Classical Chinese Texts
The Mencius Interviews

Two groups are distinguishable within the 23 interviews which make up MC 1. One group is clearly less plausible than the other. We may clarify the nature of the text, and the details of Mencius's career, by distinguishing them.

Arriving At A Distinction

Plausible. This would include brief interviews, in which the ruler typically assigns a theme and Mencius discourses on it, or speaks on his own initiative but in a respectful manner. There may be a supplementary question, but the total time is short. Neither Mencius nor the ruler quotes the Shr and/or the Shu.

1B16 does not record an interview; instead, it recounts why an interview (with the ruler of Lu) did not take place. It may be tentatively put in a category of its own.

Implausible. Very long interviews (1A7). Separately, those in which Mencius presumes, or the ruler displays, familiarity with the Shr and/or Shu (1A2, 1A7, 1B2-5, 1B8, 1B11). Those in which Mencius is accusatory toward the ruler or his kinsmen (1A4, 1B6 in which the King himself looks away and changes the subject, 1B7, 1B11). Those in which Mencius proposes doctrines hostile to the concept of rulership (removal of a king in 1B6, legitimation of regicide in 1B8).

These criteria overlap. The list of interviews implausible on one or more grounds is 1A2, 1A4, 1A7, 1B2-8, 1B11. These interviews envision Mencius as dominating the occasion, they imply a more Confucianized court ethos, and they suggest a more adversative stance toward the ruler.

Adjustments. We now consider the possibility of interpolations, and note that the last sections of two otherwise plausible interviews: 1A3:4-5 and 1A5:4-6, have affinities with the implausible group:

They were themselves probably added later; in the case of 1A3:5, to homogenize the two groups, and to insert the recommendation of 1A7 into the otherwise genuine 1A3.

None of the later discussion directly impugns the "non-interview" 1B16, which for that reason we will tentatively regard as genuine.

Corpus. The passages which then survive as being presumptively original are

And those with suspicious features are

Interpreting the Result

Some tendencies are clearly visible in each of these two groups.

Aggrandizement. All the presumptively added interviews or attachments are associated with Lyang or Chi Kings, that is, with big-time personalities. No interviews with lesser figures have been subject to similar extension. The kings were evidently felt to be a better platform than the lesser rulers for the school's later revision of old stances and its expounding of new resentments. The spurious interviews as a whole thus have an aggrandizing agenda. This is plausible as a later development. Retrospective aggrandizement is a regular element in other WS texts, and in early traditions generally.

Confucianization. Besides the attempt to make Mencius more important than he was, there is also an attempt to make Confucianism appear more widely accepted than it was. This too is intelligible as propaganda for the Confucian point of view, of which the Mencian view is one variant.

Vindication. The added Chi interviews clearly attempt to adjust perceptions of Mencius's failure as a statesman in Chi. Even the presumptively genuine ones (1B1, 1B9, 1B10) together suggest a ruler who is vapid and pleasure-loving, and incapable of taking a hint either metaphorical (1B9, in which Mencius asks for more responsibility) or literal (1B10, in which his implicit advice is not followed, with disastrous results). The implication is that Mencius did his best in a difficult and delicate situation. It may be so. It may also be that the controversy, more than a decade old in c0303, was already affecting the interview transcripts at the time of their organization into a posthumous archive. The later, more obvious distortions and inventions would then follow logically as an intensification of that early vindicative stance.

General Situation. The other themes mentioned above are also met with in the later material, particularly in the later layers of MC 1-3. Depending on relative chronology, some spurious MC 1 interviews or extensions may have had a homogenizing intent: to reduce the implied distance between the originally respectful MC 1 interviews and the more shrill positions later reached by the successor schools.

Literary Considerations

Form. The spurious interviews do several things that the original ones did not, and there is thus a possible motive for their addition. That is, the additions make sense. On the other side of the equation, we observe that the original core document, the genuine interviews, show a pattern which may be intentional. That pattern is based on a module consisting of a group of three interviews which are in some sense positive, followed by a single interview which is somehow negative. A first impression might be:

  • 1A1, 3, 5: Lyang Hwei-wang (sympathetic to Mencius)
    • 1A6: Lyang Syang-wang (not sympathetic; Mencius soon left)
  • 1B1, 9, 10: Chi Sywaen-wang (treated Mencius as major advisor)
    • 1B12: Dzou Mu-gung (went nowhere; Mencius moved on)
  • 1B13-15: Tvng Wvn-gung (ready to listen to Mencius on policy)
    • 1B16: Lu Ping-gung (declines after all to visit Mencius)

The date of 1B16 must have been 0317. This was Ping-gung's first year, and thus a period during which he was in mourning for his predecessor, as was Lyang Syang-wang in 1A6. The ritual requirements of this period may explain the indirectness of the negotiations for a meeting. Mencius was then in Lu, on leave from his new duties in Chi (begun in 0318), to attend to his mother's funeral. Chronologically, then, 1B16 should come between the early Chi piece 1B1 and the final Chi pieces 1B9-12. It is not an interview, and if the school maintained a repository of interview transcripts, as it probably did, this piece will not have been among them. It may have been composed when that repository was put in order after Mencius's death, to round off the set with a final comment on Mencius's ultimate career failure.

Implications

Authenticity Envoi. Given the evident formal ordering of these 12 pieces, may they have been selections from a larger file of genuine interview transcripts, or were they the whole extent of that file at that time? In the former case, some genuine material may have remained to be used in later Mencius chapters. We have examined MC 3 in particular, and do not find reason to regard anything in that chapter as other than consistent with the chapter as a whole. It suffices, as far as we can see, to assume that each MC 3 piece was newly composed in about the same time span. If there was unused material in the file of genuine interview transcripts, we find no convincing trace of any later use of that material in later chapters of the Mencius. The hypothesis of its existence during Mencius's lifetime is unproblematic, but the assumption of its survival past his death in c0303 does not necessarily follow. The original state of MC 1 probably represents what it was desired to retain of that source material for the uses of the successor school, in a form given to it by the first leaders of that school. Beyond this, it is perilous to go.

For example, it is not at all unlikely that in returning east from Lyang in 0319, Mencius passed through the territory of Sung. Nor is it unlikely, given the universal tendencies that apply to all living traditions, that this fact would have become later elaborated in the minds of Mencius's dutiful followers. No Sung interview is recorded in MC 1, so that if Mencius did pass through Sung, he had no significant contact with its ruler, and at most received from the Sung border officials the courtesies due to a well-escorted traveler. But in MC 2B3 it is assumed that Mencius received a substantial gift of money [evidently from the ruler] to help him on his way. In MC 3B5 it is further implied that Mencius was conversant with Sung politics, and in 3B6 that he was sympathetic to one of the advisors of the King of Sung. The trouble is that 3B5 apparently refers to the situation obtaining just before the Chi destruction of Sung in 0286; this and 3B6 amount to a judgement that the King of Sung's bad deeds justified the destruction of his state. This is anachronistic, and thus cannot be accepted as it stands. It is far better treated as an invention of later times, made for the purpose of taking a position on a burning political issue of 0286. So also with the rest of MC 3, many of whose passages have close relations with events of the 03rd century.

To combine later material in this way with the relatively secure, but scanty, record in MC 1 is very tempting. But it was probably put into the later layers of the text precisely to be available for that purpose, and the careful historian will not yield to the temptation to take it at face value. As an artifact of the developing self-image of the later Mencian school, it is of course invaluable. So is every piece of text evidence, once it is properly placed in time.

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