← All schools🛠️ 5th – 3rd century BC
Mohism
Impartial care, anti-aggression, promotion by merit — the engineers’ guild and pacifist militia of pre-imperial China.
Mohism was the most organization-like of the schools: disciplined, led by a Grand Master (juzi), equipped with its own siege-defense engineering, rushing to defend whichever state was about to be attacked. Mozi struck at Confucianism’s two pillars — lavish funerals waste wealth, ritual music burdens the people — and asked how love could possibly be graded by kinship. His "impartial care" flatly denied the ethics of closeness; to Mencius this amounted to "having no father." After the Qin-Han transition Mohism vanished wholesale — one of intellectual history’s great disappearances.