Mencius, like his predecessor, Confucius, is better known by the latinized version of his name than as Menge K’e. He developed Confucian doctrines and introduced ideas of his own into the body of Confucian thought.1 His recorded sayings, known as the Mencius, are one of the Four Books, the collection of classical writings that for many centuries formed the basis of Chinese education. The Four Books were the main texts studied for the Chinese civil service examinations which were first instituted in 1313 CE and held annually for six centuries. The literary style of the Mencius is regarded as exemplary.
Little is known of the events of Mencius’ life. A history called the Shi chi (Records of the Historian), written at the beginning of the first century BCE, contains a brief biography but tells us no more than can be sifted from Mencius’ own writing. He was born in the state of Tsou in the province of Shangtung. From the age of 3, when his father died, he was brought up by his mother who worked as a weaver and who dedicated herself to providing an exemplary moral education for her son. Mencius was taught for a time by Tzu Ssu, the grandson of Confucius. He became a teacher and after brief service as an official in the state of Ch’i in the east of China took to travelling between the courts of rulers, advising them on the practices of human government and kingship. But the political unrest that had thwarted Confucius on similar missions prevailed still – indeed, had increased – and was equally thwarting to Mencius.2 He eventually went into retirement with a number of disciples, probably to work on the composition of the Mencius, but it is not entirely clear whether the book was written by Mencius himself or put together by his followers. Even if he did write it himself it is evident from the names and titles of some of the people who feature in it that the version that has come down to us was not completed until after his death.
China underwent profound change during Mencius’ lifetime. Her states were in continual conflict as feudalism gradually gave way to a more centralized kind of government. The era became known as the Time of the Warring States (403–222 BCE) and during it there developed a doctrine known as Legalism which regarded human beings as egotistic in nature and responsive only to reward and punishment. Mencius had scant sympathy with this view. His thought is steeped in the Confucian concepts of human benevolence (jen) and justice, or right conduct (yi), and he held that there is an element of goodness in human beings that is as much part of human nature as the appetites for food and sex.
As well as maintaining Confucian views on benevolence and right conduct, Mencius developed Confucius’ concept of ‘the gentleman’ or ‘superior man’, the person who is deeply humane in both his inward thoughts and outward conduct and who will never do to others what he would not wish to have done to himself. Mencius wrote: ‘Slight is the difference between man and the brutes. The common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the gentleman retains it.’3 What the gentleman retains and develops is the power to think and to rule his life by reason. He is not governed by the attractions and repulsions of the senses; he can engage in moral reflection. Mencius speaks of the heart as the organ of thought and of its having the role of a kind of reflective conscience which should govern one’s life. Unlike many western thinkers, he did not believe in a sharp dualism of mind and body in human beings. He regarded human beings as organic wholes that flourished best when the most valuable elements of the body ruled the lesser ones. In his scheme of things the heart takes precedence because it is the most important organ. However, the heart is not essentially different from the rest of the body so its activity does not generate any problems of interaction between itself and what it governs.
