The Criterion Quarterly—June

22

# MANG TSZE

## (THE ETHICS OF Mencius)

By EZRA POUND

I AM convinced that the most fantastically foolish or at best crassly inadequate notions both of Kungfutsu and of Mang tsze are current not only among the weak minded but among that class which, if it can't quite be considered an intelligentzia, has at least a greater domesticity with books than has the average reader.

A chinese female in the U.S. has been lamenting in print that although chinamen greatly outnumber the chinese girls in America these girls have the deuce of a time finding husbands. The men go back to China for wives, they say the girls with an American 'education' are brainless.

And this I take it arises from our occidental habit of never looking at anything. I may be inattentive. I have no doubt whatsoever that my long-suffering friends consider me inattentive, but on the other hand I am not a distracted infant, and I have on occasion seen more than was meant for me, or even, in the case of Gaudier's sculpture and Wyndham Lewis's drawings back in 1911 to 1914 more than some others did.

Nevertheless we occidentals do not see when we look.

Kim had an education. I doubt if we occidentals ever receive one. Having drawn an ideogram, quite a simple one, three times WRONG, I am humbled but not in any dust of the occident. It was a simple picture, a bureaucrat (or minister) faced by a member of the public, thereby forming the verb 'to sleep', occurring in the sentence: Mencius put his head on his stool (or head rest) and slept. It was not difficult to write, and it looked wrong when done wrong. I committed the same error three times running before I found out what was wrong, and whatever be my 'low' for idiocy I find traces of at least similar failure in sinologues. This note is the result of an experiment, necessarily personal but which I must describe if the reader is to judge its results. During August and the first half of September 1937, I isolated myself with the chinese text of the three books of Confucius, Ta Hio, Analects and the Unwavering Middle, and that of Mencius, together with an enormously learned crib but no dictionary. You can't pack Morrison or Giles in a suit case.

When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from. And my contention is that the learned have known too much and seen a little too little. Such of 'em as knew Fenollosa profited nothing.

Without knowing at least the nature of ideogram I don't think anyone can suspect what is wrong with their current translations. Even with what I have known for some time I

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23

did not sufficiently ponder it. The Ta Hio is of textures far
more mixed than Pauthier's version. I see no reason to doubt
the statement that it was a family possession, and that the
actual bamboo tablets had got out of order and some of them
lost, any more than I doubt the ethnographic evidence of the
portrait of Confucius, as likely to be authentic as any bust
of a Caesar.

This diversity is not due to any failure of unity in the
meaning of the Ta Hio. No one has brought out the con-
trasts of style from the magnificence of citation to the terse-
ness and lucidity of Kung's statements. Kung was an antho-
logist and a shortener.

With Pauthier under my hand for 23 or more years and
the Confucian matter in that form long familiar I had never
read through Pauthier's Mencius. In the french he seemed
merely prolix and inferior. The original gives ample reason
for the four books appearing together, and my title is for a
reason. Mencius nowhere turns against Kung, all of Men-
cius is implicit in Kung's doctrine. This doctrine is one,
indivisible, a nature extending to every detail as the nature of
being oak or maple extends to every part of the oak tree or
maple. Mencius has gone into detail as, let us say, Van
Buren goes into detail from a Jeffersonian basis.

By taking the 'ethics of Mencius' I include the ethics of
Kung. Yet if I tried to ascribe some of the opinions here
about to be exposed to Kungfutseu I might be accused of
trying to modernize them or of seeing too much in the original
text. In Mencius several cardinal lines are explicit, the most
squirmy Ersatz-monger will have difficulty in worming away
from them.

What I mean by not looking at the text can be shown by
the very nice little story of Kung in discouragement saying—
'It's no go. We aren't getting anywhere. I think I'll get a raft
and float about at sea for little. And the one of you chaps who
will go along will be Yu.'

The elected disciple throws out his chest at the compli-
ment, and Kung continues 'Yu likes danger better than I do.
But he wouldn't bother about getting the logs'.

Implying I think that logs are used to make rafts. Never-
theless the translator in question talks about 'exercise of
judgment' losing we believe the simple and Lincoln-like
humour of the original.

For the logs are there in the ideogram very clearly. What-
ever later centuries may have done about political platforms
etc., and the raft ideogram appears to show a log and claw and
a child hinting sylvan (if riparian) origin.

1

I am not denying certain ambiguities in the text or in
certain statements in ideogram but there are also certain
utterly unambiguous uses of ideogram. You must distinguish
between the inclusive and the ambiguous.

Ambiguity and inclusiveness are far from the same.

The specialist will often want a more particular statement
inside the inclusive one, but the including statement can be

¹ Note similar process in meaning in the greek ἀλη uncut forest,
and the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being.

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perfectly categoric, in the sense of having its frontiers clearly
defined. And this is not in the least the same as straddling the
category's fence.

In ascribing ideas to Mang tsze I shall limit myself to
what seem to me utterly clear cases of statement. Any border-
line cases will be noted as such, and where I am stumped I
shall ascribe no meaning.

I do, on the other hand, object to under-translation. I do
not think that I have a better mind than Confucius. Mencius'
great merit is that he did not think he had a better mind than
Confucius. (There are numerous cases recorded of Confucians
refusing to be had by such suggestions re themselves.) When
I get a good idea from the ideograms I do not think it is my
idea. If by any chance my ideas are better than those of the
Man of Tsau's offspring, then, of course, my tablet should be
placed in the Temple and my views replace those of earlier
sages. But I consider it unlikely that occasion for this will
arise. What matters is the true view. If my views are better
than those in the ideogram, pray do accept them, but accept
also the burden of proving it.

