The Formative Age 15
Heaven. Xunzi understood how much the state was changing in his own
time, and he embraced the development of a complex bureaucracy of
offi cials promoted and demoted on the basis of their job performance.
He had seen enough of Warring States behavior to argue, against Men-
cius, that human nature is evil, in that people are inherently selfi sh.
But Xunzi rightly regarded himself as a follower of Confucius. While
recognizing the necessity and power of law and state authority enforced
with a highly organized bureaucracy, Xunzi also saw Confucian rituals
and early Zhou texts as effective guides to proper human behavior. He
argued, as Confucius and Mencius had, that fi lial piety, one’s love and
respect for one’s parents, was the most fundamental foundation for all
other moral teachings and behavior.
At the forefront of the secular and rationalistic tendencies of his
own time (at least among the elite), Xunzi gave a completely naturalistic
interpretation of nature and its workings. When there were droughts,
fl oods, or hurricanes, these were just the natural arbitrary workings of
nature in Xunzi’s view, not the supernatural intervention of Heaven or
any divine being. The true omen or portent that signifi ed the loss of
the Mandate of Heaven was not a natural disaster but the state’s failed
response to it. Thus, while Xunzi accepted the large bureaucratic state
based on the rule of law, he also argued forcefully that such a state
could be guided most humanely and most effectively by the values of
Confucius and Mencius.
While Legalists were steadily building up the lethal powers of the
state and Confucians were urging the restoration of early Zhou ideal-
ism and the use of ritual in both families and governments, others were
attacking both Legalists and Confucians from other angles. One group
assembled around Mozi, a thinker who lived sometime between Con-
fucius and Mencius and who argued that Confucians were wasteful in
their emphasis on rituals, music, and ceremonies in honor of the dead.
Mozi and his followers argued that rulers owed the people not elabo-
rate ceremonies to awe them but the basic necessities of food, clothing,
and shelter. The school’s most original teaching was its call for “univer-
sal love,” in which every adult bore equal responsibility for every child.
The Mohists also made interesting developments in logic and the study
of optics and motion (in part for the purposes of defensive warfare), but
they failed to inspire followers for more than a few generations, and
their call for universal love seemed puzzling and impractical to most
Chinese.
A more long-lasting challenge to the Confucian and Legalist visions
of society came from a group of thinkers we now know as Daoists, or