Talk:Mandate of Heaven

message: I wonder about this: "any failed ruler was considered to have lost it, no matter how great his personal virtue."  Can anyone name one ruler who both represented the end of a dynasty and who had great personal virtue?  I doubt there were any but I'm not sure.
"It also encouraged both Chinese unity and a disdainful attitude towards the outside world, since there was only one Mandate, and so only one true ruler of humankind—the Emperor of China".  I think this statement is ridiculous. I don't think the Mandate applied to foreigners. Do you really think the Hans thought the Mongolians had the Mandate of Heaven during the Yuan dynasty?  And where does it say that China believed the emperor of China is the ruler of all humankind?  If China really believed that, then they would not have had peaceful relationships with so many other kingdoms around the world.  And if China really had such disdainful attitudes, it wouldn't send so many envoys around Asia.  If the Chinese court resisted the ravenous European empires of the 1800s, it was because of .. well they were ravenous European empires.
Sour pickle 22:26, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Scope

message: This list of related topics strikes me as arbitrary: Tian'anmen? Amaterasu? Where's General Tso Chicken, while we're throwing random Asian concepts at the reader? Keep it short and closely related. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.100.116.23 (talk) 03:10, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Tiananmen was called the gate of accepting heavenly mandate.  It is either Amaterasu or japanese sun deity.  I think you're just in the mood to whine and complain. It is not random and they make sense.  Benjwong 03:35, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  See Also.. 

message: "Times of floods or famines were considered divine signs from the heaven in violation of the Mandate."
This sentence seems ambiguous to me. Are floods and famines results of Mandate violation (i.e., sent from heaven to punish Mandate-violating mortals), or are the floods and famines themselves cases of a heavenly divinity violating its own Mandate? Hopefully someone can clarify. -  Tobogganoggin talk 05:04, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguity 

message: The section regarding the concept of the Mandate of Heaven in "the East Asian countries that drew much of their political philosophy from ancient China" focuses only on Japan. Is anyone able to expand this section to include other countries such as Korea and Vietnam?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.96.226 (talk) 18:34, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You are right, both Korea and Vietnam also had their head of the kingdom as "Mandate of Heaven" at some stages.--Korsentry 03:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Divine Right in other countries? 

message: This section is original research with very questionable translations. In my view it should simply be deleted. --Mujokan (talk) 21:14, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have cleaned up this section a bit but I am not happy with it. The comment above is accurate - there is no way that any emperor would encourage his civil servants to become emperor - they fought tooth and nail to get the mandate and were scared stiff of losing it. "平天下“ does not mean to become emperor - rather to promote harmony under heaven on behalf of the emperor. My proposal is that 1) the Confucian adage stuff in the first part is deleted - since apart from the dodgy translation it is not particularly relevant. 2) With some new preamble the numbered list remains as it may be useful. Philg88 (talk) 01:53, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I am quite familiar with this whole area and have started to clean things up a bit. The section in question should simply be deleted. It's too late at night to do anything more, but if nobody objects I'll have another look to see whether there is anything worth saving and then delete all that needs to be deleted. The ideas from The Great Learning were in all likelihood addressed to rulers in hopes that they would accept the principles and therefore become better rulers. Be that as it may, the theoretical impulse of the book is to show individuals how they might become best able in their own lives (whatever those lives turned out to be) to further the aims of Heaven. Whether one would become a decent official in the local yamen, a prime minister, or something even more grand was not ever going to come out of one's own willful desire. If you were a hammer and Heaven needed a hammer, then you might get used as a hammer. If you were a saw, then you might get used as a saw. But it would have been totally against the ideal of being a good servant of Heaven to plot out one's way to the throne -- and a disqualifying characteristic, presumably, in the eyes of Tian. P0M (talk) 09:26, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an old topic, but the section in question was quite ridiculous. I just deleted it, which seems to have been the consensus here some years ago. Snuge purveyor (talk) 03:40, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Manifestations of Mandate of Heaven 

