Book of Mencius

The date of September 3rd 1981. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures on the Great Spiritual Classics of the Orient from 2500 BC to 300 AD by Roger Weir. Tonight's lecture is entitled The Book of Mencius classic Confucian Sage translations from Liji Lao Hughes and I.A. Richards in multiple definitions of the mind. Close proximity to more dazzling books or sages and he's usually given second place to Confucius. Traditionally in China and it's difficult sometimes to find material on Mencius. The pronunciation of his name in Mandarin is Mengzi the Cantonese slur and say Hmong so we can say Mencius. And he was an exact contemporary of Aristotle. And it's quite interesting to note because we're paying attention to some of the larger structures and forms that actually seem to create human reality in cycles called civilizations that Mencius and Aristotle both of whom were very concerned about the place of man's mind in man's society and that what nature is primordially is invisible in terms of its primordiality and only becomes visible in its human manifestation. And I guess I should wax discursive on this for just a second to give you some idea of the cosmology involved here because this is this is not at all understood any more in general and is badly botched up. And you get it in pieces. So that everyone can understand that nature as a horizon of experience includes the objective phenomena that we encounter. And in more ancient days that would have meant food and some people and distances and fire and celestial phenomena and the way rivers run and the way mountains have weather and so forth out of this horizon of nature always there is a parallel.

And in China its original parallel. And in China we read. The Book of rites or rituals. Was a prescription of the consistent patterns of activity which mirrored and imitated nature. So that while nature was of indefinite extent around oneself through mastery of the rites which were a essential quintessential reflection of nature one was in possession of all the major focuses and by attending to the ritual level man felt that he not only fit in with nature but to some extent more and more. Began to suspect that he might have control of it as long as the. Rituals were kept intact and respected and as long as those. Persons in charge were dedicated to them. And out of this just as a. Natural effervescence rising up from this level of spirituality is the expressivity of our being. And it condenses literally almost like clouds forming into another level. Called myth if you like myth or poetry if you like. Or as the Chinese would say songs songs all of these taking language for the modus operandi and collecting together into a different kind of pattern no longer imitating the horizon of meaning that is in nature or in ritual but bringing into perspective a cycle of experience which more relates to a circular wheel like patterning of meaning rather than a broad horizontal landscape of meaning.

So in the book the Book of the Book of Songs the Chinese Book of Songs which Mencius always refers back to whenever he's quoting 90% of the time he says the Book of Psalms says so and so. Which means that at this level at the level of language what planes into existence is a transformation of the understanding of the structures of reality. And at this point where the indefinite extent of the lines of meanings curve and come together and form a cycle it forms a singular pattern which can be interiorized by a human being. So that after some centuries and takes a while for this to set in. After some centuries of this kind of a gestalt operating the circular the cyclic system the cycle of songs the mythology after that it circulated for a while and the words become interiorized. That is they reverberate inside. There comes a time when some central point of presence is achieved. And that. Central point of presence we could call the level of symbolism. And this if it is coherent if a symbol. Let's just use the same word here. If a symbol is coherent it points back through the wheel of formed language back to the horizon of the ritual and its origins in nature so that someone in possession of this inside of themselves and this and their capacity to enunciate.

And this is their capacity to do is also in possession of nature. In such an individual whose eye looks straight back through to the origins in China. It's called the sage. Sage. So the eye of the sage looks back through all time and space and all human achievement. And that primordial ground which sustains the horizon of nature and sustains the level of ritual which in turn permits the engendering of language and song which in turn finally flowers into the interior symbol which is called the way or dao. Way or dao. So that this. This sage. Holds like this the talisman of the circle of language. Is comportment. And the ground in which he stands is the horizon of ritual and propriety. And the inner presence the equanimity of himself assures one symbolically that he is the possession of the interior symbolic presence. Such a person is an archetype for sure and a prototype. And Mencius time and time again is bringing up the fact that he doesn't quite make it. He's the best there is but he doesn't quite make it because he knows that the true sage revolutionizes the world. Never appears with the world unchanged. And he. At one point in the book which we have Mencius he says it has now been 700 years since we have had a world shaper. And of course the period at which Mencius lived which in Chinese history is called the Period of Warring States was just one war after another.

The entire landscape of China was fractionated into kingdoms. Many many medium sized kingdoms. Half a dozen or so a dozen smaller kingdoms feudal warlords were rampant. There was just several centuries of constant Warfare and Manchester of course trying to style himself as the sage realize that even though he was regarded as being very high he was unable to move. And his reason for that was that human life had unraveled to such an extent that it was the case of trying to put out the fire with the cup of water that it was no longer effective. And so his constant reiteration is that for there to be human wisdom there needs to be a long runway of continuity among the common people to prepare the way for the sage. And in this we have this for the very first time in eastern history The diagnosis that even if one were given the very best of personages they would not be able to be effective. So that it was thrown back onto the people themselves. If you want to have a life if you want to have some chance for a civilization then you've got to do your own death. And what is your own bed? Your own bed is owning up to the standards of human relationships. Because only only when this level is taken care of can someone be born out of that. We're no longer just like animals and fields.

We are human beings in a social history and that social history has to have its relational geometry put back into order. Hence the great Confucian ideals filial duty. Not not just simply revering one's parents but revering the very structure of a family. Because only in a family does an individual become amplified and fulfilled. And for families together it is only in the village that the family becomes amplified and it is only through the plots of land that used to divide them like this where there were one two three four five six seven eight families and the central plot they were called. 900 Ching. This Chinese character that looks like this which means wealth is changed. And they used to say that one ninth of the land belonged to the emperor. But the whole idea was that visually on the landscape and in your relationship you realized that these eight families together made that cell of the empire and the empire only held together if it in turn nourished those families to nourish the center that was the part of the Empire. And the only way that these families could be nourished was if the individual had a lifelong orientation for themselves so that Mencius instead of reaching out to the stars like the Bhagavad-gita or Lao Tzu pulls in a little bit and directs the great wisdom to the chronic problems of human society lost in warfare the pathos of constant warfare.

