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'''Xunzi''' the Chinese philosopher of the third century BC (c. 310-235 BC), the most systematic of the Confucian thinkers, who taught that human nature is bad and must be reformed by ritual, education and law, and who numbered the legalist Han Fei among his pupils.

== Life and Times ==
Xunzi, whose personal name was Xun Kuang and who is also called Xun Qing, was a native of the state of Zhao in the north. He lived in the third century BC, in the final and most violent phase of the Warring States period, when a handful of great powers contended for the empire and the Qin state was rising toward its eventual triumph.

He travelled and taught in the states of Qi, Qin and Chu, and at the famous academy of Jixia in the state of Qi he is said to have held the position of senior master three times. In his later years he served as magistrate of Lanling in Chu and there he wrote and taught. He died around 235 BC, outliving by a generation the master he honoured.

His pupils were among the most consequential men of the age. The legalist philosopher Han Fei and the statesman Li Si, who became chief minister of Qin, both studied with him. This fact has always coloured his reputation, for later Confucians were uneasy that the teacher of Confucian ritual should have produced the architects of the harsh Qin state.

== Human Nature and Its Correction ==
Xunzi is best known for the thesis that human nature is evil, or more precisely that it is naturally self-interested and disruptive and that goodness is the product of conscious effort and training. He wrote a famous chapter against Mencius, who had taught that nature is good, arguing that the very existence of teachers and rituals proves that people need correction.

His argument begins from the observation of appetite. Human beings are born with a love of gain, and if they follow it they will quarrel and seize; they are born with envy and hatred, and if they follow these they will injure one another. Order can be achieved only when these tendencies are restrained and shaped, and the instruments of that shaping are ritual, moral instruction and law.

He used the image of the craftsman who steams and bends wood to make a wheel, or of the blade ground on the whetstone until it is sharp. Just as such transformations require deliberate effort, so the moral transformation of a person requires accumulated practice. Goodness is not a seed that grows of itself but an achievement, a second nature created by culture.

This view did not make him a pessimist, for he held that anyone can become a sage through effort. The difference between the sage and the ordinary person, he argued, lies not in nature but in the training that each has undertaken, and so the possibility of moral perfection is open to everyone.

== Ritual, Music and the Confucian Way ==
For Xunzi, ritual was the great instrument of moral and social order. Ritual distinguishes ranks and relationships, regulates desire, and provides an outlet for grief and joy, and in doing so it makes possible a harmonious community. It is not an empty form but the accumulated wisdom of the sages about how human beings can live together well.

He wrote extensively on music, arguing that the proper music of the ancients calms the emotions and unifies the people, while licentious music excites disorder. Music and ritual together, he held, were the twin pillars of the Confucian education, for one ordered the inner feelings and the other the outward conduct.

He also defended the value of learning and the study of the classics, and his essay on encouragement to learning is one of the most celebrated pieces of Chinese prose. In it he insists that learning is cumulative, that it must be pursued without ceasing, and that its end is not mere information but the transformation of the whole person.

== Heaven, Knowledge and Argument ==
Xunzi rejected the belief that Heaven is a personal power that intervenes in human affairs. Heaven, for him, is simply the regular course of nature, which follows its own laws and is indifferent to human virtue. Droughts, eclipses and strange phenomena are not omens but natural events, and to fear them is superstition.

From this he drew the conclusion that human beings should not pray for or cajole Heaven but should master nature through their own effort, regulating the seasons, controlling the rivers and improving agriculture. This naturalistic and activist outlook is one of his most distinctive contributions to Chinese thought.

He was also a rigorous logician and critic of the other schools. His essay on the removal of obstructions examines the various ways in which the mind is misled, by emotion, by partiality and by faulty inference, and he insisted on clear definitions and the correction of confused terminology. He criticised the sophists and the Daoists alike for the misuse of language and for paradoxes that obscured the plain truth.

== Influence and Legacy ==
In the centuries after his death Xunzi was overshadowed by Mencius, and in the Song dynasty, when Zhu Xi established the orthodox line of Confucian transmission, his doctrine of the evil of human nature was regarded as a deviation. Some later scholars even questioned his place in the tradition because of his influence on the legalists.

In the modern period his reputation has risen. Scholars value him for the clarity of his arguments, for his naturalism and his rejection of superstition, and for his theory that morality is a cultural achievement rather than a natural endowment. His writings are now recognised as among the most original and rigorous in the Confucian canon.

He is remembered as the Confucian who tried to give an account of how moral order is actually created, through ritual, education and deliberate effort. In doing so he made the tradition more defensible against its critics, and his debate with Mencius over human nature remains one of the great enduring questions of Chinese philosophy.

== See also ==
* Confucianism
* Mencius
* Han Fei
* Ritual

== References ==

<ref name="r1">John Knoblock, trans., Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, Stanford University Press, 1988.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Burton Watson, trans., Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, 1963.</ref>
<ref name="r3">A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, Open Court, 1989.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Antonio S. Cua, Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsun Tzu's Moral Epistemology, University of Hawaii Press, 1985.</ref>

<references />

[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Confucianism]]
[[Category:Ancient China]]

Xunzi - Revision history

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