Study On Xunzi’s Thought Of Temperance

Continence is playing an essential role in the human society. It can balance all kinds of conflicts in the society including interest, desire and emotion, by doing this the society can achieve its own stableness and orderness. If a person can behave with continence, lots of weakness in its own nature can be overcame, with this said realizing completeness of his or her own morality. We can see along the journey of human history, every society, eastern or western, almost none of the moral codes has nothing to do with continence, and the most perfect status of the situation is the whole society is behaving with the same code, which entails us a very sober judgement to the desire and affection aroused from undue nature. Xunzi is worthy of study as the rich thoughts from his work, from intellectual immorality to overcome excessive needs, and moreover to develop a set of moral standards of human being, all of which involves how greatly continence can act on a person. This work is basing its foundation on the work from Xunzi, trying to interpret his thoughts of continence from3perspective. First it will start with the statement from "Theory of nature"to discuss what continence plays in a person’s live, as there is a tendency of evil from human’s character, which without the external constraints, will lead a person inextricable of bad behavior and able to find achieve the development of kindness. Secondly, it will then discuss how to achieve continence from the work of "Manners"from Xunzi, and it’s the external manifestation and how to develop it from daily life. Lastly, we will discuss how we can control people’s focus from blaming the external factors for human deeds, to human care. People cannot treat nature itself negatively just because it have the tendency to lead a person to the wrong deeds, instead, we should nourish our own hearts by persisting learning and asking, with the awareness of the evilness in human’s nature, only by doing this we can realize the actual harmony in the society. Xunzi sets his statement of evil of human nature to develop a set of standards of self-restraints, then to extent it to the whole society so it’s the moral codes for the overall harmony. This means a lot to the current rapidly developed world at it’s in urgent need have a correspondent fertial spiritual world. Our country is now working energetically the core value of socialism which we can benefit greatly from the thoughts of Xunzi.