ABSTRACT
For Xunzi, ritual propriety is the guide that leads a human being who was born as a small person to become a noble person and finally reach to the state of a sage. Ritual propriety plays an important function to get human desires moderately cultivated and thereby make a person beautiful both culturally and humanly. Fusion of the two traditions may also be attempted between the Confucian approach of “transmitting but not inventing” that emphasizes faithful transmission of truth and the Christian approach emphasizing individual creativity that respects every person’s basic right to choose. The concept of the “timely mean” articulated by Mencius and Xunzi covers the vast area of everyday life and is easily applied in our life with no break. On the other hand, since the early Confucian tradition focused on the practice of timely mean on political affairs, the integrity of “balancing the scale” could have been easily lost in history.
