Competing Systems 7a

Dates of the Mencius
(An Added Note)

The argument here turns on the dates of the Mencius text, which there was no time to discuss in detail in the lecture as originally presented.

Scholars are inclined to date all this material to the lifetime of Mencius himself; that is, to the last 20 years of the 04c. For them, the argument as here stated will be cogent. Our own theory of the Mencius makes MC 1A7 a later addition to the series of genuine ruler interviews in MC 1. The received dates of the historical Mencius are nonsense; they have obviously been tampered with for one reason or another. There is more than one way to amend them. In our view (which is not far from that of Chyen Mu), Mencius lived from 0385 to 0302, a span of 84 years. The disciples disagreed about how to develop Mencius's theory of government, and spurious interviews were added the genuine ones in the years immediately after his death. MC 1A7, by far the longest of these, and thus the most literarily aberrant, was one of these spurious interview. What shall it be dated?.

In 0300, the ruler of Chi died (Sywaen-wang, the ruler under whom Mencius had served from 0318 onward), and the future Min-wang came to the throne. The Mencian factions composed their differences, agreed on a common position, and presented that position to the Chi court. There was no response, and presently the two factions split, leading to not one but two successor schools, of which the southern one continued to defend what they saw as Mencius's own position, while the northern one ventured into new philosophical territory. It was the northern school, not the southern one, which disputed with Sywndz the question of human nature (the two halves of that argument are preserved in MC 6A and SZ 23). Obviously, Mencius himself could not have been alive to oppose Sywndz; it was one of his successor schools, acting in his name, who accepted that challenge.

This takes us into later history, as it must if we are going to get a defensible idea of what the whole "Mencius" text actually contains. Looking over the probabilities for the whole text, and noting these contacts with with later controversies, we find that the only period in which MC 1A7 can be plausibly placed is the brief interlude between Mencius' death in 0302 and the two-faction compromise of 0300.

This puts MC 1A7, in our view, between the final layer of the Dzwo Jwan (c0312) and the version of the Five Ba theory which appears in Sywndz (probably early middle 03c). On our dating too, then, the argument holds.

 

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