Meng Yizi

Meng Yizi appears in the Analects as an aristocratic questioner whose exchange with Confucius turns filial piety from a short maxim into a rule of conduct extending across life, death, and ancestral sacrifice. The account preserves no wider biography, but its two-part form gives his question a clear significance: propriety is not merely obedience in the abstract; it governs how parents are served and remembered.

Identity and Introduction

The text identifies Meng Yizi as a person who asks Confucius what filial piety means. It gives no further personal history in this episode. Instead, it frames him through the question and the answer he receives, making the exchange a compact example of the Analects’ practice of testing ethical principles against concrete relationships and obligations.

The Question and Confucius’s First Answer

When Meng Yizi asks about filial piety, Confucius replies, “It is not being disobedient.” The answer is deliberately concise in the surviving account: it states a governing principle without immediately spelling out the acts that principle requires. The following scene supplies that explanation, so the terse response does not stand alone as a complete definition.

Fan Chi’s Follow-up and the Meaning of Propriety

Soon afterward, while Fan Chi is driving Confucius, the Master tells him that Meng Yizi had asked the same question and repeats the answer. Fan Chi asks what it means. Confucius then specifies that parents should be served according to propriety while alive, buried according to propriety when dead, and sacrificed to according to propriety. The exchange thus carries Meng Yizi’s question beyond the parent-child relationship during life: filial duty also shapes funeral observance and continuing ritual remembrance.

Ethical and Ritual Significance

The episode makes non-disobedience intelligible through ritual practice rather than treating it as a bare command to comply. Confucius’s clarification gives filial piety a sequence of responsibilities—care, burial, and sacrifice—and makes propriety the standard governing each. Meng Yizi’s brief appearance therefore anchors a broader ethical point in a specific exchange: respect for parents must be enacted appropriately at different stages of their lives and after their deaths.