Xunzi 310 BC – 235 BC

Xunzi was a Chinese Confucian philosopher of the late Warring States period and one of the three great classical Confucian thinkers, alongside Confucius and Mencius. Against Mencius, he argued that human nature is bad, or rather inclined toward selfish desire, and that goodness is the achievement of ritual and education. He was a careful theorist of language, ritual, and the proper organization of the state, and his students Han Feizi and Li Si became the principal architects of Legalism. Xunzi's influence on Chinese thought, although later overshadowed by Mencian orthodoxy, has been immense.

Xunzi — Xun Kuang — was born around 310 BC in the state of Zhao during the late Warring States period. As a young man he traveled to Qi and joined the Jixia Academy at Linzi, the most prestigious intellectual center of the age, where he is reported to have served three times as the academy's senior libationer. He later spent time in Qin and in Chu, holding a magistracy at Lanling under the patronage of the lord Chunshen.

The book Xunzi, in thirty-two essays, is unusual among pre-imperial Chinese philosophical works in being substantially the author's own composition rather than a record of his sayings. Among his pupils were Han Fei and Li Si, the Legalist theorist and the Qin minister whose policies later helped to unify China under the First Emperor.

Xunzi's Confucianism is rationalist, ritualist, and naturalistic. He famously argued, against Mencius, that human nature is bad and must be straightened by the patterns of ritual, education, and good government; he reinterpreted Heaven as impersonal natural process; and he made li (ritual propriety) the keystone of moral and political order. He died around 235 BC at Lanling and was overshadowed by Mencius in the later Confucian canon, but his work has been reappraised as one of the great achievements of classical Chinese thought.