Confucianism by Goldin Paul Rakita

Author:Goldin, Paul Rakita
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317492498
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

What is crucial is not how loudly the trees may have squalled this year, but how people have behaved. Xunzi goes on to expound his theory of “human portents” (renyao 人祅), a term that would have seemed as outlandish in Xunzi’s language as it does in ours. “Human portents” are the many shortsighted and immoral acts through which human beings bring on their own destruction.

Among material [anomalies] that may occur, it is human portents that are to be feared: poor ploughing that harms the harvest, hoeing and weeding out of season, governmental malice that causes the loss of the people. When agriculture is untimely and the harvest bad, the price of grain is high and the people starve. In the roads and streets there are dead people. These are called human portents. When governmental commands are unenlightened, corvée miscalculated or untimely, fundamental affairs chaotic – these are called human portents. When ritual and morality are not cultivated; when internal and external are not separated; when male and female are licentious and disorderly; when father and son are suspicious of each other; when superior and inferior are obstinate and estranged; when crime and hardship occur together – these are called human portents. Portents are born of disorder; when these three types [of human portents]39 obtain, there is no peace in the country.

(Xunzi 17.7)

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