Mencius

Chinese philosopher

• Born: c. 372 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Zou, China
• Died: c. 289 b.c.e.
• Place of death: China

Through a lifetime of reflection, Mencius clarified and expanded the wisdom embodied in Confucius’s works, rendering Confucian ideas more accessible. His own writings eclipsed other interpretations of Confucius and gained acceptance as the orthodox version of Confucian thought.

Early Life

Mencius (MEHN-shee-uhs) was born probably about 372 b.c.e. in the small principality of Zou in northeastern China, not far from the birthplace of Confucius (551-479 b.c.e.), whose work Mencius spent his life interpreting. Knowledge of Mencius’s early life is scarce. What evidence exists must be extracted from his own writing, most notably the Menzi (first transcribed in the early third century b.c.e.; English translation in The Confucian Classics, 1861; commonly known as Mencius), although many biographical observations are found in the great historian Sima Qian’s Shiji (first century b.c.e.; Records of the Grand Historian of China, 1960).

Mencius was probably a member of the noble Meng family, whose home, like that of Confucius, was in the city-state of Lu, in what is now southwestern Shandong Province. Certainly Mencius’s education was one that was common to the aristocracy, for he was thoroughly familiar with both the classical Shijing (traditionally fifth century b.c.e.; The Book of Songs, 1937) and the Shujing (compiled after first century b.c.e.; English translation in The Chinese Classics, Vol. 5, Parts 1 and 2, 1872; commonly known as Classic of History), which together provided the fundamentals of his classical training. Moreover, he had a masterly grasp of Confucius’s work and quoted it frequently, leading to the assumption that he studied in a Confucian school, purportedly under the tutelage of Confucius’s grandson, who was himself a man of ministerial rank in the central state of Wei.

Known as Menzi to his students, Mencius assumed the role of teacher early in his life and never abandoned it. Rejecting material well-being and position as ends in themselves, he, like many Confucians, nevertheless aspired to hold office inside one of the courts of the Chinese states. He did indeed become a councillor and later the minister of state in Wei. In such positions, he tutored students, not all of them noble, in classical works: the dynastic hymns and ballads anthologized in The Book of Songs and state papers from archives (from 1000 to 700 b.c.e.) that formed the Classic of History. These were works from which, by the end of the second century b.c.e., Confucian precepts developed. During these early years of observation and teaching, Mencius gained disciples, furthered his interpretations of Confucius, and enjoyed considerable renown in many parts of China.

Life’s Work

Mencius was Mencius’s principal work. It appeared late in his life. Had it incorporated less wisdom than his many years of diverse experiences and reflections allowed, or a less lengthy refinement of Confucius’s thoughts, it would not be likely to rank as one of the greatest philosophical and literary works of the ancient world.

Mencius garnered experience through his wanderings and temporary lodgments in various Chinese courts and kingdoms. He was fortunate to live in an age when, despite continuous political turmoil, dynastic rivalries, and incessant warfare, high levels of civility prevailed in aristocratic circles. Teacher-scholars, as a consequence, were readily hosted—that is, effectively subsidized—by princely families eager to advance their children’s education and to instruct and invigorate themselves through conversation with learned men.

Some of Mencius’s temporary affiliations can be dated. Between 323 and 319 b.c.e., Mencius was installed at the court of King Hui of Liang, in what is now China’s Szechwan Province. He moved eastward about 318 b.c.e. to join the ruler of the state of Qi (Ch’i), King Xun (Hsüan). Prior to his sojourn to Liang (although the dates are conjectural), Mencius visited and conversed with princes, rulers, ministers, and students in several states: Lu, Wei, Qi, and Song (Sung).

Mencius’s journeys were not feckless. They related directly to his philosophical and historical perceptions. Like Confucius, Mencius believed that he lived in a time of troubles in which—amid rival feudatories and warring states, divided and misruled—China was in decline. Also like Confucius, Mencius looked back fondly on what he thought had been the halcyon days of Chinese government and civilization under the mythical kings (2700 b.c.e.-770 b.c.e.), when a unified China had been governed harmoniously.

Drawing on Chinese legends incorporated into literary sources familiar to him from the Xia (Hsia; c. 2100-1600 b.c.e.), Shang (1600-1066 b.c.e.), and Zhou (Chou; 1066 b.c.e.-256 c.e.) Dynasties, Mencius concluded that the ideal governments of these earlier days had been the work of hero kings—Yao, Shun, and Yu (Yü)—whose successors had organized themselves into dynasties. These were the sage kings, who, like kings Wen and Wu of the Zhou family, had been responsible for China’s former greatness. Their dissolute successors, however, such as the “bad” kings of the Xia and the Shang Dynasties, were equally responsible for the subsequent debasement of the sage kings’ remarkable achievements and erosion of their legacy.

