Mencius (Mengzi)

Mencius taught that human nature is good: every person is born with four “sprouts,” compassion, shame, deference and the sense of right and wrong, which grow into benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom if nourished and die if neglected, as the trees of Ox Mountain die when the axe comes every day. The sage is therefore not a different kind of man but one who has extended what every heart already has, and the child about to fall into the well shows that no one lacks the heart that cannot bear the suffering of others. In politics he told kings that the people are the most important element and the ruler the least, that a ruler who abandons benevolence is a “mere fellow” whom Heaven's mandate has left, and that government begins with securing the people's livelihood; he fought the Mohist doctrine of impartial care as a denial of the father and Yang Zhu's egoism as a denial of the ruler.

Why he matters: He is the Confucian witness to the law written on the heart (Romans 2:14–15), and Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits read him so, siding with him against Xunzi on the goodness of nature in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven; the 1939 decree permitting the Confucian rites rested in part on this reading. Catholic scholars from Julia Ching to the Jesuit sinologists have found in his “four sprouts” the nearest Chinese parallel to synderesis.