Introduction to the Mohist Canon

Abstract

We briefly introduce the approach to a historical theory of knowledge that underlies our comparison of the Mohist Canon to other historical sources. Next, we discuss the text and its tradition, starting from their socio-cultural origins and ending with their reception in modern times. In this context we provide a translation of Liang Qichao’s preface to his interpretative work on the Mohist Canon from 1921. Finally, we outline the philological difficulties arising from the text’s confused transmission and give an overview of the structure of the text.

1.1 The Mohist Canon and Historical Epistemology

Anyone undertaking a long-term historical study of any particular field of human activity is confronted with the difficulty that the contents and boundaries of that field are inevitably fluid and change over time. The historical study of science is no exception to this. Is it possible to conceptualize science broadly enough to include what has traditionally been considered science and at the same time narrowly enough to exclude practices and activities that we today deem unscientific? Earlier forms of science may include elements that are later recognized as not science at all. Astrology and alchemy, for example, still prominently figured in early modern science, but are now not generally regarded as science, but rather seen as pseudo-sciences. And different strands of traditional practices and thinking that may not have originally been deemed scientific sensu stricto may at some point merge with each other, taking on a new form that can then be considered properly scientific, e.g., the merger of practical mathematics with natural philosophy in early modern Europe, resulting in modern exact science. In the end any answer to the question of what historical human activity and knowledge are to be considered scientific depends on how science is defined, i.e., what characteristics of science are deemed essential.¹ If the discovery and systematic, often quantitative, treatment of regularities in nature is deemed to be that criterion, science begins in such early civilizations as in the Near East, Asia, and Mesoamerica. If systematic argumentation about such regularities and theoretical proofs are deemed to be that criterion, ancient Greece is most prominently considered the historical place where science emerged. If the empirical foundation of knowledge by systematic experimentation is considered the vital criterion, then science only begins in early modern times.

A pragmatic approach to delineating the field of a science for historical study would be to follow the connected currents of traditions that have led to its modern manifestation and consider everything that contributed to these currents to be of relevance to the history of that science. But when a historical tradition, however significant at a certain time in a certain context, did not become a part of a developmental trajectory that led to some aspect of modern science we are denied this pragmatic approach. In particular when we discuss the emergence of a specific type of science in ancient China and compare it to the independent emergence of such a type of science in ancient Greece, as we will endeavor to do here, we have to recognize this difficulty and to be conscious of what exactly to compare. In defining this type of science we have to be careful to distinguish what constitutes in its historical manifestations a necessary feature, i.e., what truly motivates us to identify the historical activity as science, and what are contingencies of the specific historical manifestations. Failing to make such a distinction either renders the comparison impossible, because no two cultural activities that have developed independently will ever be identical; or it may lead to privileging the manifestation in one culture over that in the other, the first being taken as a standard, and the second subordinated to it, analyzed and judged by how it matches the features of that first standard. Earlier analyses of ancient Chinese science and in particular of the Mohist Canon—the text whose analysis and interpretation lies at the center of this book—show that scholars have not infrequently fallen into this trap and have tended to this kind of biased judgment, consciously or unconsciously taking western science as the default standard and subordinating judgments about Chinese science to that.

Even Joseph Needham (1900–1995), whose high esteem for Chinese science is readily apparent in his pioneering work on science and civilization in China, discusses Chinese scientific achievements by using Western traditions as the standard reference point, as if only one historical pathway to truth were available. Statements such as the following abound in his work: “if continued [the lines along which the Mohist thought] could have developed into a geometrical system of Euclidean type.” (Needham 1959, 94); “[section B 62 of the Mohist Canon²] seems to show the Mohists moving in the direction of the ‘gravitas secundum situm’ of Jordanus Nemorarius (+13th) and Leonardo, who both considered spheres or circles moving on inclined planes” (Needham 1962, 58–59). “The most important thing about this excerpt on the lever and balance [section B 25b of the Mohist Canon] is that it shows that the Mohists must have been essentially in possession of the whole theory of equilibria as stated by Archimedes” (Needham 1962, 23). Needham somehow assumes that those aspects of Western science that he cannot find expressed in the Mohist text were all the same familiar to the Mohists, or might have been an inevitable consequence of future developments that in fact did not happen. At one place he even goes so far as to speculate about missing parts of the Mohist corpus: “[…] if more of the physics of the Mohist school had been preserved, we should have found in it some discussion of trajectories, the effect of gravity, and so on” (Needham 1962, 58). He then proceeds to console himself over the absence of any concept comparable to the western notion of ‘impetus’ in the Mohist Canon by pointing out the similar absence of two other concepts that he considers detrimental in the western tradition: “If the Mohists had no technical term corresponding to impetus, at least they did not suffer from the concept of ‘natural place’ or the awkward idea of antiperistasis” (Needham 1962, 58).

