Confucius and the Hundred Schools of Thought
Chinese philosophy was invented during three centuries of political collapse, and Confucius is the earliest figure in it. He was born about 551 BC in the small state of Lu, held minor office, spent thirteen years travelling between courts looking for a ruler who would employ his ideas, and found none. The period was the Spring and Autumn and then the Warring States, in which the Zhou king had ceased to matter and a hundred and more polities fought and absorbed each other; the philosophical question everyone was answering was how order could be restored. Confucius answered with ritual and relationship. A society works when each person acts according to the obligations of his role — ruler, father, son, elder brother, friend — and those obligations are mutual; government is by example rather than by force, and the ruler who is himself correct is obeyed without commanding. His sayings were collected by pupils after his death in the Analects. The competing schools are why the period is called the hundred schools. The Mohists argued for impartial care for everyone and against ritual as waste; the Daoists of the Laozi and Zhuangzi argued that the more government does the worse things get; and the Legalists held that people respond only to reward and punishment and that the state should be organised accordingly. Qin adopted Legalism and unified China with it. The Han adopted Confucianism, and it stayed the doctrine of the Chinese state for two thousand years. The competition is the point. Three centuries of political fragmentation produced the most creative period in Chinese thought, and unification under a single orthodoxy closed it, which is a pattern that also describes classical Greece.
- Year: 500 BCE
- Category: Cultural
