On Mencius' Confucianism Thought

In recent years, with the increasing of the research works about"the ritual", the domestic has whipped a boom of"the ritual study". The Confucian ritual study and thought has always been occupying important position in the China traditional culture ideology. While at present, there are many works on the ritual of Confucius and Xun zi in the academic world, the mount of works on the ritual of Mencius is relatively small.In response to this phenomenon, the author chose'Mencius'ritual thought'as the main subject of the article, in order to compensate for the little research on Mencius ritual theory. Based on the professional characteristics of historical philology, the author mainly took the book Mencius as the version; and the writer wrote this article, referencing to the important research results of today's scholars'and his own reviews.The article was mainly divided into three parts. Firstly, it described the origin of Mencius'ritual study or thought, the inheritance and the development survey of the ritual from Confucius'ritual thought; we can draw the conclusion that Mencius learned the ritual much when he was very young and Confucius's theory gave him great influence by what the works noted about the teaching of Mencius's mother or learning of the teachers, like Confucius and his students.Then, this article analyzed Mencius theory on the function of the ritual, Mencius'adovocating the ritual and the characters of Mencius'ritual theory, according to the words and the sentences of the Mencius. We can know that Mencius not only inherited the ritual study of Confucius thoughts and treated the ritual study very seriously, and what's more ,Mencius can adopt the ritual on the basis of changing circumstances in the late of Zhan guo period. Thus Mencius promoted the Confucian ritual study to a higher level.Finally, the author carried on the summary to the status of Mencius ritual study thought in his thought. Although in the book Mencius, there are more words on the "benevolence" than the words on the "Etiquette", this does not mean that Mencius did not attach importance to the ritual; that's because the ritual is one part of the ,Mencius's"four origins"theory, and the ritual can regulate or modify the relationship between the "benevolence" and the "justice", while the "benevolence" is thought the core of Mencius'thought ,and he always put the "benevolence" and the "justice" together .