes to the king, and in the time of war and other national businesses, they must follow their king as a supreme leader as well. However, on issues pertaining to the organization of their own states such as economy, taxation, hiring officials, policing, etc., these enfeoffed lords enjoyed a great degree of sovereignty and autonomy. As analyzed in the section on Duke of Zhou, two principles of Ru philosophy were represented in this feudal system: “to treat family as family” (亲亲) and “to treat worthies as worthy.” The implication of the latter principle in the feudal system is easy to understand since local lords and the king need to employ able men to staff their courts; however, the principle of “treating family as family” is particularly important since the power was distributed according to the order of seniority in varying familial lineages, and thus, it would be crucial for maintaining a peaceful political order of a feudal system to abide by a strict family ethic.

The elaborate ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou sustained Zhou Dynasty for quite a while. However, after several hundreds of years, the system was collapsing due to the same reason which once lead to the end of the institution of abdication, viz., in a feudal system, if local lords became too powerful, the king just could not control them. The time of Kongzi and Mengzi was such a period of war when those local lords once enfeoffed by the Zhou kings constantly fought each other. In face of the rampant social and political disintegration, the ideal of Kongzi, as it was followed by Mengzi, was to recover the original ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou. More distinctively, while transmitting ancient cultures, Kongzi and Mengzi distilled a philosophical kernel, viz., the transcendent virtue of Humaneness, from the Zhou ritual system, and hence, created new possibilities for the future development of the Ru thought.

Nevertheless, in the late stage of the so-called Warring State period when Xunzi lived his life, there was a new political institution created by the belligerent states located in the northwestern periphery of the Zhou dynasty. In order to understand the deviation of Xunzi from his Ruist predecessors, the impact of this new institution upon Xunzi’s thought cannot be underestimated. This is the institution of prefecture, by which the administrative power of a state is divided vertically, and the supreme leader retains their ultimate power to appoint officials in varying governmental tiers and to prescribe laws to manage varying offices. The system was designed solely for the purpose of centralizing authority, which turned out to be very effective to militarize a society so as to combat its external enemies.

In a strict sense, this system needs neither to “treat family as family” nor to “respect worthies,” since its political power is distributed among governmental tiers according to neither the pedigree nor the virtue of a governmental official. Rather, as indicated by the most powerful state structured by this institution of prefecture, viz. the state of Qin, which also became the first unified imperial dynasty after the collapse of Zhou, commoners were either rewarded or punished by a set of laws designed for the singular purpose of assisting the central authority to build the domestic order, provide supplies, and win battles against other states in the field. In the intellectual history of ancient China, the philosophy to articulate the rationale of this new system of prefecture is called “legalism,” and it became one most important trend of political thought contemporaneous to Xunzi’s Ruism.

When Xunzi visited the state of Qin, he was impressed by the order of its society and the effectivity of its government. He praised it as “to be at ease, yet bring about order; to act with restraint, yet take care of all details; to be free of worry, yet achieve meritorious accomplishment – such is the ultimate in good government!” (Xunzi, chapter 16). However, being aware of that such an effective governmental system of Qin was based upon an overtly military state ideology, and thus, lacked a moral foundation advocated by the Ru tradition, Xunzi also predicted Qin’s eventual perish.

Therefore, the overall intention of Xunzi’s thought becomes clearer to us after its historical situation gets clarified: in a time of unstoppable political crisis and social disintegration, Xunzi could by no means hold on to the original feudal system which once flourished in the time of Duke of Zhou. In this regard, he welcomed the creation of the system of centralized authority in the institution of prefecture with his full-heart, and saw it as a hopeful means to regain the unity and peace of civilization. However, while judging the prefecture system to have lacked a moral foundation, Xunzi tried to infuse the moral teaching of Ruism with the system so as to create a new type of institution to embody Ruism. While doing so, Xunzi modified the traditional Ruist conception of “rituals” according to the legalist standard of laws, and advocated that it is entirely up to the process of ritualization to transform the innately bad human nature. In other words, what Xunzi intended was to create a state ideology of Ruism to sustain the legalist institution of prefecture.

Since Xunzi’s thought can be understood as such, it will be of no surprise for us to re-read those deified depictions of Ruist sage-kings by Xunzi. Yes, in this Ruist system of prefecture, the central authority can only be envisioned as a supremely intelligent and virtuous human being who design the best rituals and laws to make the entire system revolve around their flawless political gravitas and moral charisma.

