The perspective of Mencius as you summarised it sounds a lot like the anarchist view that if the state or authorities disappear / stop their meddling then people’s essential goodness will out. There are also similarities with the Tao te Ching of course. Personally I’ve noticed that certainly the more that the state or rulers, or society/culture, float abstract ideas of rights and laws then people do tend to neglect their own ethical condition and self-responsibility. However I don’t think that it necessarily follows that people are inherently good. In fact it could just as easily be used to argue that people are bad – jumping at the first opportunity to be absolved of self-reponsibility.

Regards, K

No worries. I read your first post as a kind of Buddhist refutation (I was expecting someone to do so at some point), so apologies for sounding defensive. You raise lots of questions, but to be honest, I don’t have a lot of answers. I posted this more as a point of interest, and point of introduction.

Regarding your latest comments.

- Like you, I know very little about Mencius, but now I am intrigued lately. According to Wikipedia, Confucian scholars of his time disagreed as to whether people were inherently good or bad. Mencius took the “good” view, while others in his generation took the “bad” view. Much later in the Song Dynasty, Mencius’s views were declared orthodoxy and the basis for Neo-Confucian thought. I want to read more on the subject myself because some of Mencius’s arguments are kind of intriguing (based on what little I saw in Wikipedia), and want to get a better picture myself.

- True on the differences between inherent and potential, but it’s a subject I admit I don’t understand the finer details of. I don’t think it’s a meaningless statement though, as I think it has some bearing on religion, practice and such.

- I definitely agree that mixing and matching religion isn’t the ideal solution, and it’s good to step outside one’s own path from time to time to explore other things for a new perspective. I think thought Westerners still feel a kind of cultural pressure to identify themselves with a single religion, and that’s what I don’t agree with. That kind of pressure is absent from Asian culture from what little experience I have. Here I speak from experience, not from anything you said.

Keep in Mencius lived long before Buddhism came to China, as did Confucius. This is mostly a discussion of Confucian thought (with a 18-century Japanese-Buddhist mix), not a discussion of Buddhism per se,

Sorry if I had a ‘tone’. I wasn’t scoffing though, just asking for clarification on some of the interesting topics you raised – and I didn’t actually mention Buddhism.

- I don’t really know anything about Mencius or Confucianism which is why I was wondering if you could say a little more about your statement “human nature was inherently good, but obscured by society’s negative influence”. If society is basically a collection of inherently good people where is the ‘negative influence’ coming from? … Culture? That is what I am asking out of interest.

- Saying that ‘human nature is inherently good’ is not the same as saying that there is an ‘inherent potential for compassion’. Though both statements are pretty meaningless anyway I think.

- I don’t accept that the flipside of accepting the the mountain/paths analogy is “our way or the highway”. If anything I would argue that it is only possible to follow multiple traditions when we respect the differences between them particularly when it comes to the summum bonum of each.

Cheers, K

Keep in Mencius lived long before Buddhism came to China, as did Confucius. This is mostly a discussion of Confucian thought (with a 18-century Japanese-Buddhist mix), not a discussion of Buddhism per se, hence there won’t necessarily be agreement. However, notion of inherent compassion (or more properly the potential for it) and such is something taken up by other, mostly non-Pure Land schools, so I’d be hesitant to scoff at it too much.

The parable of the mountain, to me, is interesting because it’s definitely not in a New Age context (this is Tokugawa-era Japan, bear in mind), and does reflect a more Asian sentiment of borrowing from various religions traditions. Having married into the culture a bit, it’s led me to question the “our way or the highway” approach Westerners take toward religion, including a strictly Buddhist-only view of things. I am reminding of a nice little quote from the novel Dune Messiah, posted elsewhere on this blog, where one of the characters ask “where is the one man who can escape the destiny of his own prejudices”, which is the very thing I hope to accomplish, even my spiritual prejudices.

Hence I find this stuff kind of interesting. I failed to mention in the post that Dōni was raised in a strictly Nichiren Buddhist family, so he seemed to rebel against that strict upbringing by teaching a more ecumenical approach. Shingaku Sekimon is probably the forerunner to other New Religious Movements in Japan, so the individual teachings may not be very interesting or novel, but the synthesis itself is what fascinates me.

“human nature was inherently good, but obscured by society’s negative influence”

So is he saying that if the cultural matrix in which people exist is ‘right’ people’s natural goodness will show forth? I can buy it to a limit extent but personally I take a dimmer view of humanity. Plus I don’t really believe in ‘inherent’ essences … we’re not good or bad but have the potential to be both. In fact an admixture of both is probably inevitable I think given the constraints of our reality.

“No matter what path one climbs to view the moon, it is always the same moon.”

This old saw? I think that there may well be areas of overlap between traditions – sometimes very large ones – but when you get down to figuring out how each of the describe the ‘mountain’ you begin to wonder whether it is one mountain or many. The image of a big stable mountain also conveys a sense of some big objective truth waiting to be found but in fact philosophers East and West have shown that whatever is there is much slipperier to pin down.