message: I added the multiple issues tag for the following reasons (these are just examples)
essay/expert - the article is not too wikified and in places uninformed - e.g. the claim that common people "often" started dynasties. This is untrue, only the Han and Ming progenitors were non-nobles - that makes two out of 30 or more.
expanded - the mandate did not disappear at the end of the Five Dynasties period, it was still going strong in the Qing Dynasty.
refimprove - speaks for itself
Philg88 (talk) 08:49, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The stuff about the Shang dynasty is highly questionable. Very little is known about the Shang except from archaeology, and of course one is always at risk of going wrong when looking at things like city walls built over burials of very many humans who appear to have been killed. Originally, many scholars thought that the Zhou dynasty accounts of Shang dynasty successions of kings were unreliable, but oracle bone inscriptions showed that those records had only a few mistakes. So the Zhou people may have known a good deal about the past activities of the Shang, but who knows? That being said, my own impression of the Shang dynasty is that it was not the kind of rule that ordinary people would have enjoyed. Some serious review of the most recent archaeological studies should be made before anything very specific is said about the Shang. Moreover, what was going on during the long reign of the Shang is not particularly relevant to the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven. All indication are that the tribe that was to become the nucleus of the new Zhou dynasty came into conflict with the Shang. There is no reason to believe that the Shang was ever a particularly enlightened regime, and in its waning years it may have become a serious threat to the well being of those over whom it ruled. Any seriously harmful activities on the part of the Shang would have supplied the Zhou rulers with evidence with which to argue to the people newly under their control that their lives would become better and that therefore they should cooperate with the new government. That's about all that needs to be said about the Shang. Anything else should be in the article about the Shang -- I presume there is one. That's something else to look at later. P0M (talk) 09:42, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple Issues 

message: :The following sentence from the 3rd paragraph of the origins section needs to be fixed.  It looks like somebody accidentally edited separate sentences together and cut some out by careless word processing:  "As shown by the divination texts preserved on oracle bones from the later Shang, Heaven was thought to be very active and to interfere in mystof the Mandate of Heaven changed the right to rule from one of purely divine legitimization to one based on just rule."  That is just awful and confusing.  I don't know what the author of that sentence jumble meant to say.  
Elgueroloco1980 (talk) 02:40, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It was garbled somehow. I found an old version and fixed it accordingly. P0M (talk) 03:44, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Bad Editing

message: Finally, after the Zhou dynasty became less powerful, it was then wiped out by the Qin because they believed that the Zhou became unfit in ruling.
The idea that the first emperor was so concerned for the welfare of the common people that he decided to put his personal interests aside and fulfill the will of Heaven strikes me as very hard to believe. Even if he claimed to be concerned for the welfare of the common people, that claim would have to be investigated in the context of the whole latter half of the Zhou dynasty in which the various Dukes decided that they were as good as being kings and then struggled militarily with each other. The ultimate winner became the new ruler, the first emperor. The roots of Qin ideology go back to Xun Zi, who cast doubt on whether people did anything except because of a cold-blooded calculus of personal advantage. From that point on a totalitarian ideology became influential and finally led to the Qin. Failures of that ideology, both in terms of what motivates people to behave well in a well-functioning society, and in terms of how successfully top-down planning with no initiative permitted at lower levels can function in a large nation with no methods of communication faster than flare relays and pony express transmission of wordier commands, led to the the downfall of the Qin.P0M (talk) 06:22, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strange assertion 

message: Liu Zhi (scholar)
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430161534/http://science-islam.net/article.php3?id_article=676&lang=fr
http://www.ccsp.ox.ac.uk/sites/sias/files/person/documents/Chinese%20Muslim%20Literature.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=jJY3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA771&lpg=PA771&dq=thirteen+classics+arabic+persian+islam+china&source=bl&ots=ee9E8kdO6I&sig=8tFnKldOnD7ne01vpwC8PLYrhXg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zHpiU6-dCKjK8wGXhICQDw&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=thirteen%20classics%20arabic%20persian%20islam%20china&f=false
Rajmaan (talk) 21:17, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Islamic view

message: This article is missing coverage of the historical development of the theory during the Sui–Tang, Yuan, and Ming periods. I have essentially no experience in any of these and don't intend to attempt to add any relevant information. Folly Mox (talk) 00:11, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing sections