Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism, Daoism and the Hundred Schools

Chinese philosophy is the tradition of philosophical argument that began in ancient China in the Hundred Schools period, roughly the sixth to third centuries BCE, with Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism and the School of Names. It continued through Chinese Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism to the present, and centres on how to live, how to govern and how people fit into nature.

Its questions are concrete. Are people born good? Should you care for strangers as much as for your own family? Does a state need virtuous rulers or clear laws and punishments? Is a white horse a horse?

The Hundred Schools: where Chinese philosophy began

The “Hundred Schools” (zhuzi baijia) names the burst of argument in the late Zhou dynasty, through the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE) and the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Rival states competed for advisers, and teachers travelled offering ways to restore order. “Hundred” means many, not a count.

Most school names are later labels. The Han historian Sima Tan, father of Sima Qian, sorted thinkers into six lineages: the Yin-yang school, the Confucians (Ru), the Mohists, the Legalists, the School of Names and the Daoists. The Qin unification in 221 BCE ended the open contest, and under the Han dynasty Confucian learning became the state’s official orthodoxy.

What do yin and yang mean?

Yin and yang first named the shady and sunny sides of a hill. In Chinese philosophy they are complementary aspects of every process — dark and bright, receptive and active, cool and warm — each needing the other and each turning into the other. They are not good and evil. With the five phases (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) and the Book of Changes (Yijing), they became a shared framework used by Confucians, Daoists and physicians alike; Dong Zhongshu built on them a cosmology linking Heaven and human affairs.

Confucius and the Confucian tradition

Confucius (551–479 BCE, by traditional dating) was a teacher and would-be adviser whose sayings his followers compiled as the Analects. His central ideas are ren, humaneness towards others; li, ritual propriety, the forms of courtesy and ceremony through which ethical life is lived; and the junzi, the exemplary person. Rulers, he held, govern best by moral example rather than punishment, and names must be rectified, so that a ruler acts as a ruler and a father as a father.

Confucius is the Chinese thinker named most often on The Coordinates, the 131 cards from The Coordinates of Thought: nine cards, among them character-based ethics, education, friendship and political philosophy. His ethics is often compared with Aristotle’s virtue ethics, though scholars debate how far the comparison holds. See Confucianism.

Is human nature good? Mencius versus Xunzi

The best-known debate in early Chinese philosophy is the question on the moral psychology card: are people naturally good, naturally selfish, or neither?

• Gaozi, known through his opponent Mencius, said human nature is like flowing water: neither good nor bad, it goes wherever it is channelled.
• Mencius replied that water does have a tendency — it flows downwards — and so does human nature, towards the good. Everyone has four sprouts: compassion, shame, deference and a sense of right and wrong. Anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm, not from calculation. Sprouts need cultivation, just as a hillside stripped of trees is not barren by nature.
• Xunzi, a few generations later, held that human nature is bad: left to itself it is selfish desire. Goodness is the product of deliberate effort (wei), shaped by the ritual and music the sages devised, as warped wood is straightened in a press frame.

Both were Confucians who held that people can become good; they disagreed about where goodness comes from. The Neo-Confucians sided with Mencius, and Dai Zhen later criticised the way “principle” had been used to suppress natural desire. It sits beside today’s disputes between sentimentalists, rationalists and situationists.

Figure	Dates	Tradition	Contribution
Mencius	trad. c. 372–289 BCE	Chinese	Four sprouts; human nature tends toward good
Xunzi	c. 310–after 238 BCE	Chinese	Human nature is crooked; goodness is deliberate construction
David Hume	1711–1776	European modern	Sympathy as the foundation of moral judgement
Adam Smith	1723–1790	European modern	The impartial spectator
Jonathan Haidt	b. 1963	Psychology	Intuition first, reasoning after
Dai Zhen	1724–1777	Chinese	Li-learning that suppresses desire is itself a harm; principle is found in desires rightly ordered

Mozi, the School of Names and Legalism

Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE) was the Confucians’ first great critic. He argued for impartial care (jian ai): we should care for other people’s families and states as for our own, since partiality breeds theft and war. He tested doctrines by three standards — the precedent of the sage kings, the evidence of ordinary people’s eyes and ears, and whether they benefit the people — and opposed aggressive war, lavish funerals and costly music. Many read him as the first consequentialist; see consequence-based ethics and Mohism. The later Mohists wrote technical canons on argument, ethics, geometry and optics.

The School of Names asked how words fit things. Hui Shi, Zhuangzi’s friend and sparring partner, proposed paradoxes about size, space and time. Gongsun Long argued that “a white horse is not a horse”, since “white horse” and “horse” do not pick out the same thing. With the later Mohists, they explored logic and language through names, distinctions and disputation (bian) rather than formal proof; see the logic guide.

Legalism took the opposite view of order from Confucius. Han Feizi (c. 280–233 BCE), traditionally a student of Xunzi, held that rulers should govern through clear, public standards (fa) enforced by reward and punishment, techniques for controlling officials (shu) and the power of position (shi), rather than hoping for virtue. The Qin state that unified China drew heavily on Legalist methods.

Laozi, Zhuangzi and Daoist philosophy

The Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, whose historicity is uncertain, opens by warning that the Dao that can be spoken of is not the constant Dao. The Dao is the nameless source and way of all things; the sage acts through wu wei, effortless, non-coercive action, and values softness, emptiness and yielding, as water wears down stone by giving way.

The Zhuangzi is playful and sceptical. Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is a man who dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Cook Ding carves oxen so skilfully that his blade never dulls. The book doubts that any single standpoint can claim to be right, and treats the world as ceaseless transformation; Zhuangzi appears on the substance, laws of nature and technology cards.

