Mencius
Mèngzǐ·4th century BCE
Mencius (Mengzi) is the thinker later Confucians called the Second Sage. Readers come for two claims that still argue: human nature holds the sprouts of goodness, and a ruler’s first duty is benevolent government (renzheng), because the people are the root of the state.
Who was Mencius?
He lived a century and more after Confucius, in a period when the old states were eating each other, and he spent his life speaking with rulers who wanted territory. He answered with moral psychology. If you can’t bear to see an ox led to slaughter, you already have the seed of a government that can’t bear to see its people harmed. That isn’t an argument that people are already finished sages. It’s an argument that the seed is there, and that a court can water it or trample it.
What did Mencius teach?
The four sprouts
Compassion, shame, deference, and a sense of right and wrong: four sprouts that can be grown into humaneness, rightness, ritual, and wisdom. Leave them untended and they wither. The famous version of this argument is the child at the well.
“Suppose someone suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well. Anyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion.”
— Mencius 2A6 · 今人乍见孺子将入于井，皆有怵惕恻隐之心 · translated from the Chinese
Mencius is careful about why. The feeling, he says, doesn’t come from wanting the parents’ favour or a reputation in the village. It arrives before calculation, which is what makes it evidence about human nature rather than about manners. The four named sprouts follow on from it:
“The heart of compassion is the beginning of humaneness; the heart of shame and dislike is the beginning of rightness; the heart of deference and compliance is the beginning of ritual; the heart of approval and disapproval is the beginning of wisdom.”
— Mencius 2A6 · 恻隐之心，仁之端也；羞恶之心，义之端也；辞让之心，礼之端也；是非之心，智之端也 · translated from the Chinese
This is his reply to the harder readings of human nature available in his own century, including the one Xunzi would later write down. Notice what he isn’t claiming. A sprout isn’t a tree.
The child's heart
“The great person is one who has not lost a newborn’s heart.”
— Mencius 4B12 · 大人者，不失其赤子之心者也 · translated from the Chinese
The old translation “the great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart” reads as sentimentality now, and that reading has made the line useless. 赤子 is a newborn: red, unformed, entirely unprotected. The claim is not that powerful people should stay naive. It is that the capacity to be moved is the instrument of the whole moral psychology above, and that power which requires you to lose it has already failed at something important.
Benevolent government
Renzheng means a court judged by whether the people can live. Mencius offers King Xuan of Qi the ox he could not bear to see killed, and then asks him why that pity stops at animals.
“I could not bear its shivering, like an innocent going to its death.”
— Mencius 1A7 · 吾不忍其觳觫，若无罪而就死地 · translated from the Chinese
The exchange is the best political writing in early China, because nothing in it is abstract. A man refuses to watch an ox shake, substitutes a sheep, and is accused by his own people of stinginess. Mencius takes his side, and then turns it: this is exactly the feeling a king needs, and it is the one thing he refuses to extend.
Which Mencius quotes are misread, and which is misattributed?
Mencius attracts fewer inventions than Confucius does, partly because his lines are longer. What he attracts instead is compression, and the compressions turn him into someone he isn’t.
Did Mencius teach that human nature is good?
He taught that it has four beginnings, 端, which is a different claim in a way that matters enormously. A beginning can be grown, neglected, starved, or uprooted. His own illustration is agriculture, and elsewhere he talks about a mountain whose trees were all cut down until people assumed the mountain had never grown trees. “Human nature is good” is the slogan version. The Mencius is arguing that goodness has a native root, which is not the same as saying it has no work attached.
Is "The people are the most precious" a democratic statement?
No, and the sentence that follows is the interesting part. Here is the whole of 7B14 in sequence:
“The people are the most precious; the altars of soil and grain come next; the ruler counts for least. Therefore to win the confidence of the common people is the way to become a true Son of Heaven. When a feudal lord endangers the altars, he is replaced. When the sacrifices have been made and the offerings are pure, and still there is drought or flood, then the altars are replaced.”
— Mencius 7B14 · 民为贵，社稷次之，君为轻 · translated from the Chinese
Rulers get replaced. So do the gods, if they stop delivering. He isn’t offering the people a vote; he is telling a king what his job is conditional on, and it is the most dangerous thing in the book to say out loud in front of a king.
Did Mencius say "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you"?
“Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.”
— Not Mencius. Analects 15.24 · 己所不欲，勿施于人 · translated from the Chinese
Not his. The line belongs to the Analects, 15.24, where Confucius gives it as the single word that could guide a whole life. Mencius gets credited with it in quote collections because he talks about reciprocity constantly, most noticeably in 7A4, where he says that pressing hard on reciprocity is the shortest road to humaneness, and in the argument that a king who has no joy while his people suffer isn’t really enjoying anything at all.
How to sit with him
Read the Mencius after a first pass through the Analects. Sit with 2A6, the child at the well, and 1A7, the ox. Then read Xunzi on the same question of human nature, since he trusted education more than native inclination. The disagreement between the two is the point of the shelf, and both men thought they were defending Confucius.
What he prized
Four sprouts
Goodness is not imported. It is grown from compassion, shame, deference, and a sense of right and wrong.
Benevolent government
Renzheng: a court is judged by whether the people can live, not by whether the ritual is splendid.
The people as root
The ruler is the lightest of the three. Lose the people, and the altars do not save you.
The child’s heart
Greatness is not a thicker skin. It is not losing the capacity to be moved.
Key work
The central text of Mencian Confucianism: the sprouts of human goodness, and the claim that a king who cannot bear the people’s suffering has no right to call his rule benevolent.
Questions People Ask
Who was Mencius?
A Warring States Confucian, often called the Second Sage. He argued that human nature holds sprouts of goodness and that a ruler’s first duty is benevolent government.
What is Mencius’s view of human nature?
Mencius argues that human beings possess natural “sprouts” or beginnings of four moral tendencies: compassion, shame, deference, and a sense of right and wrong.
How is Mencius different from Confucius?
Confucius focused strongly on moral education, virtue, and social relationships, while Mencius further developed ideas about human nature and righteous government.
What is the most famous Mencius quote?
In the Chinese-speaking world it is almost certainly “The people are the most precious; the altars come next; the ruler counts for least” (7B14). In English it is “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart” (4B12), which is usually quoted without noticing that 赤子 means a newborn rather than a child.