The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Mencius lived in an era that seemed to mock Confucius^ hope of restoring the virtuous rule of the early Chou Dynasty. States repeatedly went to war against others, and the losers were annexed by the winners; treaties were made and broken with impunity; thrones were usurped and kings put to death by their courtiers or even by their own sons; prowess on the bat- tlefield was the surest route to preferment at court; and codes of law began to replace the old aristocratic unwritten rules of conduct. Under these circumstances, Mencius devoted his career to an inquiry into human nature: Is human nature fun- damentally good? If it is, what accounts for evil in the world?

Mencius^ answer is that human nature is good but mal- leable. People can easily be led astray; hence the emphasis Mencius, like ali Confucianists, placed on education, and par- ticularly on moral education—an emphasis still honored throughout East Asia today. Beyond that, Mencius stressed the importance of virtuous leadership in creating a just society. The ancient Chinese political theory of the "Mandate of Heaven" held that the benevolent moral force of the cosmos itself would resonate so strongly with the moral character of a supremely virtuous man as to make him not only a natural ruler, but also one invulnerable to challenge. The founder of a dynasty would hand this tradition of virtuous rule down to his descendants, and with it the protection of Heaven that virtue conferred. But if the ruler ceased to be virtuous, Heaven would withdraw its Mandate, and a virtuous rebel would rise to found a new ruling house.

How, asks Mencius, does one know if a ruler has the Mandate? Like responds to like, he points out; if a ruler is vir­tuous, his goodness shining throughout the world will resonate with the goodness of human nature itself. People will flock from everywhere to live under the rule of such a monarch. Or, conversely, they will flee by night to escape the rule of a bad king, or, in extreme circumstances, rise in rebellion against a tyrant. Is it regicide to execute an evil king? No, answers Mencius, because he has already lost the Mandate; he ceased to be a king before he was deposed.

This explains Mencius^ answer to King Hui of Liang: Only by basing his reign on benevolence and righteousness can the king show that he possesses Heaven's Mandate. If he perfects benevolent rule, people everywhere will long to be his subjects. That would surely benefit the king and his domain; but, as Mencius emphasizes, to concentrate on that outcome, rather than on the way to achieve it, would be to accomplish nothing.

The teachings of Mencius helped shape the ethical basis of monarchy in China for two millennia. Of course, no emperor ever felt able to rely only on Mencian "benevolence and right- eousness" to the exclusion of armies and law codes, tax-collec- tors and constables, but the principie that people, being basi- cally good, respond positively to virtuous rule was deeply embedded in Chinese political theory.

I should also note that the intensely social and communitar- ian views of the Confucian school did not go unchallenged; in addition to the Analects and the Book of Mencius you might also want to read the basic texts of Taoism, namely the Tao Te Ching [Daodejing] and the Chuang-tsu [Zhuangzi]. The first

posits a monarchical absolutism based on the rulers attune- ment to the Tao, or universal force; the second takes a stance of radical relativism, and argues for self-preservation through nonentanglement in the affairs of the world.

The Book of Mencius, like most other early Chinese philo- sophical works, was compiled by several hands rather than written personally by its nominal author. But it is accessible and coherent, and worth reading in its entirety. There is, moreover, an important reason for modern Americans to read Mencius: He is a distant ancestor of our own Revolution. In the seventeenth century, European Jesuit missionaries in China sent back glowing reports of the virtue and moderation of Chinese imperial rule, hoping to show that the Chinese were highly civilized and therefore presumably amenable to Christian conversion. The Jesuit letters were read avidly by Leibniz, Voltaire [53], and other leaders of the Enlightenment; Voltaire especially used an idealized vision of China as a plat- form from which to criticize the European rulers of his day. From his writings, and other sources, the Mencian idea that people have the right to rebel against a wicked monarch entered the political climate of the late eighteenth century. In the Declaration of Independence [60] Thomas Jefferson does not quite say that King George III has lost the Mandate of Heaven; but the resemblances between our founding political documents and the collected sayings of an ancient Chinese philosopher are nevertheless not accidental.

J.S.M.

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Attributed to VALMIKI