Confucius (551–479 Bc)

well before the arrival of Buddhism from India. Of these philosophical schools perhaps the best known are Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism and Legalism. Confucius (551–479 BC) in many ways epitomizes Chinese philosophy. A scholar of the highest order, he was also a teacher and a political adviser. Philosophy for him was centred on issues of political and personal merit, and was therefore a form of enquiry with great practical implications. His ideas concerning the nature of humanity, propriety, loyalty and so forth can be said to have set the agenda very much for later philosophers in the Chinese tradition, up to and including those in contemporary China. Not that they necessarily agreed with him, of course—rather that philosophical progress so frequently involved movement away from Confucius' position. Mozi, the leading figure of Mohism, argued for a universal love of mankind, against the Confucian emphasis on the claims of kinship and social hierarchy. The parallel, in India, with the Buddha's rejection of traditional Vedic hierarchical social and individual morality is quite striking. Legalism, on the other hand, put the emphasis on the requirements for an orderly social structure in the Warring States Period of Chinese history, subordinating the individual interests of the person to the interests of the state. And in stark contrast to the Legalists, the Daoists encouraged a morality centered on a withdrawal from the trials and tribulations of the political agenda. After the introduction of Buddhism, with the translation of Buddhist texts which began in the second century AD, its ideas became amalgamated to a greater or lesser extent with the indigenous philosophies and produced a second great wave of original thinkers in medieval China, in the Song and Ming Dynasties. The Confucianism—better called Neo-Confucianism—of this time established itself as the leading socio-political influence, a position in which it remained up to the early twentieth

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