The ethics of Mencius are Confucian. The spelling *Men-cius* is all right if you take count of the way some people pro-nounce latin. Kung-fu-tsu. Chung Ne, Kung, Confucius all refer to the man of Tsau's son. Nobody now in anglo-saxon countries pronounces a c as tsz.

Serious approach to Chinese doctrines must start with
wiping off any idea that they are all merely chinese. Mencius
had an holy fear of cranks and idiots, and nearly all the most
recent forms of idiocy had already pullulated in his time,
among secretaries of one sort or another. As to subversive-
ness, the editor of the *Criterion* may for all I know still be
waiting for me to review a volume of chinese philosophy
which I found too rancid to mention. After finding the text
too rancid for use I turned to the introduction. (The trans-
lator has merits off efficiency, his english must have been as
slippery as the original, and in this introduction he delighted
me with the statement that all except the most hard-boiled
Confucians had swallowed his author.)

Thanks to nature, destiny or Kung fu tsu, I did not swallow him.

Nevertheless before we can have any serious discussion of
chinese philosophy we must agree on terminology. We must
decide more clearly than has, I think, yet been done, which
ideograms correspond to what terms of good latin. *Directio
voluntatis*. Dante's view upon rectitude rimes certainly with
that of Mencius.

Here (Analects IV,IV) is luminous doctrine reiterated in

Tsin Sin, part 2, XXXIII, 3.

Mencius. I cannot think that the translators have been care-
ful enough in correlating their terms either with those having
great contents and elaborate precisions in Christian (catholic)

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theology,¹ or with those of greek philosophy. Apart from latin (and greek) theologians I doubt if we have any occidental theologians. We have a word 'sincere', said to date from Roman luxury trade in faked marble. The chinese have a sign which is translated by this word of english. But the chinese sign implicates quite definitely naming the emotion or condition.

Which you can tie up if you like to the first chapter of Leone Vivante's *Originalità nel pensiero*. There are two ideograms, one middle-heart,

which might be translatable by sincere in its now current meaning, and this other sign: the word and the action of fixing or perfecting (just given, ideogram 5).

All of which comes out of the Confucian answer when asked about the first act of government: 'call things by their right names.'

There is a third sign recurring and again recurring, of the man who stands by his word.

The conditions of my experiment, if you will consider them, implied not being distracted or led off into the mazes of the dictionary with its infinite (i.e. unbounded) interest and interests. Having been three times through the whole text and having perforce to look at the ideograms and try to work out the unfamiliar ones from their bases, I should have now a better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine, at any rate I believe that I have, and that the constants have been impressed on my eye.

Clearly what they translate virtue is the greek *arete*

it is not mediaeval *virtu*, though it is radically *virtus* from *vir*. It is, in chinese, the whole man and the whole man's contents. This is or should be impressed on the eye.

The sick part of our philosophy is 'greek splitting', a term which I will shortly re-explain. The Confucian is totalitarian. When the aims of Shun and Wan were set together, though after a thousand years interval, they were as two halves of a

¹ Since writing this, though not necessarily altering the mentioned condition of things, Routledge announces 'Soothill and Hedous' Dictionary of Chinese-Buddhist terms', and Motoschiro's Greek-Japanese dictionary has been published.

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26

tally stick. (Even the greatly learned translator has translated
this 'seal' in the text with a foot-note to say 'tally-stick'.)

That things can be known a hundred generations distant
implied no supernatural powers, it did imply the durability
of natural process which alone gives a possibility for science.

I take it the Mencian affirmation is of a permanent human
process. There is no reason for me to tone that down with the
phrase 'I take it'. The doctrine is clear. But the effects of the
doctrine are startling when Mr. D. tells me he suspects
Soothill of modernizing his version of Analects.

Mencius distinguishes a tax from a share, he is for an
economy of abundance. Riches are due to exchange. The
man who wants to lower the standard of living should end as
an earthworm. Simple-lifers are half wits. All this is perfectly
clear and utterly non-semitic in the original text.

The semitic is excess. The semitic is against ANY scale of
values. The Church in the middle ages evolved an hierarchy
of values.

It is mere shouting for the home team to pretend that the
so-called Christian virtues were invented A.D. 1 to A.D. 32 in
Judea.

'If a man died in a ditch Shun felt it as if he had killed
him.' This of the Emperor Shun.

'Is there', said Mang Tsze, 'any difference between killing
a man with a club and a sword?'

'No,' said King Hway.

'Is there any difference between killing him with a sword
and with a system of government?'

This is not the chemin de Velours. There are perfectly
good reasons why this philosophy does not get more publicity.

The cabinet ministers who can face it? I know of none in
London or Paris.

Greek philosophy was almost an attack upon nature. That
sentence cannot stand as it is, but may serve to disturb ex-
cessive complacencies.

The school of Kung included intelligence without cutting
it from its base.

You can no more fake in this company than you can fake
in a science laboratory. But you are not split into fragments.
The curse of European thought appeared between the
Nichomachean notes and the Magna Moralia. Aristotle (as
recorded in the earlier record) began his list of mental pro-
cesses with Te Xne, τέχνη, and the damned college parrots
omitted it. This was done almost before the poor bloke was
cold in his coffin.

Greek philosophy, and european in its wake, degenerated
into an attack on mythology and mythology is, perforce,
totalitarian. I mean that it tries to find an expression for
reality without over-simplification, and without scission, you
can examine a living animal, but at a certain point dissection
is compatible only with death. I believe Leibniz felt this, and
that Gemisto Pleton felt it.