Um we've been at war in our time now for four generations and you can see how much disarray appears in human life now. Just think if it goes on for another 6 or 7 generations. Well that's what it was in nature's time. It was absolutely pure chaos. So that from the period of the Warring States looking back in history Mencius of course very very alert to the fact that he had to choose his examples very carefully. There were a lot of sophists around that is so-called teachers who would draw huge pay and be very famous and so forth who were just muddying the stream. There were hundreds of those. Mencius was concerned to try to be as legitimate as possible and so he picked the Book of Psalms is that level of language cycle wherein there would be the best chance to view the integrity both of ritual and of nature. I haven't much time to go through the Book of Songs for you but I want to give you two excerpts from it. The very first song from the Book of Psalms which is a bucolic poem on courtship and you can hear in the tone the wonderful we would say naive. But let's agree with Mencius that that this is this is like a paradigm of how Primordially man really is taken away. All the stresses all the strains all the complications. This is what we are like. And he says that our essential nature is goodness and goodness in the sense that it seeks towards Completion all the time.

Inevitably and if encouraged it will achieve it. So that kind of goodness. And just in this simple beautiful meeting out in the bushlands a creeper grows. The falling dew lies thick upon it. There was a man so lovely. Clear brow well rounded. By chance I came across him. And he let me have my will. Obviously by a woman out in the Bushlands the creeper grows. The falling dew lies heavy on it. There was a man so lovely well rounded his clear brow. By chance I came upon him. Oh sir to be with you is good. So the Book of Songs begins with chance meetings in nature between men and women and thus the whole structure of human life begins in the Book of Psalms. Then later on there were 305 songs by song 241. They had worked their way up to the time of King when you remember King when one of the great redactors of the I Ching who founded the Cho dynasty some 700 years before Mencius the Book of Psalms. King Wen is on high. Oh he shines in heaven. Joe is an old people but its charge is new. The land of job became illustrious blessed by God's charge. King Wen ascends and descends on God's left hand and on his right. Very diligent was King Wen. His high fame does not cease. He spread his boundaries in Jo and now his grandsons and sons.

And in his grandsons and sons. The stem has branched into manifold generations and all the nights of Joe are glorious in their generation. And it goes on from there almost a kind of of Arthurian imagery here of the great King. When. By Menzies time the Zhou dynasty that had been founded by King Wen and firmed up by Wen's son King Wu and his other son the Duke of Zhao and all of the enormous order that the Zhou dynasty had brought had fallen and the Zhou dynasty having fallen was the third such dynasty. The great Shang kings before them had fallen. The great lords of Zhao before them had fallen. And so by Mencius time it seemed as if it might well be that human nature was incapable of sustaining a viable human form much beyond the family for any duration of time. Three dynasties very powerful individuals had failed and now 2 or 300 years of war so that the sage Mencius in his time often found himself wandering from kingdom to kingdom and he would have a whole entourage. He would have maybe 20 or 30 people sometimes a hundred people in his party. And when he would enter the kingdom word would go out and the king if he wished would summon the itinerant wanderer to see what kind of learning could be had for him. Mencius was in a kingdom called Qi which had a king named Xuan.

And it records right in the first book of of Mencius. King Xuan of Qi said have you anything to say about the conduct of relations with neighboring states? You see he doesn't ask for eternal wisdom. He doesn't ask for the eye of clarity. He asks what have you got to say about my relations with my neighbors? Mencius replied yes right away. He's got it. Among rulers of major states it is only a humane prince who would render service to a minor state. It was because they were humane that King Tom rendered service to Cole and King. When rendered service to the Qin tribes among the rulers of minor states. It is only a prudent prince who would render service to the ruler of a major state. It was because they were prudent that King Tai rendered service and that the King of Yue rendered service. When major states serve minor states it is pleasing to heaven. When minor states serve major states it shows reverence for heaven. It is he who pleases heaven that will protect the whole world and he who reveres heaven that will retain his own state. So Mencius here is drawing him out trying to get his interest trying to show that there is a late structure between your actions and the past and what we could understand. And once he's built the king to that point to where if he were listening to Mencius he would be ready to receive a little lightning.

So Mencius says like it says in the Book of Psalms and right away takes the king's attention and puts it back to a cycle of meaning that was held together in antiquity. And so he says as it says in the Book of Psalms and he quotes Psalm 40 we fear the wrath of heaven and doing so will protect our state. So he's linking all these things up right before the king. And the king says well splendid words indeed. But I have a feeling I have a perverse fondness for feats of fearlessness which is sort of a euphemistic way of saying that he likes to conquer. He likes the fanfare the trumpets the massed armies moving on the hillsides the shouts early in the morning and the trout to feed late at night. I have a perverse fondness for feats of fearlessness. So Manchester replied would that Your Majesty were not so fond of these trivial acts of fearlessness to take up a sword look fierce and cry? Who dares match himself against me? Is the fearlessness of an ill bred man one who merely matches himself against another. Would that Your Majesty loved fearlessness of a large order? You see he's stirring him away sets him up again. And then he says as it says in the book of Psalms. Then he quotes the Book of Psalms again because he's trying to get the king. He's trying to slap him awake.

And of course he's just covered with habit and glory and success and nothing fails like those. And then he quotes and he describes King Wen from the Book of Songs. The king blazed in anger and mobilized his armies to halt the foe. He marched on. Tzu Jo's well-being was thereby ensured. He marched up to the world's expectations. And so the king of course listening to Mencius thinks. Hmm. Maybe I've been playing with small potatoes. Then Mencius having his attention proceeds. The fearlessness of King Wen was of this magnitude. Once aroused in anger he brought peace to the entire world. Seeing that. Just laying it all out before him. You want greatness here? Let's have a real banquet. King Wu was quoted as saying Heaven has condescended to the common people creating princes and leaders for them saying that they are the helpers of God Most High thus placing a mark upon them throughout the world whether they are guilty or innocent. Let the honours fall on me. Who dares override the will of the common people? If only one man went astray. King Wu took the blame upon himself. King Wu too once aroused brought peace to the entire world. He was the son of King Ram. So he's telling him. Look it doesn't just happen at once. It can happen again and again. You too. May your Majesty too once aroused bring peace to the entire world. The people then would only fear that the king were not addicted to feats of fearlessness.

