II. The Origin of "Li": Desire, Order, and the Birth of Civilization

2.1 Master Xun's Question: Whence Does "Li" Arise$7

At the very opening of the "Discourse on Ritual Propriety," Master Xun poses a fundamental question directly:

Whence does li arise$8

It is said: Human beings are born with desires. When desire is not satisfied, one cannot but seek to satisfy it. When such seeking has no measure or bound, there cannot but be contention. Contention brings disorder, and disorder brings exhaustion. The Former Kings hated such disorder, and so they established li and righteousness (yi) in order to allot things — thereby nurturing people's desires and providing for their seeking. They caused desire never to be exhausted by things, and things never to be depleted by desire; the two sustaining and increasing each other in mutual reliance. This is whence li arises.

— Xunzi, "Discourse on Ritual Propriety," Passage 1

Rendered into continuous prose: "Whence does li arise$9 The answer is: human beings are born with desires. When one has desire but cannot obtain what is desired, one cannot but seek it. When such seeking has no measure or boundary, there cannot but be contention. Contention leads to disorder, and disorder leads to exhaustion and want. The Former Kings hated such disorder, and so they established li and yi (righteousness) in order to allot and distinguish, thereby nurturing people's desires and supplying their seeking — so that desire would never be exhausted for want of goods, and goods would never be depleted by the excess of desire. The two sustain and grow together — this is whence li arises."

This passage deserves close reading, sentence by sentence.

2.2 "Human Beings Are Born with Desires": Facing Desire Squarely

Master Xun's starting point is a plain fact: human beings are born with desires. Hungry, one desires to eat; cold, one desires to be clothed; weary, one desires to rest — this is the natural condition of human beings, part of their xing (nature).

Note well: Master Xun does not say that desire is "bad." He merely says that desire is a fact. This attitude matters a great deal, for it means that the purpose of li is not to extinguish desire, but to regulate and guide it. This is precisely what distinguishes li from asceticism as found in certain religions.

Let us compare this with other pre-Qin thinkers:

• Laozi takes a more wary attitude toward desire. He says: "Do not exalt the worthy, and the people will not contend; do not prize goods hard to obtain, and the people will not turn to theft; do not display what is desirable, and the people's hearts will not be thrown into confusion." (Daodejing, Ch. 3) — best of all would be for people never to give rise to desire in the first place. Yet even Laozi does not call for the utter extinction of desire, but rather advocates "few private aims, few desires" (Daodejing, Ch. 19) — diminishing self-interest, lessening desire.
• Zhuangzi offers a celebrated parable about a fine horse: Bole was skilled at judging horses, yet in the course of "caring for" them — branding them with hot irons, trimming their manes, paring their hooves — he in fact injured the horses' natural disposition. Zhuangzi suggests through this that excessive human management (li included) may in fact run contrary to the natural disposition of things.
• Mencius held that human nature possesses an "innate moral knowledge and innate moral ability" — people naturally know what is good. Desire, too, contains an element of goodness — the desire to love one's kin, the desire to help others. The key is not to suppress desire, but to guide it toward the good. The "heart of deference and yielding" is itself a natural inclination, requiring only cultivation.

Master Xun's position is neither as wary of desire as Laozi's, nor as sanguine about it as Mencius's. He adopts a realist attitude: desire is a neutral fact, and the crucial question is how it is handled.

2.3 "When Seeking Has No Measure or Boundary, There Cannot but Be Contention": The Logical Chain from Desire to Disorder

Master Xun goes on to lay out a tightly reasoned chain:

Desire → Seeking → Unbounded seeking → Contention → Disorder → Exhaustion and want

The critical link in this chain is "having no measure or boundary" (wu du liang fen jie). Master Xun is not saying that seeking itself is bad. What he says is that seeking without restraint or limit inevitably leads to conflict.

The term "boundary" (fen, 分) here is of great importance. Fen is a core concept in Master Xun's system of thought, carrying two meanings at once: "to distinguish" and "to distribute" or "allot." Without fen, there is no order; without order, there is only disorder.

This reasoning holds equally in modern society: if everyone in a society pursues their own interests without limit, and there is no institutional constraint or mechanism of distribution whatsoever, then contention and disorder are inevitable. Natural resources are finite, while human desire tends toward the infinite — this contradiction must be reconciled by some means.

2.4 "Establishing Li and Yi in Order to Allot": Li as a Solution

The Former Kings (the sage-rulers of antiquity) hated such disorder, and so they established li and yi in order to allot. "Li yi" here is a compound of li and yi (righteousness). The original meaning of yi is "fitting" — what is proper and appropriate. "Li yi" together thus means "a proper and fitting ordering."

Note Master Xun's choice of words: he says "established" (zhi — to institute, to create), not "discovered" or "restored." This means that, in Master Xun's view, li is not something that already existed in nature, nor something innately present in the human heart, but rather a creation of human wisdom. This is precisely what distinguishes Master Xun clearly from Mencius: Mencius held that the sprout of li (the "heart of deference and yielding") is inherent in human nature; Master Xun held that li is an acquired, deliberately created human artifact.

But "humanly created" does not mean "arbitrarily fabricated." The "Former Kings" of whom Master Xun speaks are not ordinary people, but sages possessed of the highest wisdom. They observed the patterns by which Heaven and Earth operate and the needs of human beings living in groups, and on this basis created li. Although li is man-made, it accords with the Way of Heaven and conforms to the patterns of nature. We shall discuss this point in detail later, in the discussion of "li and Heaven and Earth."

2.5 "The Two Sustaining and Increasing Each Other": The Wisdom of Dynamic Balance

Master Xun's description of the function of li is masterful:

They caused desire never to be exhausted by things, and things never to be depleted by desire; the two sustaining and increasing each other in mutual reliance.

"Desire is not exhausted for want of goods, and goods are not depleted by the excess of desire — the two sustain and increase each other in mutual reliance."

This is not a zero-sum game, but a positive-sum game. The goal of li is neither to suppress desire in order to conserve goods, nor to expand goods without limit in order to satisfy desire, but to let both grow together — "the two sustaining and increasing each other."

Embedded here is a profound economic intuition: a proper institutional arrangement can increase the total welfare of society, rather than merely redistributing existing welfare.

Let us draw an interesting comparison with Laozi. Laozi says: "The Way of Heaven diminishes what is excessive and supplements what is insufficient. The way of humankind is not so: it diminishes what is insufficient in order to enrich what is already excessive." (Daodejing, Ch. 77) — the Way of Heaven diminishes surplus and supplements deficiency, while the way of humankind does the opposite, taking from the deficient to enrich the surplus. Laozi held that the tendency of human society is to intensify inequality — the rich growing richer, the poor growing poorer.

Master Xun's li is precisely what addresses this problem. Through fen (distinguishing and distributing), li causes the distribution of social resources to tend toward reasonableness. As Master Xun states further on: "cutting the long to mend the short, diminishing what is excessive, and supplementing what is insufficient" (Passage 24) — cutting what is too long, joining on what is too short; diminishing what is surplus, augmenting what is lacking. This coincides remarkably with what Laozi describes as the "Way of Heaven."

This reveals an interesting fact: Master Xun and Laozi in fact agree on the direction that li ought to take — both hold that some mechanism is needed to balance excess and deficiency. Their disagreement lies in means: Laozi advocates according with nature and governing through non-action (wuwei); Master Xun advocates achieving this through the humanly created institution of li.