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Of One Mind or Two? Query on the Innate Good in Mencius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Whalen Lai
Whalen Lai
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Extract

Every man, says Mencius, has within him this mind (heart) of commiseration, this pu-jen chih hsin that cannot bear to see another person suffer. To support his argument, Mencius cites the parable of the child about to fall into a well. A man with an innate mind of compassion unable to bear to see the child suffer would naturally feel the urge to run ahead to save the child (Mencius 2A.6). Yet elsewhere in Mencius 4A.17, it appears that had the potential victim been a drowning sister-in-law, the man would also be momentarily checked by a fear of impropriety. Since the sense of propriety has its beginning in the mind as much as the sense of compassion, is not the mind of goodness somehow divided against itself? The present essay will examine this possible dilemma.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 247 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 All references to passages in the Mencius will henceforth be given in parentheses within the text.

2 Dutifulness i is often translated as righteousness.

3 Mencius trans. Lau, D. C. (1970), p. 82Google Scholar, but formatted here differently for clarity's sake.

4 Recent scholarship has reconstructed better the thoughts of Yang Chu and Mo-tzu, see especially the works of Graham, A. C. (1967, 1978).Google Scholar

5 The third line ‘because he abhors the (child's) cry’ may be read as ‘because he loathes (his own) reputation’ (for not acting).

6 Though the opposite can also happen. That is, as her passion or ch'i united her will or chih, she could have done the seemingly impossible – she leapt over the well and plucked her child to safety. On this double psychology of ch'i and chih as related to yang or courage, see Lai, (1968).Google Scholar

7 On the possibility that Kao-tzu combined Confucian sentiment and Mohist logic, see Lai, (1984).Google Scholar Kao-tzu would treat the man's reaction to the child in the following manner. The man's animal nature would care only for its own preservation; like Yang Chu, nature at that level is just instinct, food and sex. Upon seeing the child of his own species, however, a higher self-definition takes over. If it is one's child, the man would feel a natural love for it. This feeling is also spontaneous; it is called ‘inner’. If the victim is somebody else's child, Kao-tzu would see this as an ‘outer’ obligation, a social duty of homo politicus. At that level, he would still feel pressed to save the child – for its ‘good’ (Kao-tzu prefers the emotive, non-utilitarian term, to its ‘delight’). Mencius ruled out as inadequate this morality based on compartmentalized commitments. For him, the seminal good (the compassion for the child) is universal, not socio-obligatory. When nursed, and wedded to what he called the ‘inner righteousness’, this highest good would deliberately ‘renounce life to fulfil humaneness’. Mencius has this unconditionality that is lacking in Kao-tzu. He who loved life and honour, like he would fish and bear's paw, would however loathe dishonour more than death itself.

8 The Christian tradition faced with the suffering innocent might ask ‘Why would God let children suffer?’ The Buddhist tradition faced with the same would conclude ‘That life is all suffering’. (children suffer because of past karma). But Mencius built his philosophy not on the Why of Justice or the That of Facticity. The ‘why?’ and the ‘that’ are consequent to reflection. Mencius insisted on tapping instead the pre-reflective pang of pain we feel in sighting the child instead.

9 The child metaphor is new. It was not central in the Hebrew Bible (because the Torah was not meant for the child) but it made its appearance in the teaching of Jesus (as the Kingdom of God is likened unto it). The shift shows a critique of culture and learning. So too, the child metaphor as one born ‘true to Heaven’ – guileless and uncorrupted by society – is more native to Taoism. It was not there in Confucius, Yang Chu, Mo-tzu or even Kao-tzu, but it appeared in Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, and here in Mencius, who is suspected by some scholars to have been influenced by the Ch'i tradition. See Lai, (1986).Google Scholar In being anti-culture, the child metaphor can also be trans-cultural, universalistic, and cosmopolitan.

10 Killing an evil king is no regicide; only a robber has been killed. Nudging the evil man over the edge can even be deemed aiding the course of Heaven. (See 5A.6).

11 King Hsüan would ask a sheep to be substituted for the ox. This may not be a very sensitive act, but it shows how the ‘seeing’ is important. Mencius used the occasion to argue how, if the king has seen the suffering of his subjects, he would also be more compassionate. The same logic lies behind the gentleman's practice of living away from the kitchen – so as not to see the animal slaughtered. Mencius would not be a vegetarian though. That was left to the Chinese Buddhists.

12 Lau, trans. (1970), p. 124.Google Scholar

13 Ch'uan ended up in the Legalist vocabulary to denote precisely the kind of exercise of power and political expediency that Ts'ao Ts'ao was famous for (see Tsai-Ling tun's characterization of him). Such ch'uan is what Mencius would denounce as immoral. The word was later adopted by Buddhists to translate upaya, until Kumarajiva decided against it and coined the term fang-pien.

14 In the West, the rule of chivalry might dictate that one saves the more helpless of the two victims, especially if the other female is a much younger girl. Although China was not ignorant of the idea of ‘children and women first’, Mencius would consider it contrary to our natural feeling not to save one's own kin first. Why this should be so is explained by Mencius in another parable, directed against a Mohist, in 3A.5; naturally we would give a proper burial to our parents because we cannot bear to see their bodies mauled by wild animals. (Confucians would not mourn just any dead nor bury a non-kin corpse automatically). In practice, this means that one should always save one's father first, not one's son or spouse, though one's lord might take precedence at times. But if the rule of chivalry is artificial, so is the rule in China that one should try to first save the son of one's elder brother at the expense of one's own son, so contrary to any parent's natural inclination.

15 Etiquette demands that the doctor does not undress her but rather turns his back as the patient undresses herself. On the face-saving rituals built into our everyday behaviour, see Erving Coffman (1959) or practically any of his books.

16 Whether the incest taboo is ‘natural’ to human nature as Mencius would see it or whether it is just ‘necessary’ to counter ‘human nature’ as Freud would see it; whether we are essentially homo politicos or whether civilization is the result of repression – we do not presume to consider them here.

17 Some of the inflexibility of Mencian ethics may not be due to Mencius himself. It could well be due to the fact that Chinese education too often stops at ‘learning the rites’ and that the patriarchal system disallowed, all too often, even mature sons to make their own decisions at their own discretion. Fathers can still cane sons even after the ‘crowning ceremony’. Marriage is often when that would stop.

18 That a child might not run to save the other child does not show that he has no mind of compassion. He does. Often one child cries and, by mere empathy, another would too – for no good reason. Here it is just that he has no sense that the fall would bring pain and death to his playmate.

19 The word i (righteousness, rightness, dutifulness) is read as ‘what is proper (i) to a situation’ in the series of the four virtues given earlier. There, it is consequent to rational deliberation. But here as the near synonym of jen, i is better read as the mind of shame – not social shame but self shaming. There are two different words for shame in Chinese: hsiu used to describe shy children and coy females and ch'ih or self-shame of the gentleman.

20 A basic difference from our serialized unity is that Wang was heir to the Sung idea of an ontologically replete jen. He assumes a fullness of virtue instead of seminal germs. I apologize of the long footnotes. An earlier draft of this essay tried to include more material in the body of the text but the many asides proved only too distracting.