So he's brought it all the way back around using the old technique not only of referring to a cyclic meaning but creating in this little vignette of conversation a cycle of understanding so that later on in his pride and always when you when you pull the beard of the king he's always going to think about who is that that was tugging at me. And in his mind will begin stirring that kind of interplay. And of course what Mencius hopes is that he'll be called back. And many times Mencius will use images like he'll talk about such and such. A mountain over there was once covered by beautiful forests but men coveting the timber cut the timber down. And then when new shoots were coming up by not watching their animals the animals went and ate all the shoots. So now we see a barren mountains. Do you think that nature is primordially barren? It is through our own lack of handling of the situation that the mountain is bare. We can return all that back to its natural setting. And if we do that the basis of the rituals will be reinstated the songs will bring truth and we will have a chance to have that sage the sage king that we need. So you can see in this little vignette and that was only one page from Mencius. You can see already how he works and he's always doing this.

Again same king. King Xuan of Qi said everyone tells me to destroy the old Ming town. The Ming town was a temple. It was a temple for rituals which had a circular moat and sort of a crystalline type structure. And it was there that the efficacies of the summer solstice and so forth were viable. And so King Swan says I've been thinking about tearing it down. Should I do so or not? Mencius replied the main town pertains to kingship. If Your Majesty wishes to pursue the policies of the princely ideal you should not destroy it. The king said may I hear about the policies of the princely ideal? Mencius replied in antiquity when King Wen governed itchy that is in the very same location as this king. When King Wen Gabbard governed here the people farmed on a 9 in 1 system. That's this system. And the officials enjoyed hereditary tenure at the state borders. Merchandise was inspected but not taxed. No prohibitions were placed on the use of marshes and bridges. The families of criminals were not involved in the punishment of the criminals. Four classes of indigents who had no one to speak for them were officially recognized. The elderly man with no wife. The elderly woman with no husband the elderly who had no children to support them and the young who had no parents. They were called qua qua Q and Q respectively and in King Nguyen's ordinances and in his humanity.

These four classes received prior attention. The Book of Psalms says lucky are the rich but petty and neglected ones. The king said it is well said. Mencius said if Your Majesty applauds such things then why not put them into practice? The king said I have a feeling I like my wealth. Mencius replied in antiquity Lu the Duke liked his wealth too. As it says in the Book of Psalms he sees relentless absolutely relentless. This is that steadfast wisdom we're talking about as the center of the Bhagavad Gita. Same here same here. Only the form has changed. Only the style of netting in has changed. As it says in the Book of Psalms he gathered his stored in bags and sacks. Tied up. He put dried foods. Thus his stores were plentiful. He laid out bows arrows shields and daggers halberd and battle axe. And then the expedition began. In other words he prepared before he did anything whether peace or war. He prepared. How do you prepare? You have to have the people organized and they have to be willing to do this which means that you have to have all this set up. And if you have it all set up as is well knows there's very little likelihood of needing to go to war. In fact people are clamoring to get into your kingdom and again and again later on. Because the book of Mencius has these large structures he time after time says why back several hundred years ago when there was such and such a good king here the refugees swelled his kingdom so much that literally 2 or 3 kingdoms were given to him because they were so depopulated by refugees that the bad guys fled.

And so he's working always in this kind of pattern always to bring it in. Well he was in No. He was in many straits and later on he was talking to somebody about this King Xuan. Mencius said it is not surprising that the king does not act wisely. No one can raise even the most easily grown plant if it lies in the warm sun for only one day and in the cold wind for ten others. The king receives me but seldom in the audience is no sooner concluded than a chill shade is ushered in. Though I may have planted some grain of wisdom what is likely to happen to it afterwards? To be good at chess is a minor accomplishment but even so it can only be acquired with undivided attention and persistence. And then it goes on with other demonstrations. But what he's saying and no other analogies are needed. We can see that the cultivation of this kingliness is a natural compliment to the sage holiness and the two of them go together. And in fact the Chinese proverb runs kingliness without saintliness within. That's the paradigm. The complement to the sage within is the king without.

I don't have a king. I have the complement which I will bring next time when we do Kwanzaa. The complement to this is a farmer. That's a little more esoteric than kingship. Some of us emersonians left. Well the first book records the discussions that Mencius had with kings. There are seven books in the Book of Mencius and there are 4 or 5 kings that he talks to and one of them mentions was received in audience by King Hui of Liang. The king said aged sir you have come with no thought for so long a journey to see me. You have no doubt some teaching by which I might profit my state. Mencius replied. Why must Your Majesty use that word profit? There is after all just humanity and justice nothing more. If Your Majesty asks how can I profit my state? Your nobles will ask how can we profit our estates and knights and commoners will ask how can we profit ourselves? All ranks and societies will be competing for profits. Such would undermine the state. And in a 10,000 chariot state which is a major state it's very big. He who slew his prince might gain a thousand chariot estate and a thousand chariot estate. He who slew his prince might gain a hundred chariot estate. A thousand and 10,100 and a thousand is no small profit. If indeed you put profit first and relegate justice to a minor place and no one will be happy unless they are forever grabbing at something.

There has never been a humane man abandoned by his kin. There has never been a just man who turned his back upon his prince. The King should speak with your permission of justice and humanity. Why must you bring up profit? This kind of thing? Well Mencius towards the end of his life of course ran out of kings and retired to write this book with his. Disciples. Mencius was received in audience by King Hui of Liang. The king was standing at a pool looking at the geese and deer. He said did the worthy kings of whom you speak enjoy these things? Mencius replied it is only when one is worthy that one really enjoys them. The unworthy though they may possess these things do not enjoy them. In the Book of Songs it says. Quote. He planned and worked on the Spirit Tower planned it and built it. The people set to work. No time limit was set. They built it on. Urged coming to work. As a son to help his father. The King is in his spirit park where the buck and doe lie and the deer in fine fettle. The white birds glisten. The king is at his spirit pool. Oh how the fish rise. King Wendt built such a tower as his matches. And a pool with the labor of his people and the people took pleasure in it. They called it his tower.