Without knowing the Book of Rites it would be foolish to
talk on Mencius' position in this regard further than to note

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27

what is actually said in his writing. There is an allusion to banishing the spirits of the fields and grain and electing others. I doubt if this is compatible with pejorative superstition. The point relevant to my title is that at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature. The man who pulled up his corn because it didn't grow fast enough, and then told his family he had assisted the grain, is Mencius' parable. The nature of things is good. The *way* is the process of nature, *one*, in the sense that the chemist and biologist so find it. Any attempt to deal with it as split, is due to ignorance and a failure in the direction of the will.

Whence the Mencian does not try to avoid concrete application. Marx and Hegel break down when their ideas come to be worked out in conduct. My contention is that you can quite clearly judge what Mencius would have thought of specific situations in our time, and to support this I shall now quote, first from his talks with King Hwuy of Leang:

> Your dogs and swine eat the food of man and you do not make any
> restrictive arrangements.

> Your people are dying from famine on the roads and you do not
> know how to issue stores for them. When they die you say it is owing
> to the year. How does this differ from killing a man and saying it was
> not I but the weapon?

and a few lines lower:

> Is there any difference between killing a man with the sword or
> with a system of government? Beasts devour one another... there are
> fat horses in your stables (while people die of famine)... this is called
> leading on beasts to devour men.

In another place he defines 'leading on the earth to devour men that is in a princes' wars for more territory'. 'In the *Spring and Autumn* there are no righteous wars, some are better than others.' Spring and Autumn is the title of Confucius history text book.

> I have found very curious opinions as to Kung's formalism.
> L. Vivante recently showed me a horrible reference book as
> he called it, where the condensing ass had cited nothing but
> details of Kung's behaviour and several rules of formality.

> Anyone who had read the text of Kung and Mencius in
> even a passable translation would know that at no point and
> on no occasion do such rules ask one to overstep common
> sense. There are times for politeness and times for prompt
> action. Discretion in perceiving the when is basic in Con-
> fucianism.

> There are two elements in the 'rules of propriety'.

> A. the expression of finer feelings and a resultant standard
> of behaviour on occasions when no graver and more impell-
> ing circumstance demands their abrogation. This is the per-
> permanent part. There is (B) the part relative to the times of
> Confucius. Certain ceremonies served, I think, as passports,
> such as the complicated Guard's salute. To-day a man not a
> guardsman would give himself away if he tried it without
> preparation.

> When you hadn't a telegraph, some of these ceremonies
> would have served to show the authenticity and also the
> nature of the man who turned up at the frontier.

The Criterion Quarterly—June 28

The three years mourning is scarcely in the New England
blood. It was not universal in China. Mencius justifies it as
being more civil and human than allowing one's dead to lie in
ditches and be chewed by stray animals. From which he
dates the idea of having any burial customs at all. There is no
doubt that latins and nordics differ greatly in their feeling for
funerals. This is not my prime concern, nor do I introduce it
save to protest against taking the chinese texts on the subject
out of focus and out of the Mencian sense of their origin. His
ideas on where to begin improving the social order are more
to my point and our time.

Therefore an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the
people, so as to make sure that they shall have sufficient to serve their
parents, and sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children:
that in good years they shall be abundantly satisfied, and in bad years
shall escape danger of perishing.

Only men of education can maintain a steady heart without a fixed
livelihood.

The steady or fixed heart is part of the *directio voluntatis*. The
commendable have it, and work inside themselves, the un-
commendable look our for lucky chances. Permit me a longer
quotation from (Book VII) *Tsin Sin*, i, Chap. 27, 28.

At fifty warmth cannot be maintained without silks and at seventy
flesh is necessary to satisfy the appetite. Persons not kept warm and
supplied with food are said to be starved and famished, but among the
people of King Wan there were no aged who were starved and fam-
ished.

Let it be seen to that their fields of grain and hemp are well culti-
vated, and make the taxes on them light . . . so that the people may be
made rich.

Let it be seen that the people USE (caps. mine) their resources of
food seasonably and expend their wealth on the ceremonies, and they
won't be able to exhaust it at that.

The 'ceremonies' here would cover the equivalents for greek
drama, and the outlay for latin processions at the feast of the
Madonna, etc. They are of the amenities.

People cannot live without water and fire. Knock at a door in the
dusk of evening no one will deny you water and fire. . . .

When pulse and grain are as abundant as water and fire, how shall
the people be other than humane.

(Here the ideogram for ARETE, entire man.)

The question of tax is here specified. Other passages clearly
define the root difference between share and impost. 'Nothing
is worse than a fixed tax.' A fixed tax on grain is in bad years
a tyranny, a tithe proper, no tyranny. If, as he brings out
against the simple lifers, a country cannot do without potters
it certainly cannot do without governors. As for an emperor
tilling his fields, it is mere shop front, no one ever expected
him to make his own clothes as well, in fact: 'is', he asks, 'the
imperial function the only business compatible with doing
one's ploughing, potters and carpenters being exempt?'

In the conditions of 500 and 400 B.C. if you cut the tithe
lower than 10 per cent. you could live only as the 'dog and
camp-fire people'. If you raised it above 10 per cent. for

The Criterion Quarterly—June 29

traders and people in the centre of empire and above the NINE
FIELDS share system for rurals and border folk, you would
have tyranny.

The analogy of the nine fields system to Rossoni's *amassi*
in present-day Italy is notable.

It is of the permanence of nature that honest men, even if
endowed with no special brilliance, with no talents above
those of straightness and honesty, come repeatedly to the
same answers in ethics, without need of borrowing each
other's ideas.

Shun and Wan had a thousand years between them and
when their wills were compared they were as two halves of a
tally stick.

From Kung to Mencius a century, and to St. Ambrose
another six or so hundred years, and a thousand years to St.
Antonino, and they are as parts of one pattern, as wood of a
single tree.

The 'Christian virtues' are THERE in the emperors who
had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the
people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than
the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so
far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood,
and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is
sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy.

