Mengzi’s Proto-Daoist Sprouts
November 29th, 2009 
Mencius, Taoism 
Chris
Where does Mencius get the idea that the internal sprouts that compose the heart contain within the entire structure of yi (morality)? I take Mencius’ position here to be that since yi is not external, nothing from social convention adds to the content of what the seed of ren (benevolence) already has within it. At best, ritual and social convention can contribute to the unfolding of the sprout, or perhaps express what the sprout already has within it (as in Mencius’ example of funeral rituals expressing a natural desire to respect one’s recently deceased parents as opposed to leaving them in a ditch). At worst, conventions can harm the proper development of the sprouts.
I am not sure where Mencius gets this sort of thinking from. I wonder whether it is a proto-Daoist conception. Specifically, I’m thinking of Yang Zhu, who thought that each person had within them only a certain fixed amount of qi. As a result, your natural lifespan was fixed. If you did all the right things, you’d live to a fixed age. So external conditions or behaviors could do nothing to extend or contribute to your store of qi. On the other side, those same conditions could harm you — you could always get hit by a bus far sooner than your qi was set to naturally expire. Given Mencius’ awareness of Yang Zhu’s thinking, is his thinking about internal yi and the unfolding of the sprout of ren in some way analogous to Yang Zhu’s thinking about qi? Is this the significance of cultivating one’s floodlike qi? I’m not sure.
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