The spirit tower. And they called this pool the Spirit Frog Pool. Delighting in his having deer and fish the men of antiquity shared their pleasures with their people and so could really take pleasure in them. And so again and again this is setting up paradigms in a certain horizon of meaning which he brings up time and time again to these individuals. Well the first book of Mencius is all about this the dialogues with the kings and so forth. The second book of Mencius takes a view of. They're all short extracts of conversations that he had with his disciples. And at the middle of the second book Mencius retires from public life. And this kind of a description is given. When Mencius tendered his resignation from office to return home the king came to see him and said before you came to me I wanted very much to meet you but I was never able to do so. When at last we met as prince and minister at court it gave me great pleasure. Now you are leaving to return home. Will I have another opportunity of seeing you? Mencius replies it would certainly be my wish to do so but I would not be so bold as to ask. Later the king said to Shih Tzu I would like to build a house for Manchester in some central position in my capital and provide a pension of 10,000 to support him and his followers.

They would set an example for our nobles and citizens to emulate. Would you not mention this to him for me? Should have conveyed this offer to Mencius through Chen Zhu. And when Kenseth told Manchester what she had said Manchester replied really this is impossible. Though she would hardly understand. If I could be attracted by money would an offer of 10,000 attract me when I've already declined to 100,000? She then said how strange. She however was in two minds about it. Mencius said since the king charged me with the responsibilities of state but failed to follow my counsel I resigned my office. If now he wants to avail himself of my own pupils of all people then who will not be attracted by mere money and position. If I were put in the position of being surrounded by rank and riches I should be tempted to show favoritism in choosing among them traders in the markets of antiquity exchange the goods they had to dispose of for the goods they needed while a market official kept order among them. Then an official of mean disposition took for himself the profits of the markets by selling his favors. Thus merchants were taxed. The practice of taxing merchants began with that low person. And so he goes into this metaphor of saying if I begin to sell out for money then all of these other structures come in and any chance for the visibility of the ordering of the world disappears.

Therefore he will retire. He will resign. Mencius left Ji accompanied by his disciples and as they journeyed one of them said you sir seem distressed at the way things have turned out. Yet on a former occasion when I spoke to you about this you said A gentleman does not feel resentment against heaven or put the blame upon men. Mencius replied the circumstances then and now are quite different. After 500 years a true king should have risen from the people and the dynasty. In the meantime would have been served by men famous in their generation. And here we are. Yet 700 years have now passed by since the jail began. And as a matter of simple calculation the time is overdue. In other words there is a cycle. And as far back as they could tell the cycle was always kept. But at this time the cycle was broken. And so what Mencius is saying is that the distress that he feels is not the distress that not finding position in his lifetime but a rather larger viewed distress at seeing that somehow a cycle of heaven which had affected man primordially since ancient times as far back as they could remember before the flood. Things have changed. Something has happened. And as he suspects man has become very strong. And through his obstinacy and his will man has set over the whole cycle of heaven and earth and has become sort of an equal partner in their management of this universal order.

And because of his ignorance man is now holding in limbo the larger structures of nature which would normally have by now 200 years already have produced a changeover. And so the dementias after the first two books begins to change its tone from interviews with royalty or interviews with disciples to looking at a little bit closer the the nature of man's involvement with the universe. In other words the dementias becomes concerned with the same kinds of considerations that the contemporaneous Greeks were. Plato and Aristotle that somehow man had interfered with the primordial pattern of life. And the complication was not going to iron itself out in any natural way but that human beings would have to take charge and rectify the tangle themselves that they were beyond the reach of the normal cleansing processes of nature or of heaven heaven and earth as the Chinese would say. In fact. This character or Confucian character Jack contains the character for man and for two and Jim that human heartedness is two people vibrating that sort of thing. That energy is the only energy that binds human relationships. The Greeks would have called it agape. It. Not eros but agape. Family love familial love only that has the. The unselfish base which allows for societal structures to bind to come into manifestation to amplify and hold their structure at least in as large a aggregates as empires or civilizations civilizations or empires through time.

There's a wonderful definition of it in terms of the study of history in the. Seventh and eighth volumes. In the third book. Mencius is concerned again and again with what is called the Junzi which translated means gentleman And by gentlemen. Not simply somebody who tips his hat but somebody who has kept his coordinates in nature and in human society whose Jen is alive and who also has a circulation inside of the G the energy so that his mind and his nature and his will rotate together and radiate together and create a human unity so that colloquially there is someone at home. If you were talking to them there is someone to reply. If there's something to be done they can go and do it. This mentions again and again now from book three calls gentleman. And he says in the third book A true gentleman or great man. Some call it great man. A true gentleman offers instruction for five reasons. Because some as with parched earth after timely rain are transformed by his teaching because some perfect their virtue by his teaching. Because some develop their talents by his teaching. Because for some questions of thereby answer. And because there are some who indirectly glean from it. And these are the five reasons come to the said outside of our circle. Men say that you simply like to argue. May I ask what you yourself say to this Mencius reply? It surely cannot be thought that I like to argue.

I do so because I have no other recourse. It is a long time now since man first appeared upon the earth. At times he has been well governed but at other times quite the Contrary. And then Manchester goes into a recounting briefly in about a page of man's history and how at the very beginnings of this historical continuity there were two legendary emperors before the Shah dynasty before the Jo before the Sharman before the Shah way at the very beginnings of history after the Great Flood the first end of Diluvian civilizations were governed by a king named Yao and the second king Shun and he says that Yao and Shun laid down the correct pattern and it had been followed all this time. And here we find ourselves in possession of the site straight through to that. And yet we're in the quandary that we can do nothing with it. So Mencius gives this in the book three sort of a little rendition of the essential history of the world according to the Chinese. And he says it's been a very long time. Yao would have been about 3000 BC about 5000 years ago from here about 2500 years from Mencius. In the days of Yao the waters flowing uncontrolled inundated the central states. That is all of the central part of China was under water. Thousands of miles they became the habitation of serpents and dragons.