The level of civilization recorded in these ideograms is
higher than anything in the near eastern tradition.

It is only in the evolved Roman sense of proportion that
we find equal sanity.

There is a root difference between an immoderate demand
or a law which takes no account of the nature of things and
the Mencian hierarchy of values.

‘Our’ hierarchy of values shines from the Divina Com-
media, or one can at least use that work as a convenient in-
dicator of it. Both the catholic mediaeval and the chinese
hierarchies and senses of proportion are infinitely removed
from semitic immoderation. When Europe flopped from the
state of mind of St. Ambrose and St. Antonino into pre-
Christian barbarisms we suffered a no inconsiderable set-
back. The thing we flopped back to is unpleasant. It was and
still filthily is usurer’s measure. Let us try to avoid words
that could give rise to partizanship and say, you can no more
consider Western civilization without the Roman component
than you can consider the Orient and leave out the Chinese
Imperial order, which already in Kung’s time recognized an
historic process, including the alternating periods of order
and of confusion.

The ethic of Kung and Mencius is not registered in words
or irresponsible fanatics. The semitic component in Chris-
tianity is anarchic and irresponsible. Take the record on its
face value, it is of a sect in a rebellious and irresponsible
province, and for a kingdom, specifically in the words of its
founder, not of this world but the next.

The Christian ideal has been recognized as something
different, something NOT evolved without Constantine and
Justinian and those who built it with them. Civilization con-
sists in the establishment of an hierarchy of values, it cannot

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remain as a mere division between the damned and the saved
... with alternate wailing and hysterical merriment.

Mencius' sense of responsibility is omnipresent. It is in man to himself. Governing of the Empire was specifically NOT among the sage's desires, or at least not regarded by him as a simple pleasure. Out of office he attends to his own internal order, in office to that of as much of the state as is entrusted to him. But at no moment is he irresponsible. His desideratum: to gather and teach the most intelligent of his contemporaries. unless by good fortune he find a sage from whom he can learn, but in any case not to start teaching prematurely and not to teach his own ignorance.

The alibi of the irresponsible is often a false one, those who say they can do nothing because they lack talent, could at least refrain from deleterious action. This phase of Mencian doctrine has, I think, been grossly exaggerated in our superstition as to the nature of Confucianism. It is set out as the MINIMUM and universal requirement, not as a maximum.

The earlier *politica* of *amassi* was as follows: in a square divided in nine equal parts, the central one was cultivated by the eight surrounding families, and its produce went to the administration, this was commuted to a ten per cent. on central or as you might say in the metropolitan areas where 'things aren't as simple as all that'. In irregular country a just equivalence of what would be equal measuring of flat acreage.

Marketing customs similarly equitable. The profit motive is specifically denounced. I mean that you will get no more accurate translation of the ideograms in Mencius' talk with King Hwey than 'profit-motive'.

Mercantilism is incompatible with Mencius. Cheap evolution and evasiveness are impossible anywhere near him.

Naturally men love life. Mencius professes a taste for fish and bears' trotters, but there is an order of preference. Some things are worth more than others. Life is not above rectitude.

If anyone in calm mind will compare the Four Classics with the greatly publicized hebrew scriptures he will find that the former are a record of civilized men, the latter the annals of a servile and nomadic tribe that had not evolved into agricultural order. It is with the greatest and most tortuous difficulty that the Sunday School has got a moral teaching out of these sordid accounts of lechery, trickery and isolated acts of courage, very fine and such as could be paralleled in the annals of Mohawks and Iriquois. Any sort of objectivity, taking the record as it stands, must arrive at something like this conclusion.

Jehovah is a semitic cuckoo's egg laid in the European nest. He has no connection with Dante's god. That later concept of supreme Love and Intelligence is certainly not derived from the Old Testament.

Numerous invasions of China have destroyed several strata of civilization, but this in no way detracts from the Mencian wisdom nor does even Mr. Lin Yutang's brilliant picture of Chinese folly, which latter is a portrayal of universal stupidity.

In every country idiots treat the branch as the root. If you deprive Confucianism of its essentials among which are the sense of proportion and timeliness, if you take isolated remarks and cut them off wholly and utterly from the rest of

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31

the four books naturally the text can be quoted in defence of
five hundred follies.

The Rules of Propriety are to be observed under certain
circumstances and at the proper times, obedience and respect
have their limits.

Some sort of time focus must be applied.

It may quite well be that Confucius and Mencius are a
hormone that could be more vitally effective in the West to-
day than in a China busily engaged in livening up the busi-
ness of the Acceptance Houses. Apropos which I understand
that a living Kung has stated in private conversation that his
Most Illustrious Ancestor is now more regarded here than in
Pekin. Foreign loans for munitions do not enter the Analects.

When Pih Kwei stated that his irrigation system was
better than the Emperor Yu's, Mencius pointed out that the
latter had led off the excessive flood water to the sea 'accord-
ing to the natural law of waters', whereas Pih Kwei had
merely dumped his into a neighbouring state. Mencius de-
clined to regard this bit of *scaltrezza* as an improvement.

I have no doubt that if the Acceptance House succeed in
piling up a sufficiency of Chinese debt to Europe and then
induce hefty or half-starved occidentals to try to collect it,
even China might wake and the great final and definitive
armageddon, yellow peril, etc. become as actual as our Ameri-
can civil war was, because of the South's debts to our (N.Y.)
city.

Naturally if you neglect the root of the Doctrine the rest
will wither, and a neglect of its basic wisdom is undoubtedly
apparent among the less wise Chinese.

Neither that country nor any other has ever suffered a glut
of sages.

