Mohism

A later generation of Mohists, writing probably in the third century BCE, built something no other Warring States school attempted at the same scale: a systematic reference work of definitions and demonstrations known as the Mohist Canons, preserved as a difficult, compressed layer inside the Mozi alongside the ethical and political chapters the first article describes. The Canons work through logic, defining terms for necessity, sameness, part and whole, and epistemology, distinguishing kinds of knowing by hearsay, by explanation and by personal experience, with a rigor that later historians of Chinese thought treat as the closest surviving parallel to the logical projects of Greek and Indian philosophy in the same era.

The Canons did not arise from disinterested curiosity. Mohism's ethical claims, that impartial care is better policy than graded love, that elaborate funerals waste a state's resources, had drawn sustained attack from rival disputers, the thinkers later grouped as the School of Names prominent among them, and much of the Canons reads as a toolkit built to make Mohist argument precise enough to survive that kind of challenge, along with entries on geometry, optics and simple mechanics that suggest the same circle also pursued natural philosophy for its own sake. The same corpus preserves direct engagement with the White Horse argument associated with Gongsun Long, treating it as a puzzle to be solved rather than admired, which is as close as any Warring States text comes to one school reviewing another's logic in writing.

Mohism took shape within a generation of Confucius's death and defined itself in direct argument against the school forming around his teaching. Where Confucians held that love and duty are properly graded, owed most fully to parents, then kin, then outward to the wider community in diminishing measure, Mozi argued for jian ai, care that is impartial and equal toward every person regardless of family connection. To Mozi this was not sentimentality but a claim about cause and effect: partiality toward one's own family and state, he argued, is the very engine of the theft, warfare and cruelty that make the world unstable, and only a universal standard of care could break the cycle.

The schools clashed just as sharply over ritual. Confucians treated elaborate mourning, music and ceremony as the visible form of genuine feeling and the glue of a properly ordered society. Mozi condemned the same practices as extravagant waste, arguing that a state exhausting its granaries and its people's labor on funerals and orchestras while common people went hungry had its priorities inverted, and he proposed frugal burial and the abolition of court music as matters of policy rather than taste.

Mohism was also unusual among the Warring States schools in becoming an organization rather than a circle of disputants. Its members formed a disciplined order under a chief elder, bound by Mozi's teaching against offensive warfare, and made themselves available to defend besieged cities, developing real skill in fortification to back the doctrine with practice. That combination of argument and discipline made Mohism a serious rival to Confucian influence for two centuries, before Qin and Han left both the order and its ethic without the patronage that had sustained them.