For Mencius, a vital part of this legacy was the concept of the mandate of Heaven. It was an idea that he ascribed to the early Zhou kings, who justified their authority by it. These kings asserted that they had received the mandate directly from the deity, who designated Zhou rulers sons of Heaven, viceroys of Heaven. Effectively, that charged them with the responsibilities of being the deity’s fief holders. The Zhou kings, in turn, proceeded to impose lesser feudal obligations on their own fief holders and subjects. In Mencius’s view, this arrangement was more than merely an arbitrary justification for Zhou authority; it was also a recognition of authority higher than man’s. Because the mandate of Heaven was not allocated in perpetuity, it was essentially a lease that was operative during good behavior. When rulers lost virtue and thereby violated the mandate, the punishment of Heaven descended on them. Their subjects, their vassals, were constrained to replace them. It was on this basis, as Mencius knew, that the Zhou kings had successfully reigned for four centuries.

Equally important in this hierarchical scheme developed around the Zhou conception of the mandate of Heaven, of sage kings functioning in response to it, were the roles of sage ministers. It was these ministers whom Mencius credited with the rise and harmonious rule of the sage kings. In times when the mandate of Heaven had obviously been forgotten or ignored, Mencius wished not only that this ideal past would be restored but also that his presence at various courts would allow him to identify, assist, and guide potential sage kings, fulfilling the role of sage minister himself or through his disciples.

King Xun of Qi was one of the rulers at whose court he served and for whom he envisioned greatness as the ideal king. Xun, however, appeared lacking in will. King Hui of Liang also showed some promise, but Mencius despaired of Hui when he revealed his desire to rule the world by force. Briefly, Mencius saw potential in the king of Teng (T’eng), who ruled a small principality that, nevertheless, afforded a sufficient stage for a true king. That potential also went unrealized. To critics who charged that Mencius was simply unperceptive, his reply was that such rulers possessed ample ability but had not availed themselves of his services. After these encounters, despairing, he returned home to kindle his belief in the ideal king in the hearts of his disciples.

The basis for Mencius’s initial optimism lay in his interpretation of China’s history, for it reassured him that great kings had appeared in cycles of about five hundred years. Half a millennium lay between the reign of Tang (T’ang), founder of the Shang Dynasty, and Wuwang, first ruler of the great Zhou Dynasty. Consequently Heaven’s dispatch of another sage king, according to Mencius, was overdue. In this interim and in expectation of the sage king’s appearance, men such as himself—“Heavenly instruments”—had divine commissions to maintain the ideal.

There is no evidence that Mencius, any more than Confucius, was successful in the realization of such dreams. Although Mencius served briefly as a councillor, and although his knowledge was profound as well as wide-ranging, he revealed more disdain for than interest in (or understanding of) practical politics in his own highly politicized environment. Furthermore, areas of intellection such as religion, ethics, and philosophy were densely packed with rivals. A number of these, such as Micius (Mo-di; Wade-Giles, Mo-ti) the utilitarian or Yang Zhu (Yang Chu) the hedonist, enjoyed greater recognition and higher status than he did. Nor was Mencius ranked among the leading intellectuals or scholars of his day who were inducted into the membership of the famous Jixia (Chi-hsia) Academy.

Later generations would honor him, but in his own time Mencius was a relatively obscure, evangelizing teacher whose views were merely tolerated, a pedagogue who never penetrated beyond the fringes of power, a man without a substantial following. These conditions help explain his occasional haughtiness, manipulative argumentation, and assertive promulgation of Confucianism. Nevertheless, not until two centuries after his death did Confucian principles gain significant influence.

Thus, Mencius’s work can be examined for its intrinsic merit, outside the context of his own lifetime. He was, foremost, a devoted follower of Confucius. As such, he never wavered in the belief that it was not enough to be virtuous; men also had to model themselves after the sage kings. Antiquity represented the epitome of good conduct, good government, and general harmony. Consequently, the ways of old—or his interpretations of them—had to be accepted or rejected completely.

This position inevitably raised the issue of how the sages of yesteryear had become, both as men and as governors, such ideal models. Had such gifts been divinely bestowed? Mencius believed that they were like all men. This response led him therefore into an elaboration of the central tenets of his philosophy, into an embellishment of Confucius, and ultimately into formulating his major contribution to thought.

Whereas Confucius left only one equivocal observation on human nature, Mencius—probably because the contention of his time demanded it—placed the essence of human nature at the center of his work. Discussions of humanity (ren) and of justice (yi) accordingly became his preoccupations, and, subsequently, because of Mencius, became the focus of Chinese philosophy.

