Mencius

Mencius, the Latinised form of Mengzi, "Master Meng", was a Chinese philosopher of the fourth century BCE and the most influential Confucian thinker after Confucius himself. He argued that human nature is good, that every person carries the beginnings of virtue, and that a ruler who oppresses his people loses the right to rule. Honoured in later centuries as the "Second Sage", he shaped the moral and political thought of China, Korea and Japan for more than two thousand years.

Mencius was born Meng Ke in the small state of Zou, close to Confucius's home state of Lu, in what is now Zoucheng in Shandong province. The dates usually given, about 372 to 289 BCE, are traditional estimates. His father is said to have died when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother, who became a model of devoted motherhood in Chinese tradition. In the best-known story she moved house three times, from beside a cemetery, where the boy played at funerals, then beside a market, where he played at trading, and finally beside a school, where he began to imitate the scholars.

He is said to have studied with disciples of Zisi, the grandson of Confucius, which placed him in a direct line of teaching from the master about a century after Confucius's death.

Mencius lived in the Warring States period, when the authority of the Zhou dynasty had collapsed and powerful kingdoms fought for supremacy. Like Confucius before him, he spent many years travelling between courts with a group of followers, trying to persuade rulers to govern by benevolence. He met King Hui of Liang (the state of Wei) and King Xuan of Qi, and spent time at the Jixia Academy in the Qi capital, a gathering place for scholars of many schools. He also advised the ruler of the small state of Teng. He was treated with respect and well paid, but no ruler adopted his programme, and he eventually retired to teach and, with his disciples, to compile his conversations. He took three years away from office to mourn his mother, as Confucian ritual required.

The central claim of Mencius is that human nature is good. He did not mean that people are born already virtuous, but that everyone has natural moral tendencies that can grow, like sprouts, into full virtues if they are cultivated and not damaged. His most famous illustration asks the reader to imagine suddenly seeing a small child about to fall into a well. Anyone, he says, would feel a jolt of alarm and compassion, not to win the parents' favour or the praise of neighbours, but spontaneously.

He identified four such "sprouts": compassion, which grows into benevolence (ren); shame and disdain, which grow into righteousness (yi); deference, which grows into propriety (li); and the sense of right and wrong, which grows into wisdom (zhi). People become bad not because their nature is bad but because circumstances, neglect or poverty stunt it, as a once-wooded mountain becomes bare after constant logging and grazing.

Mencius defended this view in debates recorded in his book, especially against a thinker named Gaozi, who held that human nature is neither good nor bad, like water that flows east or west depending on the channel cut for it. Mencius replied that water may flow either way, but it always tends to flow downwards; so human nature tends towards goodness.

From his view of human nature Mencius drew a political philosophy. A good ruler practises "benevolent government": light taxes, mild punishments, care for the old and the orphaned, and land arrangements, such as the "well-field" system he described, that let families feed themselves. A people secure in their livelihood would then be open to moral education. He told rulers that such policies, not conquest, were the path to true kingship, and that the people would flock to a humane ruler as water flows downhill.

He also taught that the people matter most, the altars of the state come next, and the ruler matters least. Heaven's mandate to rule, he argued, is revealed through the acceptance of the people. When King Xuan asked whether it was right that ancient founders had overthrown and killed the tyrants of earlier dynasties, Mencius replied that a ruler who destroys benevolence and righteousness is a mere "fellow", and that killing such a man is not the murder of a king. This justification of resistance to tyranny made Mencius a challenging figure for many later emperors.

Mencius saw himself as defending the Confucian way against rival teachings that were spreading widely. He attacked Yang Zhu, who put the preservation of one's own life first, for denying one's duties to the ruler, and the followers of Mozi, who preached equal concern for everyone, for denying the special duties owed to one's own father. Both, he said, reduced humans to the level of beasts. His position, that love naturally starts with family and extends outwards by degrees, became a defining feature of Confucianism.

The book Mencius, in seven parts, records his conversations with rulers, disciples and opponents. It is lively and argumentative, and probably took its final shape after his death. A generation or two later the Confucian Xunzi rejected his view of human nature and argued that it is bad, and for centuries Mencius was one master among several.

His standing rose sharply during the Song dynasty, when Neo-Confucian scholars built their philosophy on his ideas of human nature and moral cultivation. Zhu Xi made the Mencius one of the Four Books, with the Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, and from 1313 these texts, with Zhu Xi's commentaries, formed the core of the imperial examinations. Every educated man in China learned Mencius by heart. His thought was equally central to Wang Yangming, whose idea of innate moral knowledge grew directly from the Mencian sprouts.

His political teaching occasionally drew imperial anger. The founder of the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor, offended by the passages about tyrants, removed Mencius from the official Confucian temple for a time and later had an expurgated edition made.

In modern times Mencius has been read as an early voice for the idea that government exists for the good of the governed, and his account of moral sprouts has drawn interest from philosophers and psychologists studying moral emotions. His family temple and tomb in Zoucheng remain places of pilgrimage. He stands, with Confucius, at the centre of Chinese philosophy and the intellectual history of China.