The claim that anyone can become a sage looks unremarkable now and was radical in a hereditary aristocratic society. Confucius took the vocabulary of birth rank and converted it into moral rank: the junzi, literally a ruler's son, becomes the person who behaves as one should, and he explicitly taught students regardless of background, saying he had never refused anyone who came with the smallest gift of dried meat. Mencius states flatly that anyone can be a Yao or a Shun; Xunzi agrees, by a different route. The institutional consequence, centuries later, was the examination system, which took the premise seriously enough to build a state on it — an in-principle open meritocracy in which a peasant's son could in theory reach the top of the administration, and occasionally did. In practice, preparation required decades of leisure and tutoring that only landed families could fund, which is why lineages built charitable estates specifically to sponsor their brightest boys.