溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Should Love Begin Near and Spread Outward?
Does true love begin at the nearest point and ripple outward like a wave?
Loving kin, one is humane to the people; being humane to the people, one cherishes all things.
Mencius's graded love (qin qin) collided head-on with Mozi's impartial love (jian ai) in the greatest debate on love in Eastern thought. Mozi urged loving another's parents as one's own, holding that only love without distinction ends the world's strife. Mencius fiercely condemned this as "the way of beasts without fathers," countering that love begins near and spreads naturally, and cannot be parceled out evenly from the start. Later Confucianism sided with Mencius, making graded love orthodox. Should love spread in order, or be equal from the beginning? The question still divides caring for one's own first from loving all alike.
We weigh daily between guarding our own family first and not turning away from a stranger's pain. Mencius's question about the order of love lives on that scale.
Mencius says love has an order: first love one's parents, then let that heart spread to the people, and reach at last to all things.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Mencius says love has an order: first love one's parents, then let that heart spread to the people, and reach at last to all things. Love is a wave beginning at one point and rippling out in concentric circles. I find this picture honest — we love the person nearby before the stranger, and need not be ashamed of it. Yet if it stops at the near, it hardens into mere favoritism. Does love begin near yet keep spreading rather than stopping? I ask how wide a circle my own love has reached.
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