Mozi

Mozi, "Master Mo", whose name was Mo Di, was a Chinese thinker of the fifth century BCE and the founder of Mohism, the first organised school to challenge the followers of Confucius. He taught that people should care for everyone impartially, condemned wars of aggression and wasteful luxury, and judged every doctrine by whether it benefited the people. For about two centuries the Mohists rivalled the Confucians as the most prominent school in China; then they vanished almost completely, to be rediscovered only in modern times.

Little is certain about Mozi's life. He is usually dated to about 470 to 391 BCE, which places him in the generation after Confucius, at the start of the Warring States period, when the Zhou dynasty had lost real power and rival states fought for dominance. Most traditions say he came from the state of Lu, Confucius's homeland, though others connect him with Song, where he may have served as an official.

Many historians believe he came from the class of craftsmen or skilled workers rather than the aristocracy, and the Mozi uses many images drawn from carpentry, such as the compass, the square and the plumb line. Some scholars have speculated that the name Mo, which can mean "ink" or a tattoo used to brand criminals, points to humble or penal origins, but this remains conjecture. Early sources say he first studied Confucian teachings before rejecting them as wasteful and fatalistic.

The best-known story about him has Mozi walk for ten days and nights to the state of Chu, which was preparing to attack Song using new siege ladders designed by the engineer Gongshu Ban. Before the king of Chu, Mozi and Gongshu Ban fought a mock siege with a belt and wooden tokens, and Mozi repelled every attack. When Gongshu Ban hinted that killing Mozi would solve the problem, Mozi replied that his disciples were already on the walls of Song with his methods, and Chu called off the attack.

The central Mohist doctrine is jian ai, often translated as "universal love" but closer to "impartial care" or "inclusive concern". The disorder of the world, Mozi argued, comes from people favouring their own family, their own household or their own state over others: thieves steal because they care for themselves and not for others, and states invade their neighbours for the same reason. If everyone regarded other people's families and states as their own, theft, feuds and wars would end.

To critics who said such a principle was impossible to practise, Mozi answered that if a man had to entrust his family to someone while he went off to war, he would choose a friend who held to impartial care, which showed that even critics recognised its value. This put him in direct conflict with Confucianism, which taught that love naturally begins with one's own parents and extends outwards in degrees. A century later Mencius attacked the Mohists for, as he saw it, denying the special bond between father and son.

Mozi judged doctrines by "three standards": whether they agree with the deeds of the ancient sage kings, whether they are supported by the evidence of ordinary people's eyes and ears, and whether, put into practice, they benefit the state and the people. The last was decisive. What benefits the people, in the sense of wealth, a growing population and social order, is right; what harms them is wrong. Because of this, many modern scholars describe Mohism as an early form of consequentialism, the ethical approach later associated in Europe with utilitarianism.

From this standard followed his other doctrines. He condemned offensive war as the greatest of all harms, mass theft and murder carried out by states, though he approved of defence. He called for frugality in spending and opposed the elaborate funerals and long mourning periods that Confucian ritual required, because they wasted wealth and kept people from work. He even opposed music and grand entertainments at court, since they consumed resources without feeding or clothing anyone, a position the Confucian Xunzi later rebutted at length.

Mozi was also a religious thinker. He taught that Heaven has a will, that it desires righteousness and impartial care, and that it rewards those who follow it and punishes those who do not. He defended belief in ghosts and spirits as a support for moral behaviour, and rejected fatalism, the idea that a person's fortune is fixed by destiny, because it made people lazy.

In politics he argued for promoting the worthy, appointing officials on merit regardless of birth, and for "identifying upward": subjects should conform to the judgements of their superiors, up to the ruler, and the ruler to Heaven, so that the whole world shares a single standard of right. Critics have seen in this an authoritarian streak.

Mozi's followers formed a disciplined organisation under a leader called the juzi, "grand master", whose word was binding. Mohists travelled as teachers and advisers and became known as specialists in defensive warfare, helping small states resist sieges. The surviving Mozi, of which 53 of an original 71 chapters remain, contains essays on the core doctrines in three versions each, probably from different branches of the school, as well as chapters on fortification and siege defence.

Later Mohists of the fourth and third centuries BCE wrote the "Mohist Canons", short, difficult texts on logic, argument, ethics, geometry, mechanics and optics, including descriptions of how a pinhole produces an inverted image. They are among the most sophisticated works of early Chinese science and logic.

Mohism did not survive the unification of China. After the rise of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE and the triumph of Confucianism under the Han dynasty, the school disappeared, and for nearly two thousand years the Mozi was barely read. Scholars of the Qing dynasty began to edit the damaged text, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries reformers in China rediscovered Mozi as an indigenous thinker who valued logic, science, merit and the welfare of ordinary people. Today he is recognised as one of the major figures of Chinese philosophy, and the founder of its most radical challenge to the Confucian tradition.