Cultivate the sprouts of goodness that every heart already holds.
Mencius holds that every heart has four sprouts (duan): compassion, shame, deference and the sense of right and wrong. Cultivated, they grow into benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety and wisdom, as surely as a seed grows when it is tended.
A passer-by who flinches and reaches out when a toddler totters towards an open well shows the sprout of compassion before any calculation.
To say that human nature is good is to say that people tend towards goodness as water tends to flow downhill. Wrongdoing comes from neglecting or damaging that tendency, not from what people are by nature.
Ox Mountain was once wooded; axes and grazing herds left it bare, yet no one should conclude that trees are not part of the mountain’s nature.
A ruler who extends the compassion he already feels governs humanely: he lightens taxes and punishments, secures a stable livelihood for the people and only then teaches them. Without a constant livelihood, Mencius says, most people cannot keep a constant heart.
King Xuan of Qi spared an ox he saw trembling on its way to sacrifice; Mencius asks him to extend the same feeling to his own people.
The flood-like qi is a moral courage that grows from consistently doing what is right. It must be nourished patiently: one should neither forget it nor try to force its growth.
A farmer of Song, impatient with his crop, tugged at every sprout to help it grow; the next morning the whole field had withered.