Confucius And Mencius Perfect Personality

Confucian thoughts with the characteristic of"self-cultivating and other-comforting"always focus on the issue of ideal personality that had largely attracted the attention of Confucian representative figures, Confucius and Mencius, and had inspired both of them with wide statements. Given Confucian culture as the lasting traditional Chinese culture, Confucian ethic values has been playing the very important role for Chinese mainstream values. This paper is trying to unveil modern spiritual personality according to the analysis and clarification on the ideal personality—the sage and the gentleman—of Confucius and Mencius.In chapter one, I will generally introduce the ideal personality of Confucius and Mencius, including its definition and its virtue. Confucius and Mencius regarded the sage and the gentleman as the model of their ideal personalities and as the ascending states of personality, of which the sage with both moral virtue and social matters is the highest state for the Gentleman. In terms of the sage and the gentleman, ego integrity of virtue is always put in the first place with the specific moral connotations of benevolence, righteousness, rituals and intelligence.In chapter two, I will analyze the thoughts changes from Confucius to Mencius, including the change of sage's connotation and the way of gaining ideal personality. Although Mencius shared the root of Confucius, but Mencius'connotation of sage changed from Confucius'"transforming your inner morality into practice"to Mencius'"perfecting your ethic". Mencius inherited and developed Confucius'idea of humanity and posed the humanitarian thought of"Men are naturally good". Due to this change, the theory for cultivating ideal personality was transformed from Confucius'"highlighting both learning and thinking"to Mencius'"exhausting one's mind, knowing his nature, knowing heaven."In chapter three, I will clarify the influence of Confucius'and Mencius'ideal personalities, including the building of the worship of the sage and the modeling of national character. Confucius and Mencius established the idea on ideal personality of the sage and the gentleman and caused Gentlemen's follow and worship of the sage. People after Confucius and Mencius developed it into the value orientation of the worship of King Sage and the one of respect of Confucius and worship of the sage, which impacted the society a lot. Confucius and Mencius raised many moral demands for ideal personality of the sage and the gentleman, therefore the follow and worship of the sage's morality became a moral pursuit of Chinese nation, and turned out to be the national character of perseverance and the national spirit of ceaseless self-improvement.