The underpinning of Mencius’ views on human nature is a conception of how things are in the cosmos. The general belief at the time was that the universe consisted of ch’i, a fundamental substance which varied in consistency, its heavier parts forming earth, its lighter and more refined aspects rising to form the sky. A human being was regarded as comprising a mixture of the two, the finer ch’i constituting the heart and the animating breath of the body. In Mencius’ hands this notion of ch’i was developed into something of great moral significance for each individual. At a personal level one’s ch’i was to be thought of as one’s essential being or spiritual personality, the source of human individuality and character. Mencius spoke of his own ch’i as ‘flood-like’ and as ‘in the highest degree, vast and unyielding’.4 His advice concerning ch’i was:
Nourish it with integrity and place no obstacle in its path and it will fill the space between Heaven and Earth. It is a ch’i which unites rightness and the Way . . . It is born of accumulated rightness and cannot be appropriated by anyone through a sporadic show of rightness . . . Whenever one acts in a way that falls below the standard set in one’s heart, it will collapse . . . You must work at it and never let it out of your mind. At the same time, while you must never let it out of your mind, you must not forcibly help it grow either.5
To foster one’s ch’i, that finer part of oneself, is to connect what is earthly with what is heavenly. It is to find the Way (tao), the right life for a human being and one in which the ultimate harmony of the cosmos is celebrated, communicated and shared. This requires the cultivation of a steady disposition of goodwill that is not superficial and is never over-zealous. Virtue is the cultivation of natural propensities. Mencius quotes Confucius as saying of natural goodness: ‘Hold on to it and it will remain; let go of it and it will disappear. One never knows the time it comes or goes, neither does one know the duration.’6
Mencius appeals to ordinary human experience to support his claim that human nature contains some innate goodness. He points out that all children are naturally aware of how to love their parents and that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well will spontaneously endeavour to effect a rescue. He identifies four germs or seeds of innate goodness in human beings. These are the feelings of compassion and shame, courtesy, and a sense of right and wrong. If nurtured properly these seeds grow into the four cardinal virtues of benevolence, dutifulness, decorum and wisdom. Mencius remarks: ‘Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself.’7
In Mencian as in Confucian ethics personal morality is the necessary condition of social and political morality. The benevolence and right conduct practised in personal relationships must manifest them selves in the larger context of compassionate and fair government. Mencius speaks of King Wen, a former ruler of Chou and one who was greatly revered by Confucius, as caring so much for his people that he treated them ‘as if he were tending invalids’.8 He maintains that people will loyally serve a humane ruler, imitating his good example and uniting to produce a peaceful and prosperous state: ‘When the prince is benevolent, everyone else is benevolent.’9 He quotes words thought to have originated in a lost chapter of the Shih-Chi, China’s Book of History: ‘Heaven sees with the eyes of its people. Heaven hears with the ears of its people’,10 and this seems to encompass, once again, the ideas of a natural, innate goodness in people and of the connection of these natural propensities with heaven. The ruler who recognizes all this will foster the natural virtues in his people and so enable them to share more fully in the happiness of heaven.
Mencius consistently asserts the superiority of the thinking person over the one whose life is predominantly given to physical activity. But this is not simply a crude class-division based on occupation. It stems from the view, already mentioned, that true virtue consists in giving precedence to the organ of thought, the heart, rather than to those organs to do with the appetites and senses. Mencius, like Confucius, believed that anyone might become a sage or a ruler or a gentleman; it was a question of cultivating one’s potential for moral goodness.
All Confucianism is deeply imbued with conceptions of orderliness, gradations and appropriateness in all things, and Mencius’ endorsement of those conceptions is particularly apparent in his teaching concerning love and dutifulness within the family. His thought here has to be seen as a response and an opposition to that of Mo Tzu, a teacher who became widely influential early in the fourth century BCE and who rejected many features of Confucian doctrine. Mo Tzu’s ideas were utilitarian in character; actions, customs, pursuits and objects were valued, he maintained, for the benefits or good consequences they yielded. Like the Confucians, Mo Tzu advocated benevolence and righteousness (jen and yi) but his conceptions of them were quite different from those of the Confucians. He maintained that our love for others should be bestowed equally and without discrimination upon everyone whereas Mencius, following the pattern established by Confucius, averred the primacy of love for one’s parents and, thereafter, a graduated bestowal of love from one’s family outwards to society at large. Mencius regarded it as perfectly proper that we should love those close to us more than those who are distant. At the same time he maintained that we should always be extending the scope of our love. ‘Treat your own young’, he says, ‘in a manner befitting their tender age and extend this treatment to the young of other families.’11
