Zisi and the Thought of Zisi and Mencius School

Abstract

Zisi 子思 was a grandson of Confucius (552–479 BCE). According to QIAN Mu錢穆 (Qian 1935: 161), he was born in the thirty-seventh year of the reign of the Zhou Dynasty’s King Jing and lived to the ripe old age of 82 sui歲 (483–402 BCE). Despite Zisi’s exalted ancestry, gaps in the historical record have made it extremely difficult for scholars to obtain an understanding of his thought with any certainty. The following two sections will briefly review some of the issues surrounding Zisi’s works and the school of thought to which he belonged as a preface to further discussion of him in the context of Chinese intellectual history.