The opening chapter of the Mencius stages one of the tradition's most quoted exchanges: King Hui of Liang greets the philosopher by asking what profit he has brought to benefit the state, and Mencius answers that the king ought not to speak of profit at all, only of ren and yi, benevolence and righteousness, warning that if a ruler asks how to profit his state, his ministers will ask how to profit their own households, and commoners how to profit themselves, an escalating chain of self interest Mencius argues ends in a kingdom where subordinates murder superiors to seize advantage, precisely the disorder yi is meant to forestall by orienting conduct around rightness rather than calculation.
The exchange is treated across Chinese Classics scholarship as programmatic for Mencius's political philosophy generally, his consistent argument being that a ruler who governs through yi and ren earns a loyalty that coercion or bribery, however profitable in the near term, structurally cannot secure, since loyalty purchased through advantage dissolves the moment a better offer appears elsewhere. Sources of Chinese Tradition situates the yi and li, profit, contrast as one of the most durable oppositions in the entire Confucian corpus, cited by centuries of later scholars and statesmen as the standard against which policy proposals were measured.