Древний Китай. Том 3: Период Чжаньго (V—III вв. до н.э.)

Instead of the tafu warriors and the ch'ing officials of the past, rulers of the Chankuo kingdoms had big armies and capable generals at their disposal. The latter were promoted for their personal merits and sometimes came from the ranks of the worthiest shih. Rulers consolidated their administrative apparatus by manning it with intelligent and capable shih. Unlike the feudal apparatus, it included those who — on account of having necessary qualifications — were capable of managing state affairs and who could be hired and dismissed like ordinary office workers. These officials of new kind were heading up new, gradually forming administrative-territorial structures that consisted of administrative units, not of feudal landed domains as earlier. Aristocrats continued to exist only as retainers and advisers of rulers and normally had to compete with clever administrators of the shih class, who sometimes hailed from different kingdoms. Who were the shih selected by rulers for this job? How, generally speaking, worked this new administrative class and what ideas formed its ideological basis?

Volume III pays attention to the exponents of a number of schools that competed with Confucianism, offering their own concepts of government. Mo-tzu was one of the earliest among them. He was born the year that Confucius died. He received his instruction from one of Confucius' disciples, and died in the late 5th century B.C. Having borrowed many ideas from Confucianism, Mo-tzu nonetheless differed with the Master on several vital points. Mo-tzu's primary concern was the creation of a society of equals. Loving one's parents and looking after one's children is not enough. One must love all people and look after them. Then the bonds of friendship would bind all the people together, and every man would always help his neighbor. Denouncing ancestor worship and hsiao (filial piety), Mo-tzu maintained that society must be free from both poverty and opulence, and that entertainment and exquisite pursuits available only to the chosen few are quite superfluous. Plain food, humble clothes, a small house and a simple tomb with a wooden coffin buried without elaborate and expensive funeral rites — this should suffice everyone.

Mo-tzu's fervent moralization is perfectly understandable, given the conditions of the defeudalized Chinese society, in which the pushy and greedy nouveaux riches (hsiao-jen) were eager to supplant the aristocrats who were quickly becoming history. The idea of taking property from the rich and distributing it evenly among the poor looked very attractive. So banal nowadays, it was quite fresh then. It seemed that Mo-tzu's proto-Socialist calls were supposed to stir society somehow and bring him a fair number of supporters. However, this never happened. People received his ideas with complete indifference. Firstly, the view that "blood is thicker than water" was both very popular and supported by tradition. Secondly, Mo-tzu's attempt to interest the authorities in his ideas (for which he devised an elaborate scheme of the administrative ladder, specifying the size of wages of officials on all levels and stressing that it was mandatory for them to inform against each other) failed, since it looked like a stupendous Utopia.

Mo-tzu sincerely intended to create a healthy, rational society of equals, with only a handful of those who would be "more equal" than others so as to make the functioning of the state possible. He vigorously condemned offensive wars that were waged quite often in his time. He wanted to achieve sensible government and good order, for which he encouraged among officials the practice of informing against each other. However, unlike Confucius, he despised tradition, and it was tradition that paid him back with a vengeance. Using tradition, Confucius brought about a revolution; rejecting tradition, Mo-tzu lost everything. The Taoist Chuang-tzu, giving his appraisal of Mo-tzu, remarked that the latter had no love for people — that was the whole point. This evaluation might seem unjust, on the face of it, for Mo-tzu's endeavors were devoid of self-interest. However, what really matters is the result, not the original motive — that was what Chuang-tzu meant.

The egocentric hedonist Yang Chu, a colorful if vague figure, was a direct opposite of Mo-tzu. Being a hedonist and a social parasite, Yang Chu asserted the priority of sensual pleasures and maintained that the only important thing was to spend the years granted you in comfort, because nothing but death awaits you beyond — the bones rotting in the dust that make the great and the humble equal. The actual role of Yang Chu's ideas is not quite clear. However, Meng-tzu — who decidedly condemned both Mo-tzu and Yang Chu — put them side by side, judging that their preposterous ideas were more or less equally harmful to the people.