ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a historical exploration of the profoundly pragmatic character of Confucian scholarship, via a description of the Sung Confucians' hermeneutical debates over the Mencius. It identifies why the Mencius-controversies took place in the Sung era, and the four causes that catapulted the Mencius into the center of a storm of debates in the Sung period. The chapter discusses what the debates were about, the contents and processes of these Mencius-controversies between the pro-Mencius scholar-officials and the anti-Mencians. The suffering of the people was the root of Mencius' passionate ideal of populism, and people-centered government. The bone of contention in Mencius' aversion to royalism was his distinction between two kinds of rulers: wang and pa. Mencius and the pro-Mencians took the distinction to be that of humane wang versus inhumane pa. The chapter concludes with some novel implications on Chinese hermeneutics as politics.
