Mencius’ View Of Happiness And Its Contemporary Enlightenment

It is an ancient and everlasting topic to discuss the happiness of human being, with the history of thousands of years, which can be called a constant pursuit of happiness history. Mencius was a celebrated and representative one who occupied an important place of Confucianism in ancient China, while focusing on Mencius’ view of happiness and its enlightenment is not fully developed in the study of contemporary academic. The book of "Mencius" does not appear the words of "happiness", but Meneius often mentions the concept of "joy". In my opinion, the "joy", Mencius has discussed, which contains multiple meanings,"happiness" is the main meaning. The "happiness" refers to the spiritual satisfaction and psychological pleasure experience after realizing certain desires, goals and ideals. The "happiness" of Mencius is deeply rooted in the basic theory of goodness. On this basis, it can be divided into several forms and states, such as acquisitive happiness, family happiness, moral happiness and people’s livelihood happiness. Both the measures and methods of approaching the happiness are quite different."Moral" is a prerequisite for obtaining the acquisitive happiness,"filial piety" is an important basis for achieving a happy family,"resort to ourselves" is the basic way to achieve moral happiness,"benevolent" is the realization of people’s livelihood and well-being of major security. Although it is beneficial to pursuit the happiness, it still has its inevitable limitations, combining the form of the "happiness" itself and the method of achieving happiness. Mencius’ concept of happiness is rich ideological wealth, combining with contemporary social reality, this paper reveals contemporary value of happiness, in order to guide people to pursuit happiness rightly, scientifically and rationally.