The Mandate of Heaven can be taken away.
Heaven authorises a dynasty to rule and withdraws the authorisation when it misgoverns — and the evidence of withdrawal is that people rebel and succeed. It is simultaneously a doctrine of legitimacy and a licence for revolution, and every Chinese dynasty has had to live with both halves.
Tianming, the Mandate of Heaven, was formulated by the Zhou to justify having overthrown the Shang, and it has cut both ways ever since. Heaven confers the right to rule on a house that governs well and withdraws it from one that does not; the withdrawal is knowable after the fact, from floods, famines, portents and — decisively — from rebellion that succeeds. This makes it simultaneously the most conservative and the most subversive doctrine in Chinese political thought: it sacralises the emperor and it supplies the argument for removing him. Mencius pushed it furthest, holding that Heaven sees as the people see and hears as the people hear, and that a ruler who ruins the people has forfeited the title, so killing him is the execution of a common fellow rather than regicide. Every dynasty had to teach the doctrine that legitimated it while managing the corollary, and the corollary is why the Ming founder censored Mencius.
The same ground, other faiths
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