Zhuangzi and Mengzi are the best Chinese Philosophers
Introduction:
Among the myriad of challenges we face, it is the consequences of death that prompt the fiercest debate over how we ought to respond to another’s absence. Perhaps here Mozi’s consequentialism is right to prescribe frugality as a means of preserving social order; rejecting extravagant, lavish funerals as wasteful practices that deplete collective resources and undermine the maximization of wealth, order, and population (RCCP, 103). Or maybe Xunzi is correct in treating funerary ritual as a necessity, a method of mastering the world through “disciplined practice.” Because human nature is, for him, inherently prone to “unruliness and chaos,” ritual is not meant for personal development in a sentimental sense, but for reshaping these raw dispositions into something good (RCCP, 319). With respect to mourning, this requires “deliberate effort” in ritual creation, such as “eliminating disgust” through ornamenting the corpse or placing the deceased alongside “spirit goods” that are visually realistic but functionally unusable (RCCP, 302, 304). This follows his “principle of distance,” creating a respectful separation so that one does not become overly attached or repulsed. Even the Analects maintain that “when it comes to mourning, it is better to be excessively sorrowful than fastidious” (RCCP, Analects 3.4). However, notice that all of these approaches carry an underlying tension, any rigid instruction set risks cheapening the very meaning such rituals aim to preserve.
They appeal to the desire for life to be governed by complex intellectual frameworks, when in reality, the solution often lies in simplicity. The more one tries to control every aspect of death, whether through Mozi’s utilitarian calculus or Xunzi’s intricate ritual design, the more its significance slips away, like holding water in your hands; the tighter you squeeze, the faster it escapes. It is Zhuangzi who best exemplifies this perspective, encouraging us to look beyond human patterns and fixed responses to find hope in the acceptance of change. In this paper, I argue that while Xunzi and Mozi attempt to manage the problem of funerals through the rigid application of systems and calculation, their approaches prove self–defeating, as they try to impose a human–made order on an uncontrollable natural event. By focusing on prescribed conduct, they address only the symptoms of our anxiety over morality rather than our resistance to Heaven’s fate. This reflects a distaste for change, even though change itself is the only constant we know, and a mistaken arrogance that we have the authority to judge good or bad.
To begin, Zhuangzi identifies this very resistance to change as the source of our suffering. He describes the “True people” of old as those who “knew nothing of loving life and nothing of hating death. They emerged without delight and returned without resistance. They came and went briskly, nothing more” (RCCP, 255). It is important to clarify that this is not mere indifference; after all, Zhuangzi admits that when his own wife died, he was initially like everyone else, saddened because he viewed her death an interruption of life not a part of it. However, the “True Person” possesses an awareness that our habit of treating “love of life" as an absolute good and “hatred of death” as an absolute evil is precisely what narrows our perspective. Doing so reinforces the attachments that craft our suffering in the first place. If one can learn to see the flux of emotional responses, whether joy, grief, or shock, as neither good nor bad, one can respond as Zhuangzi eventually did: “She was resting quietly, perfectly at home, and I followed her crying ‘Wah–hah!’ It seemed like I had not comprehended fate. So I stopped” (RCCP, 267). What is that fate? It is simply the movement of change, which Zhuangzi compares to the procession of the four seasons. Just as Summer does not die but instead becomes Autumn, Zhuangzi realizes that his wife’s death is not a cessation of existence, but a transformation. This is a play on the concept of memento mori (“remember that you must die”); rather than a tragic end, death is a natural continuity. As the text notes, “nothing has ever beaten Heaven,” and because we cannot force nature to bend our will, acceptance becomes the only path—and through this practice, we honor the process of life itself as change (RCCP, 258).
Critique of Xunzi:
Interestingly, Xunzi offers a direct response to this philosophy. What Zhuangzi dismisses as self–inflicted suffering and an inauthentic transformation, Xunzi sees as the very thing that makes us human. He argues that Zhuangzi’s yielding to Heaven is misguided, for the Way is “that whereby humans make their way” and explicitly “is not the way of Heaven” (RCCP, 289). It is through our mistakes and the efforts to continuously correct or form them that we derive meaning; this is the purpose of ritual. For Xunzi, human nature is nothing like Mengzi’s harmonious sprouts; instead, “crooked wood [that] must await steaming and straightening,” meaning nature cannot be followed or left alone, it must be reshaped (RCCP, 319). As he writes, “among the creatures that have blood and qi, none has greater awareness than man, so man’s feeling for his parents knows no limit until the day they die” (RCCP, 304). Without the guidance of ritual, the emotions Zhuangzi accepts as natural flux would either collapse into grief or run rampant to something worse, making us no better than “birds and beasts” (RCCP, 302). Thus, Xunzi imposes a middle way to regulate this. We perform rituals not necessarily for the sake of Heaven, but for ourselves. Even if we know the ritual scientifically does nothing at all, human performance is what brings us together and holds us accountable. Taking Heaven out of the picture, let us entertain the performance itself: like an actor stepping onto a stage, the Confucian mourner memorizes cues and delivers lines not just because they feel them, but because a script and convention demands it.
Perhaps they resonate with the character, though life requires us to fill more roles than one; our audience is never static, and neither are we. It is not enough to model ourselves after a sage only within the boundaries of our own culture, we must be able to adapt and engage with others. One can learn to mourn through ritual, but it need not be the only way to do so at all. By insisting on assigning a particular as “good,” Xunzi’s view can be read as inadvertently severing many mourners from the very authenticity of experience through which they might have valued and respected death more. Zhuangzi warns against this in his description of the “True Person,” noting that they “do not use the mind to block the Way, [and] do not use the human to help Heaven” (RCCP, 256). To follow Xunzi is to place a human imposition upon grief, treating it as something to be solved rather than something to be understood. Such rigidity produces a hollow cycle that may be socially acceptable but remains spiritually empty. As evidenced by the story of Mengsun Cai, who “cried without tears” yet was still considered a mourner, Zhuangzi suggests that the external portrayals Xunzi champions around with rituals are irrelevant if the internal emotion is not aligned with the inevitable changes of existence (RCCP, 260). By fearing that we will become “birds and beasts” without ritual, Xunzi reveals his own anxiety, he incidentally prefers a well–ordered falsehood to the supposedly messy and uncontrollable truth of nature.
Critique of Mozi:
If Xunzi turns grief into a performance, Mozi reduces it to an equation, as if mourning could be conditioned mechanically and regarded as a logical inefficiency to be solved. He argues that because the dead cannot return, any resources spent on them could be injuring the living without benefitting the departed (RCCP, 101, 105). Indeed, I contend that this does offer a valid critique of the Confucians, whose three–year mourning period or fleshed out coffins might appear excessive (it definitely is). However, from a Zhuangzi-an perspective, this is arguably an even more egregious imposition of humanity upon Heaven. While Xunzi at least recognizes that emotions shape events, Mozi’s philosophy can be interpreted as risking their complete excision. By denying the natural inclination to accept grievance, even for someone of little value, consequentialism becomes a way to justify acting against one’s own internal nature—all it takes is one calculation. Trying to redirect a river requires patience and understanding that it flows as it does for a reason, whether good or bad. Simply displacing loss in order to act elsewhere does not help, and it certainly is not a preservation of order. For if the individuals within a society are forced to bypass their own humanity, of which they use to understand all events with, they lose all motivation to proceed with helping others with their events.
References (MLA):
Ivanhoe, Philip J., and Bryan W. Van Norden, editors. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. 2nd ed., Hackett Publishing Company, 2005.