And the people have no settling place. They dug pits in the ground and they cut out caves in the hills and the raging waters were a warning. The raging waters were the flood and you were set to control it. He dug ditches and drained off the waters into the sea. He drove out the serpents and dragons banishing them to the marshes. The waters flowing off the land became the great rivers the Yangtze the yellow River the Ham etc. once the dangers were removed wild animals harmful to man disappeared. Then man took possession of the plains and built his houses there. But once Yao and Shun were dead the way of the sages fell into decline. Tyrants arose who destroyed those houses by flooding plains and to make fishing grounds so that people were homeless once more. They withdrew land from cultivation to create hunting preserves so that the people were deprived of food and clothing. Evil words and violent deeds once again prevailed throughout the land with the increase of hunting parks and fishing grounds. The wild animals returned. By the time of King Zhao of the Shang dynasty the world had once again reverted to confusion. The premier king Wen and the Duke of Zhao punished the Shang ruler and for three years he had Yan under attack and then of course order was brought back by King Wen. So Mencius again and again in book three gives us ideas of always going back to Yao and Shun and he uses this metaphor again and again in book three.

And shun who had been sort of a wild man of the mountains that the Emperor had found one day on a hunt and he recognized in him sort of a truth of heaven about him and brought him into his capital to be his adviser and then had the great capacity of being somebody who could go and do things. He didn't deliberate at all. He just went to it. And through the efforts of Shun and Yao gave both his daughters to shun in marriage. And he had nine sons. And he made shun the emperor's successor because he was very capable. And Yao reigned for 28 years and shun for 17. So between them in about a third of a century they had actually reinstated China. Well Mencius saw the same kind of a pattern in King Wen who with his successors Wu and the Duke of Shao had again reinstated China. What bothers Mencius very very much is that he suspects that Confucius was the proper lineage in that order that Yao was an emperor and King Wen was an emperor and that Confucius was an emperor but that something had transformed in human history and the kingdom was no longer supposed to be an empire but understanding and relationships and he suspected that he was the shun. To Confucius he was the Duke of Chao to Confucius. And so in his retirement and in the book Mencius you see him withdrawing from the complications and the worries that all this out here is in confusion and beginning to see that the kingdom the empire to set up was an empire of understanding.

The mind was the empire. The man had changed that it wasn't the Earth anymore and it wasn't even the glorious Earth. But that it was the kingdom of his mind. And so in the book of Mencius there's this tremendous realization. So much so that when we get to the seventh book of Mencius just give it to you and you see the contrast right away. By the seventh book of Mencius this is how it reads. Mencius said for a man to give full realization to his heart is for him to understand his own nature. And a man who knows his own nature will know heaven by retaining his heart and nourishing his nature he is serving heaven. Whether he is going to die young or live to a ripe old age makes no difference to his steadfastness of purpose. There's that phrase again death oppression of steadfast purpose. It is though awaiting whatever is to befall him with a perfected character that he stands firm on his proper destiny. He is no longer worried. He is no longer concerned over what the external circumstances are because he understands now that the kingdom of the mental order controlled by the spiritual steadfastness. And he goes directly to them again.

Mencius said though nothing happens that is not due to destiny one accepts willingly only what is one's proper destiny. That is why he who understands destiny does not stand under a wall on the verge of collapse. He who dies after having done his best in following the way dies according to his proper destiny. It is never anyone's proper destiny to die in fetters. Mencius said all the 10,000 things are there in me. There is no greater joy for me than to find on self-examination that I am true to myself. Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence. And he uses benevolence as a synonym for enlightenment. It's the Golden Rule Mencius said. The multitude can never be said to understand what they practice to notice what they repeatedly do or to be aware of the path they follow all their lives. Mencius said wise kings in antiquity devoted themselves to goodness forgetting their own exalted position. How should wise gentlemen in antiquity be any different? They delighted in the way Forgetting the exalted position of others. That is why kings and dukes could not get to see them often except by showing them due respect and observing due courtesy. If just to see them often was so difficult. How much more to induce them to take office? Mencius said to Sun Wukong you are fond of traveling from state to state offering advice.

I shall tell you how this should be done. You should be content whether your worth is recognized by others or not. If and then the question what must a man be before he can be content? Mencius. If he reveres virtue and delights in rightness he can be content. Hence a gentleman never abandons rightness and adversity nor does he depart from the way in success by not abandoning rightness and adversity. He finds delight in himself by not departing from the way and success. He does not disappoint the people. Men of antiquity made the people feel the effect of their bounty. When they realized their ambition and when they failed to realize their ambition were at least able to show the world an exemplary character in obscurity. A man makes his own person but in prominence he makes perfect. The whole empire as well. Mencius said those who make the effort when there is a king when are only ordinary men outstanding men make the effort whether there is a king when or not. And so towards the close of the book of the benches we find this enormous growing certainty and maturity just as we will see in the Greeks at about the same time that the inevitability of the orders of nature are like the inevitability of the yoga of the body. That if any one part of it is organized it is inevitable that all of it becomes organized.

Therefore organized just one part one self. And if that can be done that rings true and reverberations of that truth inevitably will organize the all. And so we have the same kind of conclusion in Mencius that Socrates found in Athens that even though the times are beyond hope and even though we've had the best of all possible worlds and thrown it away therefore we will now have the just man who is unmoved by circumstance no matter what with the certainty that that is the writing edge of history and the pen point of truth in man's nature. Well let's pause there and have a little break. I'd like to give you just a few. Tidbits from books that you normally wouldn't run across or very difficult to find. And I seem to have some of the few copies available. Some of them. There is a book called Mencius on the mind that I a Richards. Richards was a literary critic and a linguist and philosopher. Very very important man. He was a fellow at Magdalene College in Cambridge in England. And he evolved from literary criticism to a real interesting position philosophically Later. Vis a vis what is language? What is meaning? In fact wrote a book with a man named Ogden who at that time was American to England and the United States got together there called The Meaning of Meaning which is sort of like a classic book still in the principles of what are we intending when we try to structure meaning through words and what possibilities of dimensioning our intent and purposes can we have through a coherent grammar and a flexible syntax and concerns like that? Well in that range of development he began investigating Chinese.