However, one final question we ask to Xunzi would be similar to how we would respond to Plato’s idea of philosopher king: is it ever realistic to expect that such a political and moral superhuman can ever be born throughout the entire history of humanity?

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song in the course of “Ru and Confucianism” at Washington College.

When Confucius passed away, his students built schools and academies which furthermore ramified to varying lineages of philosophical and religious thought. Within these lineages, there is one which is particularly favored by later Ruists, and in the second millennium of imperial China, it is also enshrined by scholar-officials as the orthodox version of Ru thought, the so-called lineage of Dao (道统). Allegedly, this lineage started from all those sage-kings discussed by the previous units of our course, such as Yao, Shun, Yu, King Wen, Wing Wu, and Duke of Zhou, continued with Confucius, and then, was finally passed down to Zeng Zi, the immediate student of Confucius as also the alleged author of the text “Great Learning,” to Zi Si, the grandson of Confucius as also the purported author of the text “Centrality and Commonality”, and eventually to Mencius.

As indicated, Confucius, Mencius, Zeng Zi and Zi Si are the authors of four Ru classics: The Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Centrality and Commonality. Overall, these four books formed a new canon system, the significance of which in the second millennium even surpassed the Six Classics that Confucius originally taught in his own school.

However, starting from the 221 B.C.E, the beginning point of Qin Dynasty, Mencius’s status was not that prominent for the Ru tradition in the first millennium of imperial China. Yes, he was as important as being seen as a principal Ru thinker; his book was also taken as having furnished an important interpretation of Confucius’s thought. However, during this earlier period, this interpretation did not grant Mencius the title, the so-called “Secondary Sage” (亚聖), through which later Ruists honored him as the sage only secondary to Confucius.

Why so? Why were the emphases of the Ru tradition during the first and second millennia of imperial China different? The answer to this question can be explained as follows.

There were two vast, long-standing, and unifying dynasties during the first millennium, viz., Han and Tang, and somewhat in-between them was another long period of social disintegration and political division. Seen from a historical hindsight, the most significant moment for the Ru tradition in this earlier period was that under the efforts of Ru scholars in Han Dynasty, Confucius’s teaching was adopted as a state ideology, and thus, established its mainstream status in the intellectual and political history of ancient China once for all. However, this also means that Ruism was seen as a major resource for the statecraft and institutional structures of the emerging and developing imperial system of ancient China. More importantly, those impactful non-Confucian thought in the pre-Qin dynasty still existed and developed in their own terms (for instance, Daoism got established as a religion during this time); also, Buddhism migrated from India, and gradually took a strong root in Chinese people’s spiritual life. In face of all these competing schools and traditions, it took time for Ru scholars to learn, interact, and incorporate their thought. In other words, the politically mainstream status of Ruism and the increasingly diversifying intellectual landscape of ancient China made the Ru tradition predominately focus upon elaborating the “ritual” side of Confucius’s thought, rather than its inner-dispositional aspect of ethics and metaphysics. In other words, because Ruism was dedicated to constructing the political and societal ritual-system of imperial China and to confronting the influence of varying schools of thought, it had not yet developed its own all-compassing, holistic discourse which grounds those political and social rituals upon a sophisticated conception of human nature and furthermore, grounds this conception of human nature upon a cosmology which addresses the most generic features of beings in the universe.

However, the situation changes quite drastically in the second millennium, when the so-called “neo-Confucianism”, viz., the form of Ruism in Song through Ming dynasties, arises and gradually regains the mainstream influence in the areas of ethics, metaphysics, and spirituality. Intellectually speaking, the competition and interaction among Ruism, Buddhism, and Daoism prepare the formation of Neo-Confucianism, and what Neo-Confucianism succeeds to provide is exactly the sort of ethical-metaphysics or metaphysical-ethics that completes the two layers of “grounding” mentioned above. In comparison with Han and Tang Ruism, we also find that Neo-Confucianism systemizes the teaching of the “humane” side of Confucius’s thought, and thus, perfects the systemacity of Ruism into an unprecedented level.

Against this background of the rising of neo-Confucianism, it is easier for us to understand why the status of Mencius was also rising in the same period. That’s because Mencius’s thought provided the backbone elements for the all-encompassing ethical-metaphysics needed by the Ru tradition in that particular historical situation.