Such short-circuiting of the Mohist achievements in their own right when comparing them with Western science blinds us to the possibility of seeing real alternatives to the Western tradition. The Mohists may well provide us with a case that qualifies as exact science, but does not lead to or imply the science of a Euclid, Archimedes, Jordanus, Galileo, or Newton. We have to recognize that alternatives to the historical development of Western science are possible, and that there are cultural activities that may qualify as science but do not presuppose any particular historical pathway. We can turn the problem of defining science in order to compare different traditions around, into one of studying different traditions in order to learn what science is. After formulating criteria to identify intellectual and social activities that suggest the possibility of the emergence of scientific thinking, comparison of the different traditions will show which aspects of those activities are cross-cultural and which are contingent on specific cultural and historical contexts. This should provide some insight into the emergence and epistemology of scientific thinking and its relation to the history of knowledge generally.

It has been asked, for instance, if there are

decisive reasons that the form of ‘exact science’ must first have emerged in the specific field of mathematics, in other words, if it is to be ascribed exclusively to particular circumstances of Greek antiquity, and in this way to chance, that it was mathematics where this form of science first emerged, or if there were systematic reasons for this?³

The question entails the relation of mathematics to the other sciences, but also to the specific form of mathematics that developed in Greek antiquity, viz., deductive geometry. Is the Greek invention of deductive geometry and its influence on other fields of knowledge the only possible historical way for science in an exact form to arise? Similar questions can be asked concerning the relations between various fields of knowledge and their specific manifestations in ancient societies. Given the fact that early Greek science is preceded and accompanied by cosmological speculation, what role do such traditions play in shaping the early development of science generally? And furthermore given the idea that a controlled use of language is characteristic of Western scientific thought, what are the consequences of certain fields of linguistically represented knowledge having become the object of systematic reflection while others did not? Such questions can best be addressed when real historical alternatives are available. Looking beyond a single tradition may well give rise to further interesting questions of this type. It is in this spirit that we will analyze what has been termed Mohist science.⁴

As we shall see, Mohist science reveals a genuinely alternative view of the world, a view that is neither identical to, nor a deficient or aberrant version of, anything known from Western traditions. It is also distinct from what came to be known as Chinese natural philosophy, in particular as that involves concepts such as yīn 陰 and yáng 陽 notions of natural polarity or complementarity and wǔ xíng 五行, the Five Agental Processes. Mohist science is an alternative kind of rationalization of aspects of the perceived world, natural and technical. In its rationality and its adherence to observation it may clearly be ranked among the historical origins of science, notwithstanding its later demise and neglect. It therefore appears to represent a highly suitable case for addressing the questions raised above about the origins of science, their historical contingencies and their possible systematic aspects.

To identify the common core of the ancient Greek and Chinese activities to be compared, we point to their goals and to the types of knowledge they involve as a consequence of these goals. More specifically, we are here concerned with the origins of theoretical science. We can speak of theoretical science whenever the goal of a certain social activity does not primarily consist in the fulfillment of some practical task, no matter how much knowledge it involves, but rather in the reflective occupation with knowledge itself.⁵ Such theoretical reflection is no matter of course. While it may be spontaneously pursued by individuals, as a collective endeavor it only develops under specific societal conditions that promote and sustain it. It is therefore by no means the case that “we must accept that every culture has a science” (Selin 1997, xv).⁶ On the contrary the development of theoretical science seems to be the exception rather than the rule in pre-modern societies. It therefore becomes worth asking what exactly are the conditions under which such theoretical reflections prosper. Here again cross-cultural comparisons may help to distinguish necessary preconditions from accidental circumstances. Furthermore, they may reveal how the concrete form and content of early theoretical science is shaped by the contexts from which it emerges.

