Mencius

Key ideas

1. Human nature is good. Mencius holds that people are by nature directed towards goodness. In Legge’s translation, “The tendency of man’s nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards”; people go wrong through circumstances and neglect, not because their nature is bad.
2. The four sprouts. Everyone has four innate feelings: compassion, shame, deference and a sense of right and wrong. They are the sprouts (duan) of benevolence (ren), rightness (yi), ritual propriety (li) and wisdom (zhi), and they become virtues only if they are cultivated.
3. The child at the well. Anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and distress, and not in order to win favour, earn praise or escape disrepute. Mencius takes this unreflective reaction (2A6) as evidence that compassion belongs to human nature.
4. Extension and cultivation. Virtue grows by extending a feeling from the cases where we already have it to similar cases: King Xuan of Qi spared a frightened ox, and Mencius told him that the same feeling, extended, would make him a good ruler (1A7). The process cannot be forced, as the farmer of Song learned who pulled at his corn to help it grow (2A2).
5. Flood-like qi. Mencius says he is good at nourishing a vast, flowing qi (haoran zhi qi), which is built up by the steady accumulation of righteous deeds and not by the occasional heroic act. It is his image for the moral energy of a person whose conduct and conscience agree.
6. The people come first. Moral concern must come before profit, and a ruler must secure the people’s livelihood, since without it they cannot keep a steady heart. In the Legge translation, “The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the lightest” (7B14).
7. Rulers can lose the right to rule. Asked whether a minister may kill his sovereign, Mencius replies that a ruler who outrages benevolence and righteousness is a “mere fellow” and that killing him is not killing a sovereign (1B8). Heaven’s favour, on this view, follows the people’s welfare.

Mencius (Mengzi, “Master Meng”; born Meng Ke; c. 372–289 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period and the most influential interpreter of Confucius. He argued that human nature is good: everyone has the sprouts of virtue, and a good life and a good state come from nourishing them. Later tradition called him the Second Sage, second in esteem only to Confucius. “Mencius” is a Latinisation coined by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. His thought belongs to Confucianism and, more widely, to Chinese philosophy, where it is the chief source of the view that ethics grows out of human feeling.

What do we know about his life?

Less than tradition suggests. Mencius was born in Zou, a small state next to Confucius’s Lu, in what is now Shandong, and his dates are approximate. He is said to have studied under Confucius’s grandson Zisi, which the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes most scholars doubt. He travelled between the courts of the age advising rulers, held office for a time in the state of Qi, and in the end retired from public life, disappointed that no ruler would reform. The stories that his mother moved house three times to find a good neighbourhood for him are legends rather than history.

What is the Mencius?

It is a book of dialogues with rulers, disciples and rival thinkers. The received text has seven books, each in two parts (A and B), so that passages are cited like 2A6 or 7B14. It was probably compiled by his disciples or their successors, and the version we read was edited and shortened by Zhao Qi in the second century CE. Unlike the short sayings of the Analects, many passages are sustained arguments, with objections and replies.

Is human nature good?

Mencius says yes, and defends the claim against Gaozi, for whom nature is like a willow from which cups and bowls can be carved, or like water that runs east or west as it is channelled. Mencius answers that water does not run indifferently up or down: “The tendency of man’s nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards” (6A2, Legge). Force can make water leap over your forehead, but that is the force and not the water’s nature.

Nature, for him, is what a thing becomes when it is properly nourished, not what is found in every specimen. On Ox Mountain (6A8), trees near a large city are cut down and the new shoots are eaten by cattle and goats; visitors see the bare slope and think it never bore timber. “But is this the nature of the mountain?” he asks. People who seem to lack goodness have likewise been stripped of what would have fed it. Xunzi, in the next century, took the opposite view, and the two disagree partly over what “nature” means.

What is the child at the well?

In 2A6 Mencius says that if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, “they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress”, and not as a ground for gaining favour with the child’s parents or praise from neighbours. From the case he infers four feelings that belong to everyone: commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving. They are the beginnings of ren (benevolence), yi (rightness), li (ritual propriety) and zhi (wisdom), which Legge calls “principles” and many later translators call “sprouts”.

Compare Peter Singer’s drowning child. Singer’s case is used to argue about what we owe; Mencius’s is used to show what we are like.

How does virtue grow?

By cultivation, and by extending a feeling beyond the case that prompts it. In 1A7 King Xuan of Qi spared an ox led to slaughter, saying he could not bear its frightened look, and Mencius told him that the same feeling, extended to his people, would make him a true king. The growth cannot be forced. A man of Song, grieved that his corn was not growing, pulled it up to help, and it withered (2A2).

In the same passage Mencius describes his own training as nourishing a “vast, flowing passion-nature”, the haoran zhi qi, which is “produced by the accumulation of righteous deeds”. It is built by steady practice, not by single acts, which fits the wider virtue ethics reading of him.

What did he say about government?

Rulers must put benevolence before profit. He opens by asking King Hui of Liang, “Why must your Majesty use that word ‘profit?’” (1A1). They must also secure the people’s livelihood: if people lack a certain livelihood, “it follows that they will not have a fixed heart”, and punishing them afterwards is “to entrap the people” (1A7). “The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the lightest” (7B14).

A ruler who outrages benevolence and righteousness forfeits the title. Asked by King Xuan whether a minister may kill his sovereign, Mencius says of the last Shang king, Zhou, that the people had cut off a “mere fellow”, not put a sovereign to death (1B8). He also attacked rival schools: Yang Zhu’s “each one for himself” ignores the claims of the sovereign, and the principle of Mozi, “to love all equally”, ignores the particular affection due to a father (3B9).

What came after him?

Xunzi and the Daoist Zhuangzi criticised him in his own age. After a long period in which the Mencius was one text among many, the Tang writer Han Yu singled him out as the “most pure” follower of Confucius, and the Neo-Confucians took up his arguments. Zhu Xi grouped the Mencius with the Analects, the Great Learning and the Mean as the Four Books, and generations of students memorised them for the civil service examinations until the early twentieth century. His emphasis on inner cultivation also shaped Wang Yangming.

How should you start reading Mencius?

Begin with Mencius on human nature, which has 2A6 and Book VI, Part A in Legge’s translation. Then read 1A1 and 1A7 for the politics, and 2A2 for the qi and the man of Song. For the teacher he is interpreting, read Confucius in the Analects, and then Xunzi’s reply in Xunzi.