Reading Mencius with Zhu Xi
See how Zhu Xi’s commentary turned the Mencius into a core text of Neo-Confucian learning and recast its sprouts and its human nature in terms of principle and qi.
An original introduction. This guide accompanies the work; it is neither the complete text nor a translation.
Situating the text
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. Zhu Xi’s commentary glosses the Mencius phrase by phrase, choosing among earlier interpretations and adding his own. It reads the goodness of human nature through Cheng Yi’s formula that “nature is principle”: everyone receives the same principle, but the qi in which it is embodied differs in clarity, so moral cultivation must clear away what obscures an originally good nature.
Following the arguments
Nature is principle : Following Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi identifies human nature with the principle that Heaven confers on every being, so its goodness is not a mere tendency but the very order of things present in each person. Sprouts as thread ends : Zhu Xi glosses the “sprouts” as the ends of a thread: feelings such as compassion are visible clues through which an inner nature, which cannot be seen directly, shows itself. Endowed qi : Differences in moral quality come from the clear or turbid qi that each person receives; Zhu Xi quotes the Cheng brothers’ remark that discussing nature without qi is incomplete.
Continuing the reading
Read Zhu Xi’s notes on 2A6 and 6A6 beside the Mencius itself and mark where the commentary brings in terms, such as principle and qi, that the earlier text does not use in this sense. 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.
Zhu Xi kept Mencius’s confidence in human nature but gave it a metaphysics that the original text never states.
Your turn to think.
- What does Zhu Xi gain by calling the sprouts the ends of a thread?
- How can a commentary written to clarify a text also change what it means?
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