Xunzian current (Xunzi)
A living tradition within Confucianism. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Xunzian current (Xunzi) is a living tradition within Confucianism. Also written Master Sun, 荀子.
Origin
Founder named in the sources: Xunzi. No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. No founding date. The Stanford Encyclopedia places Xunzi in the third century BCE and describes him as 'sometimes reckoned as the third of the three great classical Confucians' after Confucius and Mencius. Against Mencius he held that human nature requires shaping, as 'crooked wood must await steaming and straightening on the shaping frame'. His students Han Fei and Li Si took Legalist positions at odds with his own.
Continue reading this article
Sign in free to read in full. Become a member to join the discussion without limits.
Sign in free to read- ✓Read every article
- ✓Comment and reply (up to 100 words, 10/month)
- ✓Browse the community
- ✓Reader badge
- ✓
Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Xunzian current (Xunzi).” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-xunzian-current-xunzi.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-xunzian-current-xunzi-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Xunzian current (Xunzi)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-xunzian-current-xunzi},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.