Mencius by Mencius
Published -300 · 70,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Classic Literature
How hard is Mencius to read?
Mencius scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 64 out of 100
- Classical philosophical vocabulary — ren, yi, qi, the four sprouts — where each key term is contested and D. C. Lau's renderings differ from every rival's.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Vigorous dialogue in short exchanges, easier than most Warring States prose, though the analogical arguments turn on unmarked shifts of reference.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- A theory of innate moral psychology and political legitimacy argued through cases, with the abstraction carried by terms that have no English equivalent.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- Compact chapters that assume the reader knows the states, rulers and rival schools being addressed, with arguments folded into single exchanges.
- Narrative indirection: 44 out of 100
- Mencius states his positions plainly, though the arguments proceed by analogy and by leading the interlocutor rather than by direct assertion.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The child at the well, the sprouts, Ox Mountain stripped bare by grazing and the farmer who pulls at his seedlings do the philosophical work.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- He is habitually sarcastic with kings, conceding a point in order to spring a trap, and his politeness is a weapon.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The debates with Gaozi about human nature are left as a standoff, and Mencius's own career ends in failure the book does not disguise.
- Structural complexity: 56 out of 100
- Seven books of loosely assembled dialogues and fragments, compiled by disciples, with no argumentative order across chapters.
How Mencius is regarded
Mencius holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.