In defining humanity, he declared unequivocally that all men were born sharing the same human nature and that human nature is good. Mencius sought to demonstrate this belief through his maxims and parables: All men were endowed with sympathy for those whose lives were at risk or who had suffered great misfortune; all men felt best when they were instinctively being their best. Thus, all men who cultivated ren were capable of indefinite perfectibility; they were capable of becoming sages. Furthermore, men would find ren irresistible, for it nullified the menaces of brute physical force (ba). Writing with fewer logical inhibitions than had been displayed by Confucius, Mencius asserted that all things were complete within every man: Everyone, in microcosm, embodied the essences of everything: the macrocosm.

Consequently, men who knew their own nature also knew Heaven. In asserting this, wittingly or not, Mencius again went beyond Confucius, for knowing oneself first in order to know everything suggested meditative introspection, whereas Confucius had disparaged meditation and insisted on the superiority of observation and the use of the critical faculty. Mencius stressed the real incentives for the cultivation of one’s humanity. Those who did so enjoyed wisdom, honor, and felicity. When such men became kings, the state was harmoniously governed and prospered. In turn, such kings won over the allegiance of the world, which to Mencius, as to all Chinese, meant China. Ren therefore also afforded men prestige and moral authority that constituted power (de) far greater than any physical force.

Mencius was all too aware of the extent to which his everyday world indicated just the opposite, that is, the appalling conditions men had created for themselves. He was also aware of misapplications of force, either as a result of these problems or as a result of attempts to resolve them. Yet to Mencius, the failure to cultivate one’s humanity lay at the root of these difficulties. He was not naïve about some of the causes of inhumanity. Poverty and the misery of men’s environments, he conceded, often left little chance for cultivating one’s humanity, but that lent urgency to the search for a sage king who could mitigate or eradicate these conditions. He was also aware that men’s appetites, as well as the conditions in which they lived, left little to differentiate them from other animals. Yet, the difference that did exist was a vital one: namely, their ability to think with their hearts.

Justice (yi) was a concomitant to Mencius’s concept of humanity and was also central to his teaching. By justice, Mencius meant not only doing the right thing but also seeing that others received their rights. Clearly the “right things” consisted in part of rituals and formal codes of manners and of traditional civilities. They also embraced rights that were not necessarily embodied in law: the right of peasants to gather firewood in the forests, the right to subsistence in old age, and the right to expect civilities and to live according to traditional codes of behavior. If feeling distress for the suffering of others was, according to Mencius, the first sign of humanity, then feelings of shame and disgrace were the first signs of justice.

Mencius spent his lifetime forming his maxims and parables to illustrate what humanity and justice meant to him, or what he believed they should mean to all men. Appropriately for a teacher, he provoked more questions than he answered; he never arrived at his goal, nor did his disciples. He died about 289 b.c.e., probably near his place of birth on the Shandong Peninsula.

Significance

A devoted Confucian, Mencius expanded and clarified Confucius’s Lun-yü (later sixth-early fifth centuries b.c.e.; The Analects, 1861) and the principles of his master as they were being taught and debated a century after Confucius’s death. Mencius, however, went beyond Confucius by placing human nature and his belief in its essential goodness at the center of philosophical discussion. Officially ranked a sage, he stands among the world’s most respected literary and philosophical geniuses.

Bibliography

Cao Raode and Cao Xiaomei. The Story of Mencius. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2001. A biography that uses Mencius’s life and historical context to illuminate his thought.

Liu, Xiusheng, and Philip Ivanhoe, eds. Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi. Boston: Hackett, 2002. Eight essays, plus a very useful historical introduction, cover different aspects of Mencius’s philosophy and place him in relation to traditional Chinese thought and modern Western philosophy.

Mencius. Mencius. Translated by D. C. Lau. New York: Penguin, 1970. Contains an interesting but dense introduction addressing the problems of dating events in Mencius’s life. One of the best translations available. Five very informative appendices. With useful notes, glossary, and index.

Richards, I. A. Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition. 1932. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2001. Richards concentrates on Chinese modes of meaning as revealed in Mencius. The exploration is designed to see if beneath linguistic barriers there is material for comparative understanding. Thus, though ranking Mencius among the world’s great thinkers, Richards deals critically with Mencius’s methods of argument.

Shun, Kwong-loi. Mencius and Early Chinese Thought. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. An advanced discussion of Mencius’s philosophy, relating his work to that of Confucius, Mozi, the Yangists, and others. After a philosophical and historical introduction, Shun examines key terms and concepts in Mencius’s philosophy. Notes, index, character list, and concordance of Mencius’s works.