Abstract

I argue that the phenomenon of hypocrisy appears in many passages and connects to multiple ideas in the Analects: exemplary persons (junzi 君子), petty persons (xiaoren 小人), the village worthies or the village pleasers (xiangyuan 鄉愿), embellishment/concealment (wen 文), rituals (li 禮), the equilibrium aimed at between what is naturally given and how it is cultivated (wen zhi bin bin 文質彬彬), the madly ardent (kuang 狂), and the cautiously restrained (juan 獧). The discussion of hypocrisy in the Analects and its further development in the Mengzi 孟子 can be detected in three different forms: (1) speech-action mismatch, (2) inner-outer mismatch, and (3) the village pleasers, those who try to please everyone and seek their own survival and success irrespective of any objective moral principles. My hope is to clarify what Confucius and Mengzi did say about hypocrisy in order to “clear the ground” so that readers of Confucianism do not jump to a conclusion that reads Confucianism itself as hypocritical.