Xunzi

Xunzi (c. 310 – c. 235 BCE), also romanized Hsün-tzu in the older Wade–Giles spelling, was the last of the great philosophers of the classical Confucian age. His personal name was Xun Kuang (荀況); "Xunzi" simply means "Master Xun." Born in the northern state of Zhao, he rose to eminence at the Jixia Academy in Qi — the foremost intellectual centre of the Warring States — where he was honoured three times as its most senior scholar (祭酒). He later served as magistrate of Lanling in the southern state of Chu, where he settled, taught, and died.

Xunzi is best known for his doctrine that human nature is bad (性惡) — a deliberate rejection of Mencius, who held that human nature is innately good. People are born, Xunzi argued, with self-seeking desires that, left uncultivated, breed conflict and disorder; goodness is therefore not a natural endowment but a deliberate achievement (僞). The instrument of that transformation is ritual propriety (lǐ) together with education, by which the sage-kings shaped crooked human material into moral order.

In his "Discourse on Heaven" (天論) Xunzi advanced a strikingly naturalistic conception of Heaven (tiān): Heaven is the constant, impersonal order of nature, not a moral agent that rewards virtue or sends portents. Floods, droughts, and eclipses are natural events, not omens of approval or wrath. Rather than praying to Heaven, the exemplary person attends to what lies within human power — sound government, ritual, and self-cultivation. It is among the most rationalist positions in early Chinese thought.

His teachings survive in the Xunzi, a collection of thirty-two closely reasoned essays most likely composed by his own hand — a sharp contrast to the aphoristic Analects and the dialogues of the Mencius. Among his students were Han Fei and Li Si, who carried his stress on order and authority toward Legalism. For most of the imperial era Xunzi was overshadowed by Mencius, whose optimism the Song Neo-Confucians enshrined as orthodoxy; modern scholarship has restored him as perhaps the most rigorous and systematic of the classical Confucian thinkers. The definitive English translation is by Eric Hutton (2014).