Mencius

Born Meng Ke around 371 BC, he joined Confucius's lineage four generations down and inherited a tradition in need of sharper edges. The Warring States period gave him his laboratory: he travelled from court to court, trying to convince rulers that humane governance wasn't idealism but survival, that citizens under good policy would naturally care for families, learn rites, and strengthen the state. Those conversations became the Mencius, later canonised as a Confucian classic. His insistence that human nature is righteous set him against Xunzi, who called it evil, a split that never healed. He…