Mozi

Mozi (c. 470-391 BC) founded the first organized rival school to Confucianism, and the eponymous text, compiled and expanded over generations by his followers into 71 chapters of which 53 survive, preserves both his own teaching and later Mohist logical and defensive-warfare material added by the school after his death.

Its central doctrine, jian'ai or impartial care, is an explicit critique of the Confucian virtue of ren as inherently partial, loving kin and superiors more than strangers, arguing that this graded love is precisely what breeds the family feuds and interstate wars that ritual is supposed to prevent. Mozi pairs it with a cluster of practical doctrines: opposition to offensive warfare (fei gong), moderation in funeral and ceremonial expenditure, rejection of elaborate court music as an economic waste, promotion of the worthy to office over hereditary privilege, and belief in an intentional Heaven and in ghosts and spirits who reward and punish moral conduct, a theistic commitment that Confucius had treated with careful agnostic reticence.

The Mohist school also became a disciplined, quasi-military organization under a single leader, the juzi, whose followers were dispatched to help besieged cities defend against aggressors, a practical extension of the doctrine against offensive war. Later strata of the text, known as the Mohist Canons, developed early Chinese logic, epistemology, and precise geometric and optical definitions, among the most technically sophisticated philosophical writing to survive from the period, arguing through careful definition and disputation (bian) rather than through anecdote and analogy in the manner of the Analects or Mencius.

Eclipsed after unification by the Confucianism and Legalism that the imperial state favored, Mohism had effectively vanished as a living school by the Han, and its logical and technical chapters went largely unread until Qing dynasty philological recovery. Its critique of ritual privilege and its consequentialist case for universal welfare nonetheless remain a distinct, sharply argued counter-tradition within early Chinese thought. Mozi himself taught itinerantly across many states, so the school's textual compilation cannot be pinned to Lu alone.