Siduan
四端 (sì duān)
At Mencius’s, the “Four Beginnings”: the four moral seeds present in every person. Compassion is the beginning of *humanity*, shame that of *justice*, deference that of *rites*, and the sense of right and wrong that of *wisdom*. The word *duān* refers to the end of a thread, the tip that starts it off—not an accomplished virtue, but its origin, which must be cultivated or risk self-destruction. (Confucianism has no proper entry in the nomenclature: the term is classified there as cross-cutting.)
Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs.
« Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. »
For Mencius, morality is not grafted onto man from without: it belongs to him as surely as his four limbs. The character duān (端) denotes the end of a thread, the tip from which a thing begins. The siduan are thus four sparks, four nascent points of virtue—already present, not four fully formed virtues.
His argument unfolds in a scene: whoever suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well is immediately struck by alarm and distress—not to curry favor with the parents, nor to win the neighbors’ approval, but by an impulse that precedes thought. From this involuntary movement, Mencius derives his entire anthropology. Compassion is the beginning of humanity; shame and aversion, the beginning of justice; deference and restraint, the beginning of the rites; the sense of right and wrong, the beginning of wisdom.
That these seeds exist is not enough. « Saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves »: whoever possesses the Four Beginnings yet claims they cannot be cultivated maims themselves. Their development is likened to fire catching or a spring bursting forth—not a given, but a growth. The heart-mind that shelters them bears the duty of bringing them to full bloom.
The siduan ≠ Kant’s innate ideas: they are not the constituted principles of pure reason, but affects, tremors of the heart grasped before any reasoning. They ≠ the empiricist tabula rasa: human nature does not wait for experience to bear the seed of goodness—it already carries it within—something Wang Yangming will later extend in his doctrine of the innate knowledge of the good. Mencius does not say man is good; he says man begins good, and all the rest is cultivation.