Imagine a ruler standing by an ornamental pond, geese and deer grazing nearby, and asking a philosopher a question that sounds almost innocent: Do wise and good rulers enjoy things like this too?
That is King Hui of Liang, the same anxious ruler who, in the opening of the Mencius, asked whether the philosopher had come all this way to “profit” his state. Now he is older, his kingdom diminished, and he is standing in his garden – and the question he asks Mencius is not really about birds and deer. It is about whether pleasure and goodness can coexist. Can a ruler enjoy his palace, his park, his pond, and still be a good ruler? Or is enjoyment itself a kind of betrayal of the people?
Mencius’ answer is one of the most compressed and consequential arguments in the entire text. It is usually translated as “Only a good man can truly enjoy these things; a man who is not good, even if he has them, cannot enjoy them”. But the Chinese is tighter, and stranger, than that:
贤者而后乐此，不贤者虽有此，不乐也。
The worthy person is one who after being worthy, enjoys this. The unworthy person, even having this, does not enjoy.
The order of the words matters. Enjoyment is not the reward for virtue, handed out after the fact. It is something that only becomes enjoyment when it passes through the filter of a certain kind of character. The same pond, the same deer, the same tower: for one person they are delight; for another they are the architecture of isolation.
Two Towers, Two Kinds of Joy
Mencius does not leave the claim abstract. He reaches for a poem from the Book of Songs about King Wen of Zhou, the revered founder of the dynasty, and his “Marvellous Tower” (Ling Tai 灵台):
He measured out and began the marvellous tower;
He measured it and planned it.
The people addressed themselves to it,
And in less than a day completed it.
When he measured and began it, he said to them –
Be not so earnest;
But the multitudes came as if they had been his children.
The king was in his marvellous park;
The does reposed about,
The does so sleek and fat;
And the white birds came glistening.
The king was by his marvellous pond;
How full was it of fishes leaping about!
This is a conscripted labour scene that has been transfig – or, rather, a scene that refuses to be a conscription scene. King Wen uses the people’s strength to build his tower and his pond, and yet “the people rejoiced to do the work” (而民欢乐之), calling the tower the “Marvellous Tower” and the pond the “Marvellous Pond,” and delighting that he had his deer, his fish, his turtles. The poem’s most striking detail is the king’s instruction: Do not hurry them. And the people come anyway, “as if they had been his children.”
The logic is not that the people loved forced labour. It is that they loved him – or, more precisely, that his care for them had made his project their project. The tower is not experienced as a extraction from them but as something they are building with him and for a shared life. The naming is the tell. In early Chinese political culture, to name something is to claim it, to identify with it. When the people spontaneously call the king’s pleasure-grounds “marvellous,” they are not flattering him. They are signalling that his joy has become legible to them as their joy.
Mencius draws the conclusion with a formula that has echoed through Chinese political thought ever since:
古之人与民偕乐，故能乐也。
The ancients shared their joy with the people, and therefore they could enjoy it.
The causal “therefore” is doing all the work. Shared joy is not a moral bonus added to enjoyment. It is the condition under which enjoyment becomes possible at all.
The Counter-Example: When the Sun Refuses to Set
Then Mencius turns the screw. He quotes a line that every literate person in the Warring States world would have recognized, from the Book of Documents, in the “Speech of Tang” – the oath sworn by the founder of the Shang dynasty before he overthrew the tyrant Jie of Xia:
“时日害丧？予及女偕亡。”
O sun, when will you expire? We will die together with you.
The historical background is essential. Jie, the last king of the Xia dynasty, had reportedly compared himself to the sun: as long as the sun endured, so would his rule. The people, crushed by his exactions, turned his own metaphor against him. They did not pray for reform. They prayed for the sun to go out, even if it meant their own destruction in the darkness that followed. James Legge’s nineteenth-century translation captures the desperation: “O sun, when wilt thou expire? We will die together with thee.” The people wished for Jie’s death, Mencius says, and asks: Even if such a ruler had towers and ponds, birds and beasts, could he enjoy them alone?
This is the passage’s cruelest irony. The tyrant’s park is, materially speaking, identical to King Wen’s. The same deer, the same fish, the same water. But the relationship that surrounds the park has reversed. Where the people once “came as if they had been his children,” they now dream of collective annihilation. The ruler who thought he owned the sun discovers that the sun is only the sun because people are willing to live under it. When they are no longer willing, the pleasure-ground becomes a mausoleum in advance.
