The Useless Tree

Mencius on the web

I've been distracted of late, as the drop off in posting here suggests.  A college reunion (first one I have been to in thirty years!  Yes, thirty years) took me away this weekend.  And work is getting busier, with end of the semester papers coming in.  So let me just quickly provide a couple of links here to a couple of posts on Mencius at other blogs.  I'm thinking of Mencius now because my class recently finished reading the text and many of my students are handing in papers on it…

First up Chris Panza, over at A Ku Indeed.  He has two Mencius posts.  In "High Bar for Sons" he asks:

So is Shun (or Mencius) serious? Is a son not a son if he fails to
transform his father/mother? Are the virtues that embody “being a son”
incomplete if they are not mirrored by the virtues involved in being a
dad? (I presume this holds in the reverse direction for sons, too).”

The short answer: yes, Mencius is serious.  He is tell us that our duties toward our parents extend beyond mere obedience, which is usually what "filial piety" implies.  Indeed, one of the greatest aspects of the story of Shun, at least in Mencius' telling, is how he came to understand that sometimes (not very often, but sometimes) filiality might require a certain disobedience of parents.  There are various possibilities of what this larger filiality, which justifies disobedience of parents, might be: having a heir (Shun disobeyed his parents and got married against their wishes in order to produce an heir); creating a new context of enacting Humanity in his relationship with his wife; and/or "realizing his parents."  This latter – which Chris's translation renders as "transforming his father/mother" – is obviously linked to the other two: the parents' Humanity is more fully realized, thus opening transformative possibilities for their less humane personal characteristics, in Shun's actions of getting married and producing an heir.  But we might be able to think of other ways in which our own performances of Humanity might similarly uplift out parents.  And that is what Mencius wants us to do: think about how all of our actions might relate back and contribute to the Humantiy of our parents.  It's not just about obedience.

Chris also has a longer post, "Mencius on Moral Effect," which raises questions about the power of exemplary moral leadership.  Good reading….

I also want to mention a post, "Bad Sons," by Alan Baumler over at Frog in a Well, which places the story of Shun in a broader historical context (i.e. considering how bad sons and wicked fathers figured in myths that precede Mencius):

So, at least for Lewis, Mencius is not using Shun to describe filial
piety, but rather trying to explain away the unfilial behavior in a
story that is not really about filiality and moral influence, but
rather is about the extremes of human possibility and the need to impose hierarchy on the family. Mencius is struggling
to put a “modern” reading on a much older story with different concerns.

I'm not sure I buy this completely, not as it is expressed here.  Mencius may well be a "modernizer" of sorts, especially in pressing for a moral meritocracy of sorts over and against mere hereditary legitimacy, but he is using Shun to describe filial piety. 

In any event, it's always good to have more Mencius on the web…

(Painting below is of the sage-king Yao discovering the modestly attired Shun plowing the fields. I didn't realize that elephants helped Shun plow…):

Shun

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Sam Crane
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2 responses to “Mencius on the web”

  1. CP Avatar
    CP

    Sam,
    First, if Shun (or the sage) truly “transforms the whole universe” (as in the Zhongyong), then given that elephants are a part of universe I can see how they’d give him a hand with his plowing. 🙂
    Second, let’s push this point further. I agree that there’s certainly more to xiao, say, than obedience (it’s a shame that it is often seen as simply this, however). So I agree that a necessary part of xiao is having the promotion of the Humanity of one’s parents as one’s aim (this is not necessarily a part of mere obedience, and as you note can conflict with it, as in the case of Shun’s marriage).
    But what if the son fails? Let’s say that a son/daughter works ceaselessly at developing and cultivating the Humanity of his/her parent, but is a total failure in practice — the parents remain non-transformed, and just “don’t get it”.
    Can we say that the son/daughter exemplifies xiao?

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  2. Glenn Berger Avatar
    Glenn Berger

    Sam,
    Nice to see somebody writing about Mencius on the web. I’m a psychotherapist and on my search for finding the root cause of the problems that my clients suffered, I came across the translation of Mencius that said,
    “Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it, and has lost his heart and does not go out and recover it. When a man’s dogs and chicks are lost he goes out and looks for them, but when a man’s heart (or original nature) are lost, he does not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to find the lost heart.”
    This passage sent me on a journey that is resulting in my book, “Finding the Lost Heart,” which synthesizes Mencian thought with other wisdom traditions, the symbolic insights of fairy tales, contemporary psychological theory and my client’s stories.
    On this post, as therapists a truism we say is that its funny how our parents change when we go into therapy. In order to heal the family, we need to heal ourselves.
    I look forward to following your blog.

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