Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

what depends on the person and what depends on heaven is evidence of the belief in the moral responsibility of human beings.

Destiny according to Confucius and Mencius is defined by both ming 命 and tian 天. Tianming has a wide and interrelated range of meanings, from destiny to Mandate of Heaven, and is represented in contrasting ways.² In fact, in some cases, the Analects portrays tian and ming as moral powers.³ But in other cases it is “heaven/destiny”—in the meaning of blind destiny—that caused Confucius’s failure in ordering the state,⁴ led to the premature death of his favorite disciple,⁵ and became the ultimate arbiter of one’s rich or poor life.⁶ Still, Confucius did not speak against heaven, even if what happened was unreasonable.⁷ Ding Weixiang stresses that tianming was the result of Confucius’s battle against ming as much as a representation of his transcendence over such destiny, and yet ming may refer to both heaven and destiny. According to Ding, this development is confirmed by the Guodian bamboo slips (Guodian Chujian 郭店楚簡) and Zhongyong.⁸ In one of the Guodian manuscripts, for instance, it is stated: (1) “the Way begins in emotions, and emotions arise from nature […] nature comes out of destiny, and destiny itself emanates from Heaven […]” (道始于情，情生于性 … 性自命出，命自天降 …)—which means that a normative model of personal and social conduct exists from the very beginning in the form of shared emotions among people and that human nature comes down from “life-destiny” which in turn originates from Heaven; (2) “although human beings receive their nature, their mind has no fixed determination because it depends only on objects; the mind operates because of pleasure, so it can be settled only with practice and experience” (凡人雖有性，心亡奠志，待物而後作，待悅而後行，待習而後奠).

Nevertheless, although the use of such terms was not always consistent,⁹ Confucius and Mencius had a clear idea of the limitations of human will under heaven, its mandate and destiny, and distinguished what depends on humans’ will from the uncontrolled effects of their choices. The former belongs to the realm of individual and moral responsibility