Both Mengzi and Xunzi follow Kongzi’s lead in recognizing the importance of ritual in shaping cooperative, flourishing human lives together, but Xunzi gives it particular emphasis. The passages quoted here emphasize that ritual works with one’s native dispositions, shaping or re-fashioning them so that they can be satisfied in ways that are consistent with broader social harmony. Thus, as Xunzi says elsewhere, “ritual is a means of nurture”: it nurtures one’s dispositions so that they eventually come to be spontaneously well-ordered. This is to have become a sage, like Kongzi who—according to Analects 2:4—by age seventy was able to “follow his desires without overstepping the bounds.”
Even if ritual has this long-term goal of nurturing one’s dispositions, its means of doing this is through a form of externally imposed control. One forces oneself (perhaps with the aid of one’s parents or others) to abide by the rules of ritual until they come to seem natural.