Any systematic reflection on knowledge necessarily involves some sort of external, i.e. non-mental, representation that can be reproduced, manipulated, and changed, and that thus may serve as a medium of reflection. External representations of knowledge rely on the material means available in a given society at a given time, particularly including the material tools of mental labor. These may include language in spoken and in written form, non-linguistic written and otherwise recorded symbols (such as knots in a quipu), drawings, diagrams, and maps, but also actions, instruments and mechanical tools. For the case of the later Mohists, language in its written form is the only medium of reflection available to us. To what extent, if any, there was an allied use of spoken language in this connection is not known. By the same token, ancient Greek philosophy is only available to us through written, transmitted, texts. Nevertheless, the possibility of basing theoretical traditions solely on the oral use of language combined with a strong tradition of memorization is shown by the example of the ancient Indian grammarians.⁷

Comparison with Greek mathematics further raises the question of the role of drawings and drawing instruments in Mohist science. As in the Greek case, no drawings are preserved from antiquity, but in the Mohist case, unlike the Greek, it is questionable if drawings ever existed. To be sure, in reading some of the Mohist passages one would appreciate a drawing to clarify the situation or arrangement in question, but with one or two possible exceptions no geometrical construction in the Mohist Canon is so complicated as to require an accompanying diagram to be comprehensible. Nothing in the text itself refers to or hints at the use of drawings, so it is unlikely that drawings were ever an integral part of the work. This marks a clear difference to texts from the Euclidean tradition, in which drawings played a central role in the argument.⁸ This may be understood as a consequence of how the knowledge reflected upon was represented differently in the two traditions. There are references to such things as drawing instruments, measuring instruments and astronomical instruments in the Mohist text, and even a definition of the circle (section A 58) referring to the compass and strikingly similar to the definition found in Euclid’s Elements. Nonetheless, in contrast to Euclid’s Elements, the Mohist text does not systematically reflect upon the figures that can be drawn with straight edge and compass.

Alongside the means of representation, the kinds of knowledge reflected upon shape the resulting theoretical science. We will distinguish two types of knowledge, viz., elementary and instrumental knowledge. Elementary knowledge is ontogenetically acquired in the process of building up sensorimotor intelligence. Due to the similar biological constitution of all human beings and to the similar basic physical properties of their environments, irrespective of culture, large parts of this type of knowledge can be assumed to be universal. This knowledge contains, for instance, the following kinds of primary perceptual structures:⁹

• a basic dichotomy of extended, generally impenetrable bodies and more or less empty spaces between them; this includes the three-dimensionality of bodies and spaces as well as the tangibility of bodies;

• a dichotomy between moving bodies and bodies at rest, against which motion can be perceived;

• a distinct sense of the vertical direction, which stems from the experience of bodies falling downwards or pressing against what supports them from below, including experiences of one’s own body;

• a basic mental structure arising from human experience in pushing or pulling objects: the harder one pushes or pulls, the greater the effect; this includes the idea that where there is motion there must be a mover.

How these mental structures arise is a matter of developmental psychology, while their universality is investigated in studies of primate cognition and in cross-cultural psychology. The structures of elementary knowledge as exemplified above are not reflected upon in the realm of elementary knowledge itself where they only underlie action and perception and, as a rule, remain unconscious.

Instrumental knowledge is acquired through the handling of cultural artifacts and instruments, often learned through joint action and frequently accompanied by speech. Often this is part of expert traditions and is acquired only by certain groups of individuals within a society. While instrumental knowledge usually builds upon universal elementary knowledge structures, it clearly depends on the artifacts available in a given culture and varies with the concrete practices this culture has developed. Examples of structures of instrumental knowledge are:

• the additive structure of length, implicit in the handling of measuring rods and ropes in societies where practices of spatial measurement such as surveying have developed;

• concepts of circle and of right-angledness implicit in the handling of the geometrical compass and the carpenter’s square, for instance in the context of architectural construction;

• the variation of shadows depending on the spatial arrangement of light source, shadow-casting object and surface the shadow is cast on, for instance when gnomons are used in the contexts of calendrical and astronomical practices;

• the notion that weight and force can be compensated by distance from a fulcrum, an experience that can be made in any society with instruments that make use of the lever principle, such as levers, shoulder poles, or balances with unequal arms.