Now, let me enumerate several major points of Mencius’s thought to help you understand his major contribution to the Ru thought.

Human Nature is Innately Good.

As explained before, there are three aspects of the golden rule of ethics in Confucius’s thought: 1) the negative: do not do to others you do not want to be done, 2) the positive: do to others what you want to do to yourself, and 3) the corrective: treat people’s wrong-doing to yourself with justice. In another statement (Analects 15.3, 15.24), Confucius also insinuated that this rule is one singlular thread to run through all his teaching.

However, without knowing what one genuinely wants and desires, and thus, having a robust moral standard of right or wrong, we still do not know how to implement the rule. Confucius called the rule “the method of practicing humaneness” (仁之方, Analects 6:30), but without knowing the content of “humaneness” per se, the method has no substance to apply. In other words, without a clarification of what the genuine humanity consists in, the one singlular thread is just a formal string to connect no content.

To continue Confucius’s thought on the concept of “humaneness,” it was Mencius who furnished a systematic and substantial elaboration on what the “genuine self” of each human individual entails, and this also constitutes the most significant philosophical proposition in Mencius’s thought: human nature is innately good.

In a thought experiment (Mencius 2A), Mencius envisions every ordinary human being will spontaneously have a feeling of alarm and fright when seeing a baby about to fall into a well. Accordingly, if one does not act upon the feeling, they will spontaneously have another feeling of shame and disgust. If one succeeds to act upon those feelings and saves the baby, others will look at them with the feeling of respect and deference. Overall, these spontaneous reactions speak to the fact that every ordinary human being has an inner moral sense of right and wrong. So, these four interconnected feelings, the one of the commiseration of alarm and fright, the one of shame and disgust, the one of respect and deference, and the one of right and wrong, were thought of by Mencius as the manifestation of four character traits, viz., four virtues, which define the good part of human nature which distinguishes humans from non-human beings on the earth. And these four virtues are humaneness, rightness, ritual-propriety and wisdom.

Once clarified about what is their genuine humanity, what each human individual remains to do is to nurture and develop these moral sprouts in gradually expanding social circles: family, community, state, and all under the heavens, just as what the three-phase and eight-step program of the Great Learning indicates. For me, this is a very wise way to elaborate the concept of “genuine self,” because it is focused upon virtues and moral excellences, rather than any rigid prescriptive rule to dictate what we should or should not do. In other words, under the general framework of those definitive virtues elaborated by Mencius, each individual can develop their own stable character traits in different situations and regarding different conditions of their life, and this approach to envisioning human self therefore maintains a balance between certainty and flexibility.

In a more general term, I think of Mencius’s proposition “human nature is good” as being both descriptive and prescriptive, since it describes a fact that could happen to humans’ emotional reaction to a certain circumstance, viz., the stimulation of the aforementioned moral sentiments. Moreover, it is also prescriptive since it says that these moral feelings distinguish humans from non-human beings, and thus, everyone “should” hold on to them so as to re-discover and enlarge their humanity.

Another very important nature of Mencius’s proposition, which learners of Ruism nowadays often overlook, is that it is a conditional, rather than categorical statement. It implies that only under certain circumstances, human nature is good. Two such conditions were articulated by Mencius: firstly, humans need to intend to re-discover and maintain our good human nature in terms of seeking education and self-cultivation. (Mencius 4A) Secondly, the societal environment needs to be just and peaceful so that the good part of human nature is encouraged and practiced. (Mencius 6A) More interestingly, Mencius had a very unique thought to connect varying contemplative practices such as sleeping and meditation to his moral philosophy, and hence, this leads to the second most important point of Mencius’s thought:

Sleep well, Breathe deeply, and then, Your Human Nature would be Good.

When addressing the question that since human nature is good, why so many bad things are committed by humans, Mencius thinks that this is like asking why a once verdant mountain can one day become barren. Mencius explains that if you continue to use axes and hatchets to destroy every sprout of plants naturally growing in the mountain, no matter how good the quality of soil is, the mountain still would not provide. By the same token, as long as one has a good sleep during a night, in the morning, they will naturally feel a clearer mind and a more sensitive heart to connect to beings in the world. In this case, people will be easier to feel their sympathy and co-existence with the world so that their innately good human nature is well-kept. (Mencius 6A)

Based upon this exhortation to nourish one’s “night vital-energy,” Mencius furthermore puts forward one most charming aspect of this thought: he is after all a mystic, and says that we should continue to nourish the nightly and early-morning sort of vital-energy up to a point when we can feel a union with the entire cosmos through the medium of these all-pervasive vital-energies, to which Mencius gave a remarkable name: the Oceanic Vital-Energies (浩然之氣, Mencius 2A).