'Dead!' said Mencius on hearing that P'wan-shing Kwoh
had received a high government post in Ts'e. After execu-
tion, a disciple asked M. 'How did you know this would
happen?' 'He was a busy fellow,' said Mencius, 'with a little
talent. Just enough to get himself condemned to the scaffold.'

The 'busy' exists in the four classics with just the shade
that that has given it a derogative sense in the argot of Edgar
Wallace's crooks. Not meaning 'cop' in chinese but indicat-
ing why the crook calls the policeman a busy. A better word
than busybody and more aromatic.

If the reader jumps every verb meaning CHANGE OR MOVE,
if he remains blind to the verbs meaning RENEWAL and ne-
glects every allusion to 'changing what is not good' naturally
he can reduce the rest of Mencius and Confucius to a static
and inactive doctrine, inactive enough to please even the
bank of Basel and our western monopolists. But this would
mean excising a great deal of the original text.

In fact it can't be done. You cannot so ignore the bright
ideogram for the highest music,

the sign of metamorphosis,

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or the constantly recurring symbol which looks to me like the back of boat with rudder.

1

although I believe the dictionaries call it something different, though they all agree that it is connected with motion (I should say river traffic, but don't want to insist).

This constant pageant of the sun, of process, of the tree with its 'small, white, small' (ideogram 12) does not give any clear-headed spectator the feeling of deadness and stasis.

There are categories of ideogram not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided really by the feel of their forms, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant.

The mountain itself has a 'nature' and that nature is to come forth in trees, though men cut and sheep nibble.

*Tain Sin*, pt. 1, xxxiii, 2, is our soliderst join with Dante. 'What is the scholar's aim?' (Scholar here being also officer.) There follows one of the shortest verses, Mang tse said: then the sign for raise and the sign for will.

They translate it 'exalt the aim'. This is definitely Dante's *directio voluntatis*, with no ambiguity possible. The top of the *will* sign is the scholar-officer sign, and its base the heart. The lifting up is structural.

Nevertheless Dante's 'god above' exists in an ideogram. No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters.

The 'above', Plato's power above the heaven; lateral motion; the tree trunks; the man who stands by his word; the qualities of these signs are basic and no one who does not perceive them can read ideogram save as an ape.

Man, man, man, humanity all over the page, land and trees.

The people who take up one point and spoil the totality 'neglecting a hundred other points' are un-Mencian. They 'lift up and grind one, and hang up and cover a hundred'.

Condensing from the Third book of Mencius (the T'ang Wan Kung) and from other passages, I find the belief that 'without government services distribution and use of resources will be insufficient'. I find definite statement as to what conduces to borrowing, and its results. I find an interesting series of five characters, the meaning of which someone may say that I force.

The first contains the knife radical, plus pearls or precious shell and certainly means draw an outline, make a pattern of, (it is used also as a particle 'derivative from that'). It is followed by wealth, use, not enough.

It might apply to production, but it appears to me to apply equally to the distribution. The 'use' is utterly undodgeable. It does not mean exhaust.

‘If he levy a ground tax and do not tax goods or enforce proper regulations *without* levying tax. . . . Merchants will store goods in his market.’ I.e. one or the other not both.

¹ Used in composition as part of a sign.

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33

All through there is the sense of need of a proper (not an
improper) income for administrative expenses.

‘No tax out of season.’ ‘No better system than mutual aid,
none WORSE than a fixed tax.’ A tithe is another matter.

Government's job is to feed the people, that is its FIRST
job. (This not to be confused with Kung's 'get the right
names'. That 'Ch'ing Ming' is the first step toward condi-
tioning the government to do its work.)

Anyone who mistakes Kung or Mencius for a materialist
is a plain unadulterated idiot. Their philosophy is not in the
least materialist, it is volitionist.

(1) Arms and defences, (2) food, (3) the faith of the people, if they must be given up, be it in this order.

'Let Mulberry trees be planted about the homesteads
with their five mow (land measure) and persons of fifty may
be clothed with silk. In keeping fowls pigs and swine let not
their times of breeding be neglected, and persons of seventy
may eat flesh. Let there not be taken away the time that is
proper for the cultivation of the farm with its hundred mow,
and the family of 8 mouths that is supported by it shall not
suffer from hunger. Let there be careful attention to educa-
tion in schools....'

All this is on an infinitely higher level than Mosaic lex
talionis. It is all out, over, and above the balderdash that was
inflicted on my generation of christians.

I am not inveighing against the best Christian ethic or
against the quality of Western mind shown in Bishop Grosse-
teste's treatise on light. I am against the disorderly tenden-
cies, the anarchy and barbarism which appear in poor chris-
tian teaching, fanaticism and superstition; against the lack of
proportion and failure of objectivity when dealing with texts
extant, and, naturally, against the insularity which credits
Byron with having invented a kind of writing that had been
used by Pulci.

But if we are ever to communicate with the orient, or
cohabit a planet rapidly becoming more quickly circum-
navigable, had we not better try to find the proportions, try
perhaps to collect some of our own better writers (of the
ages) to present to our oriental contemporaries rather than
offer them an unmixed export of grossness barbarities, stove
pipes and machine guns. Several young men in Tokio seem
pleased to meet Cavalcanti. I have no doubt that even the
Ten Remnants¹ could have found something admirable in our
tradition had it been more tactfully shown them.

Lady Hosie's introduction to a recent reprint tells us that
the Four Classics 'have been relegated to University study
and are no longer the main preoccupation of Chinese schools'.
She dates the essay 1937, which year has brought the natural
consequence of unusual idiocy in the form of Japanese in-
vasion. If China had got to this point, naturally there would
be an invasion, and quite naturally some Chinese would, as
they do, hold the view that such an invasion is to be wel-
comed.