Later, the “Profound Learning” (xuanxue) commentators took these texts further: Wang Bi made non-being the root of being, while Guo Xiang held that each thing comes about of itself, with no creator or first cause. Philosophical Daoism (daojia) is often distinguished from the Daoist religion (daojiao), though many scholars now think the line less sharp than once supposed. See Daoism.

Chinese Buddhism: Huayan and Chan

Buddhism reached China from India and Central Asia around the first century CE. Early translators borrowed Daoist terms for Indian ideas. In the seventh century the pilgrim Xuanzang travelled to India and brought back Yogācāra texts, which teach that what we experience as the world is a manifestation of consciousness.

Chinese schools then developed philosophy of their own. Huayan, systematised by Fazang, held that all phenomena interpenetrate: each thing contains and is contained by every other, as Fazang showed with a golden statue in his Treatise on the Golden Lion. Chan — Zen in Japan, Seon in Korea — stressed direct insight into one’s own nature over scripture and doctrine; the Platform Sutra attributed to Huineng teaches that awakening is sudden. See Huayan, Chan & Zen and Buddhist philosophy.

Neo-Confucianism: principle (li) and vital stuff (qi)

From the eleventh century, Confucian thinkers of the Song dynasty answered Buddhism and Daoism with a metaphysics of their own. Two terms carry it: qi, the vital stuff that condenses into things and disperses again, and li, principle or pattern, a different word from the ritual li of Confucius.

• Zhang Zai held that everything is qi, condensing and dispersing. His “Western Inscription” treats Heaven and Earth as one’s parents and all people as one’s siblings.
• Cheng Yi, with his brother Cheng Hao, held that each thing has its principle, and that principle is one while its manifestations are many.
• Zhu Xi (1130–1200) joined these in a synthesis: principle and qi are two aspects of all things, and learning means investigating things to grasp their principle. His commentaries on the Four Books, the Analects and Mencius among them, became the basis of the imperial examinations from the fourteenth century until 1905.
• Wang Yangming (1472–1529) replied that principle is not outside the mind. Everyone has innate moral knowing (liangzhi), and knowledge and action are one: to know filial piety and not practise it is not yet to know it. He recalled spending days “investigating” bamboo in Zhu Xi’s manner and falling ill without result. See the moral motivation card.
• Wang Fuzhi and Dai Zhen pushed back towards qi: principle is the order within qi and within human desires, not a realm above them.

See Neo-Confucianism and Zhu Xi’s anthology Reflections on Things at Hand.

Modern Chinese philosophy, and its reach into Korea and Japan

The end of the imperial examinations in 1905 and the May Fourth movement of 1919 brought sharp criticism of Confucianism and a turn to Western science and democracy, and later to Marxism, which became the official philosophy of the People’s Republic. Others renewed the tradition: Xiong Shili rebuilt Confucian metaphysics from Buddhist materials; Feng Youlan wrote a history presenting Chinese philosophy as a sequence of arguments and schools; Mou Zongsan, a leading New Confucian, argued against Kant that the moral mind can disclose reality itself.

A live debate asks whether “philosophy” is the right word for Chinese thought. Some hold that the classical texts are philosophy by any fair standard; others that their focus on self-cultivation makes them something different; others that the question exposes too narrow an idea of philosophy.

Chinese thought also shaped its neighbours. In Korea, Yi Hwang (Toegye) and his critics debated whether the four sprouts of Mencius and the seven feelings arise from principle or from qi, the Four–Seven Debate. In Japan, Ogyū Sorai argued that the Confucian Way was an institution devised by the sages, and Zen grew from Chan. See Japanese and Korean philosophy.

Timeline of Chinese philosophy

Period	What happened	Key figures
6th–5th century BCE	Confucius teaches; the Hundred Schools begin	Confucius, Mozi, Sunzi; Laozi by tradition
4th–3rd century BCE	The Daodejing takes shape; the human nature debate; Legalism	Mencius, Zhuangzi, Hui Shi, Gongsun Long, Xunzi, Han Feizi
221 BCE–220 CE	Qin unification; Confucian orthodoxy under the Han	Dong Zhongshu, Sima Qian, Wang Chong
3rd–4th century	Profound Learning	Wang Bi, Guo Xiang
5th–9th century	Chinese Buddhist schools	Xuanzang, Fazang, Huineng
11th–12th century	Song Neo-Confucianism	Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi
16th–18th century	The learning of the mind; the turn to qi	Wang Yangming, Wang Fuzhi, Dai Zhen
20th century	Modern and New Confucian thought	Xiong Shili, Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan

The Chinese thinkers most cited on the cards, linked to their profiles (see also Chinese philosophy on the site and the philosophy timeline):

How to start studying Chinese philosophy

1. Start with the human nature debate. The moral psychology card sets Mencius and Xunzi beside Hume and modern psychology.
2. Read a guide. Bryan W. Van Norden’s Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy is written for beginners.
3. Read short classics side by side. Books 1 to 4 of the Analects and the opening chapters of the Daodejing, each in two translations, then the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi.
4. Then hear a later voice. Wang Yangming’s Instructions for Practical Living, or the Han Feizi for the case against Confucian government.
5. Join a conversation. Browse Chinese philosophy, compare Eastern and Western philosophy, or ask a question.

The liveliest conversations in Chinese philosophy on the site:

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Every question here has serious answers on more than one side. Pick a card, read the rival answers, then say which you find strongest and why. Members ask, reply and take sides; reading is free for everyone.

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