Confucius had insisted that 'by nature men are very much the same, it is through practice that they drift apart'. But his great follower, Mencius, puts much greater emphasis on the innate goodness of human nature, which he insists is the gift of Heaven to each and every man.
Mencius was born in 372 BC, just over a century after the death of Confucius in 479. He dedicated his life to the promulgation of the teachings of Confucius, but much less is known about his life than that of his mentor. Like Confucius, he tried to find some ruler enlightened enough to adopt the ideas he was teaching, but was equally unsuccessful in this endeavour. China itself had meanwhile changed still further. Although it remained nominally under the rule of the Chou Dynasty, the Emperor was little more than a figurehead, while the era became subsequently known as the 'Period of the Warring States'. The three most important of these were Ch'i in the East, Ch'u in the South, and Ch'in in the West. Eventually Ch'in succeeded in swallowing up all its rivals, but this was not until 221 BC, long after Mencius had died. During the intermediate period the feudal system was gradually replaced by a centralized government which divided the states into separate administrative districts. The sale and purchase of land was legalized and taxed, and laws were passed which applied equally to everyone. But the inter-state conflicts led to more frequent wars on an ever-increasing scale, and the legalistic system encouraged a view of man 'as purely egoistic and motivated solely by the thought of reward and punishment' and bred a growing cynicism towards morality with which Mencius was in profound disagreement.
Mencius himself is widely regarded in China as the greatest writer among the ancient philosophers, and The Book of Mencius, together with the three books by Confucius, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean and The Analects, later became known as The Four Books and were read and memorized by every Chinese schoolboy in his first years at school from the Sung Dynasty onwards until the end of the 19th Century.
Both Jen, human-heartedness, and Yi, right action, are equally central concepts in the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. Confucius had said that 'By nature men are very much the same, it is through practice that they drift apart.' (Analects XVII 2) He highlighted the importance of habit as the main factor creating the personality and determining what man made of his life. But Mencius insists emphatically that, in addition to this, man's nature is innately good. In this belief he radically disagrees with that of Kao Tzu, who held the opposite view, whose opinion he vigorously contests in his writings:
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Kao Tzu said: 'Human nature is like flowing water. Give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give it an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or bad, just as water does not show any preference for either east or west'.
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To this Mencius replies that the analogy is a false one, and that the relevant illustration is that water shows no such equal indifference to flowing upwards and downwards, but always flows down unless constrained temporarily by some outer force. In another passage, he answers a question put to him by a disciple, Kung-tu:
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The disciple Kung-tu said: 'The philosopher Kao says that human nature is neither good nor bad. Some say that human nature can be turned either towards good or towards evil....Others say, some natures are good and some are bad....But now you assert that human nature is good. Are all those opinions then wrong?'
Mencius replied: 'It is in virtue of its innate feelings that human nature may be considered good. That is what I mean in calling it good. If a man's actions are evil, it is not his instincts which are to blame. The feelings of compassion, shame, courtesy, and the sense of right and wrong are common to all men... [They] are not instilled into us from without-they are part of our very being. Only we give them no thought. Hence the saying: "You can have them for the seeking, or lose them through neglect". Some will have twice as much as others, some five times as much, and some incalculably more, but that is because those others have not been able to develop their natural instincts to the full'.
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Mencius says that the command of heaven, Ming, to the individual is to be moral. It is true that man's appetite for food and sex is natural, but there is something more than this. 'Slight is the difference between men and the brute (animals); the common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the superior man retains it.' 'A superior man differs from other men in that he retains his heart.' The word for heart here is hsin. While Mencius insists on the innate goodness of the heart, he emphasizes that it is something which it is very easy to lose. He speaks of it as 'the true heart' or 'the original heart', and says that we lose it by letting go of what we originally possessed. The purpose of learning wisdom by experience is to go after and regain the straight heart, which has been lost by neglect.
According to Mencius, there are four innate tendencies of the heart which are liable to be lost by neglect, but which are themselves the natural endowment of each and every man. The first of these is benevolence, which leads to compassion for the suffering of others and kindness towards them. It is, for instance, what prompts a man who sees a child in danger of falling down a well to go and help him. Secondly, there is what he calls 'the heart of shame', which feels contrition and remorse at the consciousness of one's own moral failures and leads one to feel the urge to reform. Thirdly, there is 'the heart of the feeling of good manners and respect for the feelings of others' [perhaps 'common decency' might better convey the meaning], which recognizes one's duty to society and leads to one's treating others with courtesy and consideration. Lastly, there is 'the heart of conscience' which allows a man to recognize when he has done wrong and to regret and disapprove of it. The last of these faculties is also what leads the individual, when it is fully exercised, to wisdom. Benevolence, righteousness, courtesy and wisdom are not instilled in us from without - they are part of our very being.
The special function of the human heart is this ability to think and to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. The senses cannot discriminate in this way and are attracted by pleasant sights and sounds and repelled by unpleasant ones. They are easily misled by external things, but not so the heart. Mencius said: 'When one thing acts on another in the world, all it does is to attract it. But the organ of the heart can think [and can therefore decide whether or not to accept and follow the suggestion of the senses]. But it will find the answer to this question only if it does think: otherwise, it will not find the answer. This is what heaven has given me'.