Lady Hosie, M.A. Cantab., regards the degradation as
temporary. Tuan Szetsun is old. Certainly a nucleus of
sanity exists in China. The West needs the Confucian in-
jection.

¹ (Ten remnants. A title given to several elderly gentlemen of the
Empress Dowager's time, now, alas, disappearing.)

E112

The Criterion Quarterly—June

34

The Four Books have survived Ch'in Shih Huang (the gorilla who ordered these books to be destroyed) and China was not effaced by that pimple.

The blots of my correction are not dry on this quotation from Lady Hosie before a still later bulletin confirms an old belief to the effect that any order in China proceeds from a Confucian centre. Chang Kai Sheck 'the Christian general' and the one man known to be getting anything done there, has now taken to using Confucian maxims in his instructions.

I am not in this essay trying to give a modern chinese feeling about the effects of such Confucianism as survived in China in 1900, and Mr. Lin Yutang will probably admit that the citizen of a chaos which has long lacked a certain code of ideas and perceptions is bound to see that code differently from the citizen of a chaos wherein such ideas have long been abused.

I am putting the original text against semitic insanity and against Socrates. If the shoving of it into University study in China were intended to bring it with fresh impact on to more thoughtful minds??? ... if ... but was it? and is, in any case, the adolescent any fitter to receive it than the child?

Obviously Mr. Yutang knows its worst side—Obviously certain practices come to us dated China 500 B.C. and we brush very lightly over them. They have not affected our lives and cannot. Seven inch planks for one's coffin or cremation is all pretty much one to us.

In any case there are or were practices. Soaking our occidental selves in the quite clearly illuminated principles of Confucius would hardly bring us out into certain chinese forms. In fact, for us to take up odd rites would be, as it were, 'sacrificing to a spirit' which does not belong to us, and therefore against Mencian and Confucian good taste, anyhow.

I do not see the abuse as inherent in the principle of Confucius, whereas the semitic is schizophrenic essentially. People who talk about 'something deeper in their nature' which laid the chinese open to Buddhism, seem to me to have failed lamentably to look at the Mencian text.

In any case I am dealing with ethics and not with cosmology, imaginary, pneumatic, or 'scientific', granting that Mencius hadn't the Western female to deal with and that the captious may think he over simplifies in this domain, or rather avoids it, though he can't be said to deny its importance. But the abuses of the 'system', mentioned by descriptive writers, are incompatible with the root. This I don't propose to argue save with someone who has passed the Pythagorean time of silence. The putting order inside oneself first, cannot be omitted from Confucian-Mencian practice if that is to be valid. Any other course is sheer fake.

Faith without works is fake, and the Mencian suggestion is that one should act right before formulating the axiom tried in act, and thereafter follow it.

The ethic of Confucius and Mencius is a Nordic ethic, a Nordic morale, if it has been boggit in laissez faire and tropical indolence that cannot be blamed on its shape. It is not quietistic. It is concentrated in the Mencian parable: 'An Archer having missed the bullseye does not turn round and blame someone else. He seeks the cause in himself.'

The Criterion Quarterly—June

35

Mencius is very difficult to summarize, yet as Legge cannot be sus-
pected of collusion with credit cranks and new orthologic economists I
add a few sentences and phrases from his version:

'Resources arising from government,' that is to say the increment of association. So far as I know this is the earliest clear formulation of it.

'If a man can prevent the evils of hunger and thirst from being any evils to his mind ... '

'Hostile states do not correct one another.'

'The way of the people is this: if they have a certain livelihood they will have a fixed heart. If they have not a fixed livelihood ... there is nothing they will not do in the way of ... moral deflec-tion.'

'What leisure have they to cultivate propriety and righteousness?'

'Only men of education are able to maintain a fixed heart without a certain livelihood.'

To treat the needy as criminals is not governing decently, it is merely trapping them.

The Criterion Quarterly—June

22

子孟

1

1.

MANG TSZE

(THE ETHICS OF Mencius)

By EZRA POUND

The Criterion Quarterly—June 23

By taking the 'ethics of Mencius' I include the ethics of
Kung. Yet if I tried to ascribe some of the opinions here
about to be exposed to Kung's I might be accused of
trying to modernize them or of seeing too much in the original
text. In Mencius several cardinal lines are explicit, the most
squirmy Ersatz-monger will have difficulty in worming away
from them.

For the logs are there in the ideogram very clearly. What-
ever later centuries may have done about political platforms
etc., and the raft ideogram appears to show a log and claw and
a child pointing sylvan (if riparian) origin?

¹ Note similar process in meaning in the greek ἰδη uncut forest,
and the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being.

材

3/2

桴

3

£2/5

The ethics of Mencius are Confucian. The spelling *Men-cius* is all right if you take count of the way some people pro-nounce latin. Kung-fu-tsu. Chung Ne, Kung, Confucius all refer to the man of Tsau's son. Nobody now in anglo-saxon countries pronounces a c as ıςz.

Serious approach to Chinese doctrines must start with wiping off any idea that they are all merely chinese. Mencius had an holy fear of cranks and idiots, and nearly all the most recent forms of idiocy had already pullulated in his time, among secretaries of one sort or another. As to subversiveness, the editor of the *Criterion* may for all I know still be waiting for me to review a volume of chinese philosophy which I found too rancid to mention. After finding the text too rancid for use I turned to the introduction. (The translator has merits of efficiency, his english must have been as slippery as the original, and in this introduction he delighted me with the statement that all except the most hard-boiled Confucians had swallowed his author.)

Nevertheless before we can have any serious discussion of
chinese philosophy we must agree on terminology. We must
decide more clearly than has, I think, yet been done, which
ideograms correspond to what terms of good latin. *Directio
voluntatis*. Dante's view upon rectitude lies certainly with
that of Mencius.

