Cultivate the sprouts of goodness that every heart already holds.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present the Mencius, Zhu Xi’s commentary and Xunzi’s chapter “Human Nature Is Bad”. The Mencius was compiled by disciples, the second work is a commentary written some fifteen centuries later and the third a critic’s reply, so only the first transmits Mencius’s own teaching. Translations, Zhao Qi’s commentary and modern studies are not indexed; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
01c. 320–250 BCE
Sima Qian reports that Mencius, after withdrawing from public life, composed the work with Wan Zhang and other disciples, but its narration and the honorific titles given to some disciples suggest that followers edited it. Zhao Qi, who died in 201, fixed the received text in fourteen parts and set aside four further books as spurious; the standard references, such as 2A6, follow that division.
02c. 250 BCE
Xunzi, the most important Confucian thinker after Mencius, taught at the Jixia academy in Qi and later served as magistrate of Lanling in the state of Chu; Han Fei and Li Si studied with him. His essays were arranged by the Han librarian Liu Xiang, and “Human Nature Is Bad” is chapter 23 of the received text. In another chapter he attacks Zisi and Mencius by name for distorting Confucius’s teaching.
031190
Zhu Xi (1130–1200) worked on the Four Books for decades and in 1190 printed his commentaries on the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean together. In 1313 the Yuan court made these interpretations the standard for the civil service examinations, and they remained the official reading of the Mencius until the examinations were abolished in 1905.