He thought well this is interesting. Here's a pictographic language. Perhaps something can be done with this. And he picked messages as the text to reveal and has revealed it to be an intelligent and insightful person. He couldn't help but be roped in to some of the concerns that Mencius had and so he wrote this book ostensibly for his purposes but he takes lots of time out in the book to display Mencius in a very interesting way. And the way that he goes about it of course is very interesting because he says look look at look at the Chinese characters that Mencius using. I can give you four characters I.A. Richards that Mencius uses because you need that kind of insight. You may not get to it right away. There may be this year or that but these lectures will settle in and you'll go and find these things. And you need to know. You need to know that it can be known. That's all you need. And you know that nobody's going to hold you back Why don't you see? It's all real and available? That's it. Richards writes we saw in chapter one what a range of interpretations can be given to this character for righteousness and truth.

Along with the gen j e m e y I li l I n k c h I h. It is. It is fortunately not essential for our purposes here to go very closely into any of the materials available are rich and profuse and the technique required will be discussed later on in this very book. The inquiry belongs to anthropology or sociology or a more detailed kind of psychology that can be then can be attempted in a preliminary survey. The important thing is to recognize that these virtues whatever the relations between them may be are the termini governing all of Mencius psychology. As we have seen it is no part of his purpose to analyze them to justify them or discuss them in general because history of them. The discussion of particular examples is a main part of his work and all his psychological argumentation may be regarded as an apology to enforce them. An apology philosophically not forgive me an apology but a platonic apology an explanation in depth to the very reasons. But if what was said in chapter two is not mistaken we need not be surprised to find that he makes no attempt to illuminate their inner constitution. Since all men know them and accept them. His task is only to encourage men's energies to flow into their development. It's already there. It's always there and nobody's exempt from it. And all we have to do is turn around and start.

And if we're true to our natures the only task is to encourage men's energies to flow into their development. What they were. We can see best by examining their first signs of beginnings. Jen a character made up of a man and the number two can be rendered as love if we are careful to exclude romantic passionate or sexual associations. Humaneness. Reciprocity and desirable acts. Fellow feeling all come very near yet but it is more a form of activity or a general tendency to act in certain ways than an emotion. So that when you are actually engaged in the activity of being a human being then jam manifests itself. It's not an abstracted emotive quality but it's a characteristic of a time process flow like catching the book. For mentions elsewhere it is the heart of man and Mensch is interesting in a lot says don't trust your eyes and don't trust your ears because they cannot think. Trust your heart because your heart can think. Thus the heart of man is not just like a nice little homily. American Indians always thought that white men were crazy because they thought. They thought with their heads instead of their hearts. They're interesting. The Chinese philosophy. From Mencius. Elsewhere it is the heart of man. And being a man that says praise. Being a man it is another phrase to teach without tiring. Why? Because one is not a teacher.

One is simply the lens through which all of this happens. It is another phrase the source of honor and its absence is the cause of humiliation. It is another quotation from Mencius. Like archery. Because when we miss the mark we come back for Examination. Minchin says in his book that at the beginning we need skill and that's like the kingliness. But at the end we need strength and that's the stage with us. The skill can put the arrow on course to the target but only strength can carry it all the way to death. In the same way in the Book of Matches it goes from interviews with kings to statements of individual worth regardless of who is king or if there is even a king. So the movement is from without to within from kingliness to saintliness. Hence the quintessential element and sacredness is the proverb the little tidbit taken from the cycle of language which symbolically We encourage you the eye of sacred retrospection. See how it's all it all links together. Okay Richard. Some more because he's good here. He was thinking. To teach without tiring like archery. Because when we miss the mark we come back for self-examination. It's actuality lies in serving the parents. But that's like a relational aspect. Serving the parents is keeping those relationships viable. And another quote with effort to strive for mutuality mutuality. I use the term Complementation a lot. It means the same thing.

Mutuality. Typekit is a model of mutuality instead of polarity. Polarity will give you a measurement but only a measurement in dead space and no time. If you put it into time and space polarities are crazy so you have to have mutuality. It's the only real perspective and thus so act is the nearest way to seek it. Okay. The next character. That was Jen. Jen has that mutuality. Human heartedness is to be in the actual process of cooperating with other people actually doing it. Fellowship. Fellowship. It extends to not just one other person but to many people and thus create stable social orders. The next character. Yi. The character is made up of a sheep above two spears. Very complex character. It looks like about 25 lines. It's too much for me right now. You can expect it later. He. The character is made up of the character the radical for sheep above the character for two spears all jammed together is less easy to describe because it fits less trimly into our own recognized scheme of values and virtues. Its first sign is the shame and dislike of having done the wrong thing. But perhaps the socially wrong thing. Than. We with our conception of conscience would take it to be. All forms however of undue interference with others and of negligence of social duties may come under this heading. In other words getting in the way on purpose. Mark Twain would have called it the damn nobility of human nature.

That sort of thing. It purges you. It merges into the next virtue. Leave. And it's like leeches. The book of Rites Li writes. Propriety. Ritual a ritual order. Li. The character is made up of a sign for revelation and a sign for a sacrificial vessel. Revelation on top of sacrificial vessel which is concerned more with good manners than with equity. But the ritual suggestion was probably stronger with Mencius than in later times. He was near enough to the feudal regime for questions of correct ritual behavior to take a very prominent place and Lee today continues to rule all such matters as funerals mourning marriage precedents and family relations between officials etc. these things together with manners and correctness in general. are we must remember very much more important in China than in the West. The fourth virtue is made up of an arrow beside a mouth. A ideogram for mouth and an arrow beside. It is the hardest of all to make certain of its first sign is in something which may be no more than discrimination. That is the mind is and the mind is not. She is. Wisdom is what we would do with wisdom to mount with the arrow. The directness of speech. But it may be more than this. A moral judgment as to right and wrong. What is to be approved and disapproved as a virtue? Develop virtue. There is a certain parallel difficulty in distinguishing knowledge or intelligence from wisdom mere sagacity from saintship.

