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?