Xunzi and the Confucian Debate on Human Nature

Xunzi (Master Xun, personal name Xun Kuang, traditionally dated c. 310-235 BCE) belongs to the last generation of major Warring States Confucian thinkers, active roughly two generations after Mencius, when the intellectual competition among the Hundred Schools had matured considerably. He served as a magistrate in the state of Chu and, earlier, held a senior position at the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi, an intellectual center that gathered thinkers from rival schools and exposed Xunzi directly to Daoist, Mohist, and Legalist arguments, which shaped the notably argumentative, comparative style of the text bearing his name. The Xunzi is organized into thematic essays rather than the more fragmentary sayings-and-dialogue format of the Analects and the Mengzi, giving it a systematic, closely reasoned character; among Xunzi's own students were Han Feizi and Li Si, both of whom became central architects of Legalist statecraft, a fact that later Confucians found troubling enough to periodically question Xunzi's own orthodoxy.