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.