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XÚN Qīng 荀卿 (or XÚN Kuàng 荀况) Was a prominent Confucian who lived about 250 years after Confucius (perhaps), and would have been learning about Confucianism when Mencius was already a middle-aged man. Like Confucius and Mencius, Xún Qīng is known today with the honorary suffix zǐ at the end of his name: Xúnzǐ 荀子, “Master Xún.”
He shared with them the core of the Confucian ideals of what human behavior ought to be like, and what life in a perfect world would be like (and had been like in the remote past). His view differs, however, in his suspicion that humans are not inherently virtuous; they are inherently extremely selfish. They are probably perfectible, with cultivation of the kind that Confucius so enthusiastically endorsed, but not quite the raw material that Mencius seemed to envision. And thus, although the force of a leader’s moral example is strong — that is a core insight of all Confucianism— it would be unrealistic to assume that with a moral leader (or more exactly leadership) all need for laws will simply fade away, however much we might wish that were so.
Among Xúnzǐ’s followers were two students Hán Fēi —韩非 and Lǐ Sī 李斯— destined to give up on Confucianism altogether and become leading figures of the totalitarian “Legalist” school. This forever besmirched Xúnzǐ’s reputation as a great Confucian thinker.
(For more about these philosophers, click here.)
In the present selection Xúnzǐ presents a pretty mainline Confucian argument about the importance of a leader’s moral example. But he realistically enough discusses the training and discipline of soldiers, and has few illusions about how to keep their loyalty or, if that fails, at least prevent their running away. A certain amount of killing is part of life in the world of the Warring States, and Xúnzǐ does not shirk from it. At the end of this passage, young Lǐ Sī speaks up, expressing his skepticism for the entire Confucian agenda. What is his argument? How effectively does Xúnzǐ answer it?
The English text presented here is essentially that of Homer H. Dubs (The Works of Hsüntze, London: Probsthain, 1928, Pp. 157-170.) However, after long hesitation, I decided to take extreme liberties with it, not just updating the Romanization of Chinese terms, but occasionally making other changes where it seemed unclear (or in one case inaccurate). These changes are not marked in the text. I also deleted Dubs’ many, often very informative footnotes. However in some cases I insinuated their clarifications (or my own) into the text using brackets to distinguish them from translation as such.
The principal reason for using Dubs translation at all is that it is out of copyright. If you would like to read more of Xúnzǐ, a far superior rendering by Burton Watson can be found in:
- WATSON, Burton
- 1967 Basic writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu. New York: Columbia University Press.
- WATSON, Burton
- 2003 Xunzi: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press. LC: B128.H68 2003.
Several Internet archives contain reasonably accurate copies of the Chinese text.
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