Mo Tzu had also criticized Confucianism for its humanistic denial of gods and spirits, arguing that this displeased God and the spirits. He pointed out that the Confucian practice of mourning the death of a parent for three years wasted human life and human resources, as did the playing of music. He maintained too that the Confucian belief in a destiny or fate had the effect of making people lazy, since they thought it useless to struggle against what they saw as a preordained and unchangeable course of events. These are strongly utilitarian themes that exhibit some of the fundamental differences between Mencius and Mo Tzu. Mencius’ view was that it is heaven, rather than gods or spirits, that is important. Heaven is the source and ideal for all that is best in human morality. Heaven is also attainable, at any rate to some extent, since one’s ch’i connects one with it and since all human beings have the seeds of its virtues within them. This contrasts sharply with the Mohist belief that benevolence and virtuous conduct have to be superimposed on human nature and developed by means of rewards and sanctions. With Mo Tzu we are not so much connected with heaven as under the rule of its inhabitants; virtue is to be practised because it produces rewards and benefits, but it is not practised for its own sake.12
Mencius differentiated carefully between kinds of human relationships. He held that father and son should love each other; ruler and subject should be just to each other; husband and wife should distinguish their respective spheres; elder and younger brothers should have a sense of mutual precedence; and between friends there should be good faith.13 These distinctions form the basis of his political thought: society is these relationships writ large and the task of the state is to foster and maintain them, providing the conditions for a moral community. Political life is essentially the life of morality, the development of all those qualities and propensities that distinguish the human world from the world of creatures. The ideal ruler is the sage-king, the wise ruler whose aim is to impart the finest moral education to the people. This is always to be done by example and teaching that win the voluntary allegiance of subjects rather than by the physical force and intimidation characteristic of a military leader. Mencius remarks: ‘When people submit to force they do so not willingly but because they are not strong enough. When people submit to the transforming influence of morality they do so sincerely, with admiration in their hearts.’14 And: ‘It is not by boundaries that the people are confined, it is not by difficult terrain that a state is rendered secure, and it is not by superiority of arms that the Empire is kept in awe. One who has the Way will have many to support him; one who has not the Way will have few to support him.’15
Mencius maintained not only that the people were the most important element in government but also that they had a right to rebel against a ruler to whom the description ‘kingly’ could not be correctly applied. This is a familiar element in the thought of numerous political theorists, ancient and modern, and it has particularly strong affinities with the view of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes maintained that a sovereign might legitimately be rebelled against if he failed to protect his subjects and preserve peace; in short, if he no longer acted in the way implied by the name ‘sovereign’. In a comparable way, both Confucius and Mencius insisted on ‘the rectification of names’, that is, on the conformity of things and persons to the names or titles given them. Interestingly, the philosophical foundations of these similarities are markedly dissimilar. Confucians seem to have believed in the existence of ideal essences which have to be discovered and which give words and terms their meanings. Hobbes, in contrast, completely rejected the notion that there are ideal essences having an existence of their own. His starting point was in the fact that we give names to particular things and that a general term such as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘redness’ is no more than a name ‘imposed on many things for their similitude in some quality’.16
Those familiar with the history of western philosophy often see the relationship between Mencius and Confucius as being much like the relationship between Plato and Socrates. There is a range of similarities. Both Confucius and Socrates were loved for their personal integrity, practical wisdom and incorruptibility. Both had a down-to-earth approach to life and both were predominantly concerned with understanding and developing the moral nature of human beings. Both were succeeded by thinkers – Confucius by Mencius, Socrates by Plato – who developed their ideas into richer and more complex philosophical systems: there are metaphysical and mystical dimensions to the thought of both Mencius and Plato that are not present in that of the predecessors they revered. Mencius’ doctrine concerning the possibility of one’s ch’i finding an affinity with heaven by filling the space between earth and heaven certainly reminds one of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which he pictures the human being as struggling from the shadowy perceptions of a cave-bound life upwards to the sunlit heights where everything is clear in the light of the sun, seen as the symbol of Good.
1 See the essay on Confucius in this book, pp. 125– 131.
2 There is an excellent account of the general political and social background of this era in Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, Vol. I, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983, ch. 2.
3 In D.C. Lau (trans.), Mencius, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, IV.B.19.
4 op. cit., II.A.1 (p. 77).
5 op. cit., II.A.2 (pp. 77, 78).
6 op. cit., VI.A.8.
7 op. cit., II.A.6.
8 op. cit., IV.B.20.
9 op. cit., IV.B.5.
10 op. cit., V.A.5.
11 op. cit., I.A.7 (p. 56).
12 There is a full account of Mo Tzu’s thought and the Mohist school in Fung Yu-lan, op. cit., ch.V.
13 Mencius, III.A.4 (p. 102).
14 op. cit., II.A.3.
15 op. cit., II.B.1.
16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 4 (many editions).
Mencius, trans. D.C. Lau, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970.
Confucius, Lao Tzu, Hui-neng, Tai Chen, Mao Tsetung
Chan, Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963
Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, Vol. I, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983
Fung Yu-lan, The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy, trans. E.R. Hughes, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1947