One historical detail is worth flagging for accuracy: Mencius’ quotation is from the Documents, but in its original context the “sun” is Jie of Xia, not the later King Zhou of Shang. The two tyrants are often conflated in later moralizing literature – both are stock examples of the ruler who loses the Mandate of Heaven through cruelty and excess – but the text Mencius cites is about Jie. The structural point is the same either way: a ruler can possess every external good and still be incapable of enjoyment, because enjoyment depends on a background condition – the willingness of others to let you have it – that no amount of possession can secure.
What “Sharing Joy” Does Not Mean
Here is where modern readers, especially those trained in moral philosophy, tend to misread Mencius. It is tempting to hear “share your joy with the people” as a demand for self-sacrifice: the good ruler must renounce his private pleasures and devote himself entirely to the people. But that is not Mencius’ position, and getting it wrong makes the passage sound like a pious sermon rather than a piece of political analysis.
A careful reading of the Mencius across several passages suggests something more interesting. Mencius does not ask the ruler to deny his pleasures. He asks him to cultivate the kind of heart – the compassionate heart (恻隐之心, ce yin zhi xin) that Mencius famously says everyone possesses – so that his self-interest itself is transformed.
Mencius defends “the ruler sharing pleasure with his people instead of denying pleasure for himself“, a good ruler “does not need to sacrifice his self-interest,” but his interests “need to be guided and directed by a proper process of moral cultivation” so that sharing pleasure becomes natural rather than forced. Sharing is not the enemy of the ruler’s enjoyment. It is what makes enjoyment enjoyable – what removes the anxiety, the isolation, the low hum of resentment that turns a park into a prison.
This is why King Wen’s tower is not described as a burden he bore for the people’s sake. He is in the park, with the deer and the birds and the leaping fish. He is enjoying it. The difference is that his enjoyment is embedded in a relationship of mutual recognition. The people are not the background labour that makes his leisure possible; they are the co-authors of the world in which his leisure has meaning. The tyrant, by contrast, has the same park but no co-authors. He can walk among the deer, but every deer is a reminder that the people who built the fence would rather the fence fall.
The Pond in Your Pocket
It would be easy to leave this in the Warring States period, as a story about kings and their landscaping budgets. But the structure of the argument is portable, and it describes something we see every day in a very different arena: the relationship between creators and their audiences.
The old model of fame was, in effect, the tyrant’s park. A star, a brand, a public figure accumulated attention the way a king accumulated deer. The audience was a mass to be counted, a resource to be extracted, a number that justified the next contract. And for a while, it worked – or seemed to. But the modern audience has developed the equivalent of the people’s curse. They can smell the difference between someone who is performing intimacy and someone who is actually in a relationship with them. And when they smell it, they leave. The park remains. The deer remain. The pleasure does not.
The creators who endure tend to do something that looks, structurally, like King Wen’s tower. They do not treat the audience as an undifferentiated mass to whom content is delivered. They build a shared world. Research on creator-audience relationships suggests the stakes: in one large study, 85% of fans described their favourite creator as a friend, and more than four in five trusted that creator as much as or more than a real-life close friend. Another finding is even more telling: audiences demand consistency and authenticity over time; a one-off brand mention is read as insincere, while sustained, multi-episode relationships are read as genuine. The relationship is not a transaction that happens once. It is a pattern that has to be lived.
This is the “shared joy” structure in contemporary form. The successful creator is not the one who sacrifices their own pleasure to serve the audience. They are the one whose pleasure is the shared enterprise – who enjoys the making, the banter, the inside jokes, the running gags, the community that forms around the work. The audience is not a resource. They are collaborators in a world that neither party could have built alone. And when that structure holds, the creator can “enjoy the park” without the park becoming a hiding place.
The Order of Things
Mencius’ closing question to King Hui is not a demand that the king give up his pond. It is a demand that he understand what a pond is. A pond is not a thing you own. It is a thing that becomes enjoyable only when the people around it are willing to let it be a pond – when they see it and feel, however faintly, that it belongs to a world they share. The king who tries to secure his joy by accumulating more deer, more water, more towers, is pursuing a logic that ends in the curse of the sun: the more he possesses, the less he can enjoy, because every possession is a wall between himself and the people whose recognition he needs.
The order cannot be reversed. Shared joy first; enjoyment follows. The tower built on extraction may stand for a season. But the people who built it will remember. And one day, standing among the deer, the ruler will hear, in the back of his mind, a line from an old song: When will you expire? We will die together with you. The park will still be there. The joy will not.
King Wen’s tower is remembered not because of its architecture, but because of what the architecture carried: a ruler who understood that his pleasure was not a private possession but a public fact, and that the people who called his pond “marvellous” were the ones who made it so. That is a lesson about more than kingship. It is a lesson about any life in which we try to hold something good – a platform, a position, a relationship, a home – without asking whether the people around us are inside the joy or outside the fence.
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