ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ideas of the third great Confucian sage, Xunzi. Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi all regarded personal cultivation as foundational to social life. They treated the question of cultivating human nature as a question of the relationship between social norms (the external) and individual psychology (the internal). Mencius focused on the inward aspects (humaneness), and Xunzi prioritized the external (ritual practice).
The chapter explores Xunzi’s historicist account of ritual. Xunzi explained ritual from the perspective of social groups and hierarchies, and was influenced by the idea of according with nature, common in the agrarian society of that time. Xunzi’s belief that the natural and the human formed a unity influenced later texts and thinkers. The chapter examines how the Yizhuan (Great Commentary on the Book of Changes易傳) formalized this Confucian metaphysics, bestowing moral qualities and feelings upon the cosmos (tian).