The difference of course being that one is thoroughly internalized and moves of its own dynamic and the other is simply a structure of the personae which one moves oneself as if it were a part of oneself. The other leads finally to the tendency to self-development wisdom. And these other characters jam and so forth. All these together form the human nature which is goodness essentially. And this tendency to self-development to the fulfillment of the mind was what he meant by goodness. It is a conception that lends itself readily to a speculative elaboration the more readily because it is free from those complexities that Western individualism has brought in with the notion of the self the ego and the conscious subject. It is free too from the problem of knowledge which in philosophy is called epistemology. And it's a big bugbear though 100 years. There's no problem with that in Chinese. Thought we could even by taking up his water analogy make the mind's tendency to self-development a matter of its following the line of least resistance. He always says that goodness the goodness in us is like water. It always seeks to move to the to the low basic levels and it fills those up before it moves on. So it is always complete and it never ventures into some terrain or some situation where it has not already built up its own base of flow previous to moving on.

Hence wisdom is like water. Well he goes on with this. There's a whole book I. Think it's complicated. A small book which is available which has a wonderful chapter. It's called Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China. Arthur said the only trouble with whaling. Is that he was trained by Japanese culture and when he looks at China he looks at it through the eyes of a Japanese person. So he gives you kind of a it's an unnecessary skew. You just don't have to have it. his first sentence a paragraph here three ways of ancient thought. He takes Mencius Kwanzaa which will take next week here in The Realist. He says this about Mencius just to begin give you a tone. The whole teaching of Mencius centers around the word goodness. Jim. See by now you can go to something like this and just zip right into it. Of course the whole teaching of Mencius centers around the word goodness. Different schools of Confucianism meant different things by this term but to Mencius goodness meant compassion. It meant not being able to bear that others should suffer. It meant a feeling of responsibility for the sufferings of others such as was felt by the legendary Yao Subduer of the primeval flood. If anyone were drowned the owl felt as though he himself had drowned. That's a quotation from Mencius. He says this many times or such as was felt or so said in ancient times by the Counselor Yin to whom if he knew that a single man or woman anywhere under heaven were not enjoying the benefits of wise rule it was as though he had pushed them into a ditch with his own hand with killing people in his town was to push them into a ditch to be killed.

It's just that people were killed so often that they were just like open ditches around the palaces. It seems hard to believe. But anyway Arthur Waley's three ways of thought in You can sign. The standard history of Chinese philosophy is in two volumes from Princeton by John Dillon. And for those who are acquainted with his travails with the embarrassment during the Red guard charades in Beijing in 1966 67. may not want to refer to this but I think Fung Yuan is very good. This was written some 15 years before he was made a spectacle in the in the square in Beijing. He was forced to recant all of his work publicly and burn his own books. the tradition was that that one should take down the top. That chapter six of the first volume of History of Chinese philosophy is on Mencius and his school of Confucianism and right away you get the traditional view of Mencius is that he was a confrere of Confucius and that he belongs under that heading and in that school. And this does a great injustice to Mencius because you can see if you read his own work there's a movement and a development in his own work in its own right.

Later on when one has built those bricks by hand then you can build any kind of house you want. But you got to do those bricks first in your own way. And Mencius has his own propriety. He mentions many things in here and I won't go into it except that he mentions some of the stories. When when Mencius was a little boy and his father died before he was very old and his mother was very worried about raising him and she wanted to have a great son. and they they lived in a certain place. and she found that they lived near a graveyard. And Max was always playing around the graves and stuff like that. And she thought this wasn't a very good environment for him. So then she moved to another place and it was like hanging around pool halls and that sort of thing. And that wasn't too good. And the third place that she moved to was next to a school and she began seeing that her son was like playing at being a teacher. And so she thought well this is what I want. Mothers are responsible for at least half of the world's greatness. Well we've got a few images here and this again is just to help you visualize some of these things.

We're running out of time. About 25 minutes for. The first three are just contemporary photographs just to bring us into some primordial proximity. I'm sure that watching the eclipses was a pastime of mankind anywhere and everywhere. And this is a recognizable scene. This is part of the awe that there is a vast enormous large structure available for man's inspection. And evidently there is some connection between the way in which we work together in our silhouetted existence and the larger Purposes that finally occur to us and found out. That. There are times when it's just spectacular and and we begin to get these insights. And I'm sure that a lot of the stories from our mission give us this this feeling of this of this mystery. That. Is of course the legendary First Emperor. And. Is followed by now. This the prototypical Chinese sayings obtained by Ma Yuan. Incidentally next year when we are able to bring the spiritual process of Asia up to date there will be a lecture on 91 and Joshua the Great painters and I'll try to have a lot of rare shots where. There isn't a single book in any European language on these figures and there is no consistent believable material. Just to give you some images the classic idea of the sage being out in the wilderness. Now this was not of that school. He was more at home with people. Here the Chinese motif the interplay of nature the water the tree.

The mutuality of the flow of life. And the unbelievable mysteriousness of primordial nature. And the Chinese view is that man has his his home their quintessential. That is this is like a dream image that one could manifest at any time in one's experience. instead of having a vision of one's home game Castle all European archetypal background one can have the hut in the mountains in the forest in the mountains. And these of course are not mountains that he would walk on but mountains that he would fly around. That's why they are so spire like aspiring one pointed and jagged. They're not. They're hiking feet. They're Flying for flying in the spirit. The energy. The classic Chinese way. An interview with the Wise Men master said. And that calls for adventurous as well as any of the other ones here. And the students gathered to sit on rocks. later on there were chairs but even then the chairs were carved to be like wild natural parts of occurrence. And not just. A sort of stereotyped chairs that you can not like. The chairs are sitting tonight with your permission. And the Chinese we need stones. And the view of course of nature was meticulous and mentions being a contemporary of Aristotle. This kind of minute inspection of nature was familiar to them. Forget they threw all kinds of activities and agriculture and sericulture that we today are just beginning to make out of silk and dozens and dozens of other fabrics and herbs and so forth.