Tsin Sin, part 2, XXXIII, 3.

尚志

Sī
sēctāRIES

4.

喜

25

言成

忠

which might be translatable by sincere in its now current meaning, and this other sign: the *word* and the action of fixing or *perfecting* (just given, ideogram 5).

正名

誠

忠

正名

信

仁

E215

The Criterion Quarterly—June 26

tally stick. (Even the greatly learned translator has translated' this 'seal' in the text with a foot-note to say 'tally-stick'.)

符

10'

10

符

5/1

That things can be known a hundred generations distant, implied no supernatural powers, it did imply the durability of natural process which alone gives a possibility for science.

'No, said King Hwy.

Greek philosophy was almost an attack upon nature. That sentence cannot stand as it is, but may serve to disturb excessive complacencies.

You can no more fake in this company than you can fake in a science laboratory. But you are not split into fragments. The curse of European thought appeared between the Nichomachean notes and the Magna Moralia. Aristotle (as recorded in the earlier record) began his list of mental processes with Τεχνη, τέχνη, and the damned college parrots omitted it. This was done almost before the poor bloke was cold in his coffin.

The Criterion Quarterly—June 27

27

what is actually said in his writing. There is an allusion to banishing the spirits of the fields and grain and electing others. I doubt if this is compatible with pejorative superstition. The point relevant to my title is that at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature. The man who pulled up his corn because it didn't grow fast enough, and then told his family he had assisted the grain, is Mencius' parable. The nature of things is good. The way is the process of nature, one, in the sense that the chemist and biologist so find it. Any attempt to deal with it as split, is due to ignorance and a failure in the direction of the will.

Whence the Mencian does not try to avoid concrete application. Marx and Hegel break down when their ideas come to be worked out in conduct. My contention is that you can quite clearly judge what Mencius would have thought of specific situations in our time, and to support this I shall now quote, first from his talks with King Hway of Leang:

and a few lines lower:

> In another place he defines 'leading on the earth to devour
> men' that is in a princes' wars for more territory. 'In the
> Spring and Autumn there are no righteous wars, some are
> better than others.' Spring and Autumn is the title of Con-
> fucius history text book.

> I have found very curious opinions as to Kung's formalism.
> L. Vivante recently showed me 'a horrible reference book' as
> he called it, where the condensing ass had cited nothing but
> details of Kung's behaviour and several rules of formality.

> A. the expression of finer feelings and a resultant standard
> of behaviour on occasions when no graver and more impelling
> circumstance demands their abrogation. This is the permanent
> part. There is (B) the part relative to the times of
> Confucius. Certain ceremonies served, I think, as passports,
> such as the complicated Guard's salute. To-day a man not a
> guardsman would give himself away if he tried it without
> preparation.

The Criterion Quarterly—June

29

It is of the permanence of nature that honest men, even if
endowed with no special brilliance, come repeatedly to the
same answers in ethics, without need of borrowing each
other's ideas.

節

節

× repeat

回符

10

The 'Christian virtues' are *THERE* in the emperors who
had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the
people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than
the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so
far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood,
and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is
sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy.

The ethic of Kung and Mencius is not registered in words
of irresponsible fanatics. The semitic component in Chris-
tianity is anarchic and irresponsible. Take the record on its
face value, it is of a sect in a rebellious and irresponsible
province, and for a kingdom, specifically in the words of its
founder, not of this world but the next.

The Christian ideal has been recognized as something
different, something not evolved without Constantine and
Justinian and those who built it with them. Civilization con-
sists in the establishment of an hierarchy of values, it cannot

E116

Mencius' sense of responsibility is omnipresent. It is in man to himself. Governing of the Empire was specifically nor among the sage's desires, or at least not regarded by him as a simple pleasure. Out of office he attends to his own internal order, in office to that of as much of the state as is entrusted to him. But at no moment is he irresponsible. His desideratum: to gather and teach the most intelligent of his contemporaries. unless by good fortune he find a sage from whom he can learn, but in any case not to start teaching prematurely and not to teach his own ignorance.

The alibi of the irresponsible is often a false one, those who say they can do nothing because they lack talent, could at least refrain from deleterious action. This phase of Mencian doctrine has, I think, been grossly exaggerated in our superstition as to the nature of Confucianism. It is set out as the *MINIMUM* and universal requirement, not as a maximum.

Mercantilism is incompatible with Mencius. Cheap evasion and evasiveness are impossible anywhere near him.

The Criterion Quarterly—June 31

It may quite well be that Confucius and Mencius are a hormone that could be more vitally effective in the West today than in a China busily engaged in livening up the business of the Acceptance Houses. Apropos which I understand that a living Kung has stated in private conversation that his Most Illustrious Ancestor is now more regarded here than in Pekin. Foreign loans for munitions do not enter the Analects.

When Pih Kwei stated that his irrigation system was better than the Emperor Yu's, Mencius pointed out that the latter had led off the excessive flood water to the sea 'according to the natural law of waters', whereas Pih Kwei had merely dumped his into a neighbouring state. Mencius declined to regard this bit of *scaltrezza* as an improvement.

I have no doubt that if the Acceptance House succeed in piling up a sufficiency of Chinese debt to Europe and then induce hefty or half-starved occidentals to try to collect it, even China might wake and the great final and definitive armageddon, yellow peril, etc. become as actual as our American civil war was, because of the South's debts to our (N.Y.) city.

'Dead!' said Mencius on hearing that P'wan-shing Kwoh had received a high government post in Ts'e. After execution, a disciple asked M. 'How did you know this would happen?' 'He was a busy fellow,' said Mencius, 'with a little talent. Just enough to get himself condemned to the scaffold.'