This doctrine is very reminiscent of the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita (III. 34):
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Love and hate lie towards the object of each sense; let none become subject to these two, for they are his enemies.
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Shri Shankara in his commentary explains this as meaning that, as regards all sense objects [such as sounds and sights, etc.] there necessarily arises in each sense love for an agreeable object and aversion for a disagreeable object. But by exerting his thought and his faculty of discrimination between what is right and wrong, what is wise and foolish, the individual can free himself from the tyranny of his sensual instincts. Neglecting to do this, man is driven on to commit sin, even reluctantly, by his sinful desires which, greedy and insatiable, obscure the truth and delude the embodied soul by their all-enveloping smoke. (Gita III. 36-40). But by relying on the judgement of the higher mind (buddhi), he can free himself from the bondage otherwise imposed by the senses.
It is in this sense that the Gita later counsels the individual with the words in Chapter 6 :
Let a man raise himself by himself, let him not lower himself; for he alone is the friend of himself, he alone is the enemy of himself.
To him who has conquered himself by himself, his own self is the friend of himself, but to him who has not conquered himself, his own self stands in the place of an enemy, like an external foe.
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Mencius lays a similar emphasis on the power of the heart and mind to free man from the domination of the blind instincts, which are a left-over inheritance of what he shares with the animals [or, in modern post-Darwinian terms, with the residue of his evolutionary past]. But Mencius above all insists on the innate goodness of human nature. This is not something which is only true of the superior man. The 'original heart' (as he calls it) is possessed by all men; a superior man differs from other men in that he 'retains his heart'. This 'retaining of the heart' is most necessary to emphasize because it is something very easy to lose. He speaks of someone who loses his sense of shame and comes to perform action which he would not have thought of, even to escape death, until he had lost his 'original heart'. It is not that he did not originally have it, says Mencius, but he has let go of it, and the purpose of education is to go after this precious faculty which has strayed and to bring it back.
But the mere possession of the heart is not enough; we must use it actively to think about what we are doing. To have it and not to use it is to sink to the level of the animal. It is thus, according to Mencius, the most important thing in our life, but it is up to us to recognize its importance and do something about it. In this he echoes the teachings of the Gita about the need to learn to live consciously and skilfully if we are to realize our full spiritual potential. We need to make wise decisions about what is really important in our lives and not just drift along with the tide.
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Mencius said: 'Suppose there is a man whose fourth finger is crooked and cannot be straightened out, yet without causing him pain or inconvenience. If there is a healer in Ch'in or Ch'u [i.e. a long way away in another country] who could straighten it for him, he would cheerfully travel that distance, simply because his finger is not so good as other men's. The fact that it not so good as other men's causes him to feel annoyance, but the fact that his moral nature is not so good as other men's has no such effect. This is called lacking a sense of proportion.'
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It is the heedlessness of the ordinary man which leads inexorably to the loss of the heart and, with it, of human-heartedness or jen.
Man is free to rise or fall because his heart and mind allows him to decide what path he will follow; the great secret that he has to realize and make use of is that habit can and does become second nature willy-nilly in the course of time. His choices make him the architect of his own fate. What you make of yourself depends on your own choices, whether deliberate or thoughtless, and your choices are the major factor determining your own future life.
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The disciple Kung-tu asked, saying: 'Human nature is common to us all. How is it, then, that some are great and some are small men?'
Mencius replied: 'Those that follow their higher nature are great men; those that follow lower nature are small men.'
Kung-tu said: 'Seeing that all alike are men, how is it that some follow their higher nature and some their lower nature?'
Mencius replied: 'The function of the eye and the ear is not thought, but is determined by material objects; for when objects impinge on the senses, these cannot but follow wherever they lead. Thought is the function of the mind: by thinking, it achieves; by not thinking, it fails to achieve. These faculties are implanted in us by Nature. If we take our stand from the first on the higher part of our being, the lower part will not be able to rob us of it. It is simply this that constitutes the great man.'
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The sage is the ideal of both Confucius and Mencius, but Mencius puts much more emphasis than his teacher on the role of heaven in achieving it:
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Our body and its functions are bestowed on us by God; but a man must be a sage before he can fulfil those functions aright.
Mencius said: 'The desire of the mouth is for taste, of the eye for colour, of the nose for smell, of the four limbs for ease and repose - these are the things ordained by our nature; but the princely man does not think of them thus when the Will of God intervenes. Love between father and son, duty between sovereign and subject, ceremony between host and guest, wisdom among the worthy, the Way of Heaven for the Sage - these are things ordained by God; but the princely man does not think of them thus when they become second nature.'
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For Mencius the morally perfect sage is also the spiritually perfected man, who achieves Knowledge of God, and of his own divine nature:
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Mencius said: 'He who gets to the bottom of his mind comes to know his own nature; knowing his own nature, he also knows God. Preserving one's mind in its integrity and nourishing one's nature is the way to serve God. To practise self-cultivation and await whatever may betide, indifferent whether life be long or short: that is the way to establish one's destiny.
All things are complete within us. There is no greater joy than to return on oneself and find a clear conscience there. If we strive for charity in our conduct, we shall find ourselves near the goal of perfect virtue.
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