In other words, Mencius states that human nature is and should be good, since, as analyzed, the statement is both descriptive and prescriptive. But why can it be good in the final analysis? That’s because humans evolve from the constantly life-generating process of the cosmos (天). Since the cosmos creates constantly and all-inclusively, each human individual, as a result of cosmic creation, can also take care of themselves and other cosmic beings because ultimately, every being in the universe is interconnected through the all-pervasive oceanic vital-energies.

Because humans are envisioned as being endowed by the cosmos with a mission to manifest the all-creating cosmic power in the human world, Mencius articulates his understanding of human fate, which leads to the third most important point of his thought:

Await, Straighten and Establish Your Fate: a Quasi-Stoic Point in Mencius’s Thought

Similar to the ancient Greek Stoic thought, Mencius believes that a joyful, peaceful, and flourished human life consists in distinguishing what can from what cannot be controlled by human beings. So, fame, wealth, property, approval from others, all of these cannot be fully controlled by human efforts. There is a fatalist element of human life to determine whether one can obtain these things or not. However, Confucius once commented, “whenever I desire to be humane, I can be humane.” (Analects 7.30) Similarly, Mencius thought that whether one can practice good sleeping, breathe deeply to keep mindful and nurture one’s inner energy, and hence, be dedicated to cultivating the aforementioned four virtues rooted in one’s inborn moral sentiments is completely under human control. Therefore, Mencius taught that the focus of an exemplary human’s life should be upon these controllable elements of learning and moral self-cultivation. (Mencius 6A, 7A, 7B) In time, the accumulated efforts of self-cultivation will lead to a feeling of self-contentedness and constant joy no matter what situation one happens to enter.

However, in a slightly different mode from the Stoic counterpart, Mencius also believes that if one constantly focuses upon learning and self-cultivation, viz., the aspect of human life that is under our control, we can gradually change the seemingly uncontrollable aspects of human life as well. In Mencius’s term, this is to “wait for one’s fate.” (俟命, Mencius 7B) In this way, since we choose the right aspects of human life to focus on, Mencius also described the resulted situation of human life as “straightening our fate” (正命, Mencius 7A) ; eventually, we humans can also “establish our fate” (立命, Mencius 7A) in the sense that we fulfill the potential of being a human to the greatest extent, and thus, try our best to serve our cosmic consciousness which aims to advance the life-affirming power of the cosmos in the human world.

So, in a word, if I have to use one sentence to summarize Mencius’s thought in light of its significance in Neo-Confucianism, I will do it as follows:

Find your genuine self in terms of four cardinal virtues, cultivate them using all contemplative practices, and eventually, establish the right path of your fate to fulfill the intimate position of your human life within the cosmos.

Required Reading:

Selections from the book of Mengzi (translated by Bryan Van Norden).

Quiz:

1, Which of the following figures were included in the “lineage of Dao” in Neo-Confucianism:

A) Duke of Zhou
B) Confucius
C) Mencius
D) Xunzi

2, What are the foci of Ru scholars in the first millennium of imperical China?

A) To build the political and social ritual-systems.
B) To interact with varying schools and traditions of thought.
C) To be dedicated to systemizing the ethical-metaphysics of Ru thought.
D) To be dedicated to elaborating the “humane” side of Confucius’s thought

3, Which of the following terms can be used to describe Mencius’s statement that “human nature is good”?

A) Descriptive
B) Prescriptive
C) Categorical
D) Conditional

4, Which of the following moral sentiments are thought of by Mencius as being innate for human beings?

A) Commiseration (fright and alarm)
B) Shame and disgust
C) Right and wrong
D) Respect and yield

5, Which of the following belong to Mencius’s attitude towards human fate?

A) To wait for one’s fate.
B) To straighten one’s fate.
C) To establish one’s fate.
D) To blindly obey one’s fate.

6, please pick up one point of Mencius’s views, and argue your own view about it.