The 'busy' exists in the four classics with just the shade that that has given it a derogative sense in the argot of Edgar Wallace's crooks. Not meaning 'cop' in chinese but indicating why the crook calls the policeman a busy. A better word than busybody and more aromatic.

If the reader jumps every verb meaning CHANGE OR MOVE, if he remains blind to the verbs meaning RENEWAL and neglects every allusion to 'changing what is not good' naturally he can reduce the rest of Mencius and Confucius to a static and inactive doctrine, inactive enough to please even the bank of Basel and our western monopolists. But this would mean excising a great deal of the original text.

樂

the sign of metamorphosis,

文

15

12

13

14

變

樂

變

14

1

Tain Sin, pt. 1, xxxiii, 2, is our solidest join with Dante. 'What is the scholar's aim?' (Scholar here being also officer.) There follows one of the shortest verses, 'Mang tse said' then the sign for 'raise' and the sign for will.

‘If he levy a ground tax and *do not* tax goods or enforce proper regulations *without* levying tax. . . . Merchants will store goods in his market.’ I.e. one *or* the other not both.

EIII

The Criterion Quarterly—June

33

'No tax out of season.' 'No better system than mutual aid, none WORSE than a fixed tax.' A tithe is another matter.

Government's job is to feed the people, that is its FIRST job. (This not to be confused with Kung's 'get the right names'. That 'Ch'ing Ming' is the first step toward conditioning the government to do its work.)

'Let Mulberry trees be planted about the homesteads with their five mow (land measure) and persons of fifty may be clothed with silk. In keeping fowls pigs and swine let not their times of breeding be neglected, and persons of seventy may eat flesh. Let there not be taken away the time that is proper for the cultivation of the farm with its hundred mow, and the family of 8 mouths that is supported by it shall not suffer from hunger. Let there be careful attention to education in schools....'

I am not inveighing against the best Christian ethic or against the quality of Western mind shown in Bishop Grosseteste's treatise on light. I am against the disorderly tendencies, the anarchy and barbarism which appear in poor Christian teaching, fanaticism and superstition; against the lack of proportion and failure of objectivity when dealing with texts extant, and, naturally, against the insularity which credits Byron with having invented a kind of writing that had been used by Pulci.

But if we are ever to communicate with the orient, or cohabit a planet rapidly becoming more quickly circumnavigable, had we not better try to find the proportions, try perhaps to collect some of our own better writers (of the ages) to present to our oriental contemporaries rather than offer them an unmixed export of grossness, barbarities, stove pipes and machine guns. Several young men in Tokio seem pleased to meet Cavalcanti. I have no doubt that even the Ten Remnants¹ could have found something admirable in our tradition had it been more tactfully shown them.

Lady Hosie's introduction to a recent reprint tells us that the Four Classics 'have been relegated to University study and are no longer the main preoccupation of Chinese schools'. She dates the essay 1937, which year has brought the natural consequence of unusual idiocy in the form of Japanese invasion. If China had got to this point, naturally there would be an invasion, and quite naturally some Chinese would, as they do, hold the view that such an invasion is to be welcomed.

Lady Hosie, M.A. Cantab., regards the degradation as temporary. Tuan Szetsun is old. Certainly a nucleus of sanity exists in China. The West needs the Confucian injection.

E112

who got a little order out of chaos
took to using Confucian slogans a little too late
thereby confirming another text of the philosopher.

The Criterion Quarterly—June

34

The blots of my correction are not dry on this quotation
from Lady Hosie before a still later bulletin confirms an old
belief to the effect that any order in China proceeds from a
Confucian centre. Chang Kai Scheck 'the Christian general'
and the one man ~~known to be getting anything done there,~~
has now taken to using Confucian maxims in his instructions.

Obviously Mr. Yutang knows its worst side—Obviously
certain practices come to us dated China 500 B.C. and we
brush very lightly over them. They have not affected our
lives and cannot. Seven inch planks for one's coffin or crema-
tion is all pretty much one to us.

In any case there are or were practices. Soaking our occi-
dental selves in the quite clearly illuminated principles of
Confucius would hardly bring us out into certain chinese
forms. In fact, for us to take up odd rites would be, as it were,
'sacrificing to a spirit' which does not belong to us, and
therefore against Mencian and Confucian good taste, any-
how.

I do not see the abuse as inherent in the principle of Con-
fucius, whereas the semitic is schizophrenic essentially.
People who talk about 'something deeper in their nature'
which laid the chinese open to Buddhism, seem to me to have
failed lamentably to look at the Mencian text.

In any case I am dealing with ethics and not with cos-
mology, imaginary, pneumatic, or 'scientific', granting that
Mencius hadn't the Western female to deal with and that the
captious may think he over simplifies in this domain, or
rather avoids it, though he can't be said to deny its import-
ance. But the abuses of the 'system', mentioned by descrip-
tive writers, are incompatible with the root. This I don't pro-
pose to argue save with someone who has passed the Pytha-
gorean time of silence. The putting order inside oneself first,
cannot be omitted from Confucian-Mencian practice if that
is to be valid. Any other course is sheer fake.

The ethic of Confucius and Mencius is a Nordic ethic, a
Nordic morale, if it has been boggit in laissez faire and tro-
pical indolence that cannot be blamed on its shape. It is not
quietistic. It is concentrated in the Mencian parable: 'An
Archer having missed the bullseye does not turn round and
blame someone else. He seeks the cause in himself.'

The Criterion Quarterly—June 35

'If a man can prevent the evils of hunger and thirst from being any evils to his mind...'

'The way of the people is this: if they have a certain livelihood they will have a fixed heart. If they have not a fixed livelihood ... there is nothing they will not do in the way of ... moral deflection.'