The Xunzi collects the philosophical essays of Xun Kuang (c. 310–c. 235 BCE), known as Xunzi, a leading Confucian of the late Warring States period. Unlike the aphoristic Analects, it argues in long, tightly reasoned chapters. Its central claim is that human nature is bad — self-seeking and unformed — and that goodness is not inborn but built through ritual, teachers, and study. He pressed this against Mencius, whose view that human nature is good was then a rival position, not Confucian orthodoxy. Only centuries later did the tradition crown Mencius as Confucius's heir and marginalize Xunzi, recovered as a rigorous mind only recently.
For much of the last thousand years the Xunzi was Confucianism's black sheep — but it did not start that way. It was influential among Han thinkers, and only later, when the Song Neo-Confucians crowned Mencius as Confucius's true heir and made "human nature is good" orthodoxy, was Xunzi's answer branded a heresy. And his answer is bracing: people come into the world wanting, grasping, and quarrelsome, and everything decent about them is added later. Kindness, fairness, and restraint are not seeds waiting to bloom; they are made things, produced by teachers, study, and the long discipline of ritual. Goodness, on this account, is not discovered but manufactured. Critics later pinned an uncomfortable charge on that idea: his student Li Si, and Han Fei, traditionally counted among his pupils, carried his view of human nature into Legalism, the cold philosophy of law and punishment that armed China's first empire. Yet the two extended older traditions of statecraft, pushing Xunzi's premise to a conclusion he refused.