So they were not naive. They were great inspectors of nature. And the problems that came up were really legitimate large scale problems. Another detail this is early on in this scroll. It's an enormous scroll. It's in Detroit at the prairie. And. This is a real good view of. Kind of majesty. Domestication of horses and canines. The idea of the large garden. Then she's talking many times about how there had been so many walled in parks and so forth that people didn't have any place to go and wild animals proliferated. The idea here that the garden sometimes was dozens and dozens of miles of fence to keep people out and shaped and so forth. Enormous palaces unbelievable constructs. They were not. Inferior to the grandeur of Greece or Rome at that period by any measure whatsoever. So you have to get the idea of an enormous palace constructs a tremendous development even at the time of mansions. And very often the stage of the activity of contemplation would be on a fishing trip. So. That sort of thing were as you can see here the scholar and his robes the sage and the scholar robes walking. And this looks like a God of nature. But if you acclimate your eyes so you can see that the pruning on that willow and everything this is probably a garden.

And the bird is an exotic bird and it's there because it's being kept in the garden. And so instead of this wild Zen like nature we actually have a very refined exquisite palace right here. And of course this is a monument to the great talents of painters of the past. Still in all there was that incredible vista of that enormous unbelievable mystic charm of the mountains. I like this slide because it has a little bit of that mysteriousness which is sometimes come on strange weather with the change of seasons in the high mountains. It was always there as a reminder. And later on as we'll see next year in the monster series it became so indispensable that landscape scrolls became the only portable salvation instruments for whole centuries of people who were so bound up in Portland Or Our metropolitan life. They had no chance to go anywhere so they would take a landscape stroll instead in lieu of nature and go traveling with the spirits. And involve themselves in all kinds of developments to enable them to do this. The. The tree is sentient. I don't know if you can feel it or if you can move with it but it's like a mudra of a hand a highly stylized positioning of fingers. And it's like teaching mudra that the tree and the. Alert birds of the spirit stopping the waves below. All this would have been a planted made up palace garden. This would never occur in nature.

This was all planned. Done and in time of course. 700 years after Cain. When this. By that time already these kinds of garden complexes had been set up. But in his time used more like this probably than to allow single individuals and peace of mind. Always journeying. The annals of Chinese history are filled with journeys incredible journeys. Chinese are some of the greatest travelers of all time and there are many great epics of journeys and marches and so forth. And adventures along the way are it's sort of like the strings of a necklace that mean. Someone has all these journeys matches throughout his life traveling constantly from place to place to place. And so to Confucius. And he was traveling off to the west at the end of his life. And so. He's an upside down. I don't know if that's intentional. I don't think it is. Traveling. Painting by Brian Southern. Song. Temporary monument. The proportion of man in the painting is very much like the notion that Mencius has of that the individual has a proportion in society and society as a proportion of history and the history has a proportionately larger heaven. Mandate. Worlds within. Worlds within worlds. The one of the ten ultimate landscape paintings online. They are almost as if the pinnacle of the distant mountains is like a sword of wisdom. It's almost that kind of a blending of images. The great complications of life are mirrored in some of the paintings in which they take impossible cluttered section of nature just in that it's an impossibility in need to have that kind of wrecked old confusion of oaks and pines on that kind of rocky slope.

It doesn't happen. So what this is is this is a metaphorical presentation of human conditions. Things have obviously gotten overgrown old gnarly and complicated. So much so that it's like a jungle or like a fairy tale thorn thicket surrounding the abode of the man in the upper left. And the. This slide is very good to show the separation between increasingly between the conditions of ordinary normal life and chaotic times. Literally people dying by the tens of thousands begging and crippled and sickly and ignorant and the few sage like having retreated to the mountains literally float on the ether and are free. And disparity between the two is something that bothers mentions already in his time 400 BC has begun to be a problem in Manchester as a matter of fact is one of the first times in Asian history that we begin to get that kind of tension between those who would go off and find the wisdom and stay there and those who haven't found some insight to benefit them would return and come back and give that to humanity. And one of his disciples asked Mencius are there unknown sages? And Mencius specifically tells him no there are not because they would not be true sages because the true sage is one whose amplification comes back to nourish mankind.

And we would have heard about him because there's always a reverberation from the good man. And thus we know of all those who truthfully have come back and given a reverberation to man. So this is the first time really in the Asian tradition that he denies the validity of this exercise of going off by yourself achieving a spiritual insight for yourself and not bringing that energy and that commitment back to man. And you see at the end of the next lecture series that this finally blossoms out in the 20th century and becomes a real real revolution in the modern day Chinese exponent of that was John Locke believe it or not. He was the great sage that held China together in most incredible fashion. Give a lecture on it sometime. It's a story almost unknown. This is just to show the incredible complications that the human mind in China is going through from time to time a staggering complexity that was made up. And the only coherence there really are the two travelers. The two travelers. There's actually some horsemen ahead of them but they're the only openness the only geometry offering. Everything else is tending towards fantastic junk. And then you have been coming for some time recognized by Lions Gate Spirit castle. And you can see in contrast to the slide before. The ordering of time and space becomes quite noticeable and the expansiveness and timelessness becomes noticeable.

Quite a difference. And back to the jungle. And you can see like it's. It's a kind of a fantasy of a complication within complication. This a metaphor when I use this out of sync with their time for didactic purpose to sort of illustrate the the social conditions at the time of vengeance that life to him was very much like this. An impossible journey. One really couldn't go too far. There were warring armies everywhere. There were dying people by tens of thousands. There were kings who controlled the lives of people with just a wave of their hand who hadn't even the slightest idea of anything beyond asking questions about whether they should parade in red or orange. And finally and this is from the kind of family unity that obtains for natural creatures. That man's place is very much like that baby monkey by its mother that we with other people with our gem or human heartedness in motion. We are of a family resemblance so much so close that to the inner eye and inside we are almost a unity. And so it's a fellowship not based on a wish of good luck between different individuals but an inward facing penetration of understanding between like kind that belong together. Thus this vision of Uji. Some time later he mentions. Well I think that's about it. Sorry to run over time. Is that right? We didn't find this when we drew it down.