As was the case with their elementary counterparts, the structures of instrumental knowledge need not be explicitly formulated. The use of a lever, for instance, need not be the practical application of a theoretically conceived lever principle. The knowledge is partly embodied in the instruments and is socially communicated, typically by example and by joint action, in order to be handed down, but it remains closely linked to the concrete practices in the context of which it arises, and may in many cases become intuitive through repetition.

The external representation of elementary and instrumental knowledge, primarily by means of language and instruments, enables the exploration of these means of representation and the reflection on the structures inherent in these types of knowledge. The historical emergence of theoretical science means that institutions arise within which such exploration and reflection is systematically pursued and the corresponding practices and results are handed down. As a consequence a new systematic type of knowledge, which we refer to as theoretical, comes about. This is what happened in ancient Greece, and, as the Later Mohist corpus testifies to, also in China in the Warring States (Zhan guo 戰國) period, roughly the fifth through the third centuries b.c.e. In the following we will sketch the historical background for the emergence of this theoretical knowledge in China and delineate its later fate in Chinese intellectual history, before we give a more detailed overview of the text itself.

1.2 The Text and Its Tradition: Background

Traditional Chinese bibliographic practice from the early mediaeval period on has been to divide all written works by genre into four large classes, jīng 經 “Classics”, shǐ 史 “Histories”, zǐ 子 “Masters”, and jí 集 “Anthologies”, known collectively as the sì bù 四部 “The Fourfold Categories”.¹⁰ The third of these, zǐ bù 子部, the Masters category, has often been called “philosophy” in western surveys and studies of pre-modern Chinese literature because this is the category in which we find most of the texts that are associated with what in Western terms is thought of as traditional or classical Chinese philosophy. The Mozi 墨子 is included in this category as are other well-known works from the pre-imperial classical age of Chinese literature, such as the Zhuangzi 莊子, the Laozi 老子, the Xunzi 荀子, the Liezi 列子, the Sunzi 孫子, the Gongsun Longzi 公孫龍子 and the Guanzi 管子, to name only a few, all of them roughly dating from the Warring States period and one way or another thought of generally as “philosophy.”¹¹ The texts from this period in the zi bu Masters category are typically not rigorously analyzed or argued, as might be expected on the basis of the Western understanding of the generic designation ‘philosophy’, as much as they are dialogic accounts of didactic, often socially moralistic, exchanges between rulers and ministers or they are belletristic records of anecdotal teachings, chiefly social or political in content either explicitly or by implication, of a named Master and his often unnamed disciples.¹² There are, to be sure, many texts that deal with such things as tiān 天 ‘heaven’ and gǔi shén 鬼神 ‘ghosts and spirits’, which at first glance seem to fall into a category of religious beliefs rather than one of didactic social or political concern. But the context in many, perhaps most, of these passages is with the proper understanding of ‘heaven’, ‘ghosts and spirits’, &c. in order that they may best accord with the exigencies of the social and political environment. The concern is not with any kind of abstract noetic sense of religion or of philosophy as a rational search for truth or for the objective basis of knowledge.¹³

If history is recognized as distinct from pre-history by the invention of writing and the first appearance of written documents, Chinese history begins around 1200 b.c.e. with written texts incised chiefly on turtle plastrons, on animal bones (usually the scapulae of oxen), and cast in ceremonial bronze vessels. In the aggregate these inscription materials constitute the earliest known Chinese texts and are the earliest known direct evidence for the Chinese writing system and language. The political context is that of the late Shang 商 state, called sometimes the Yin 殷. The plastron and bone texts are primarily divinatory in content, recording the ancestral divination practices of the Shang royal house and other powerful lineage groups, from the time of king Wu Ding 武丁 ca. 1200 b.c.e. to the end of the Shang state in 1045 b.c.e., when the Shang was conquered by the Zhou 周.¹⁴ The bronze inscription texts are chiefly commemorative or ceremonial paeans directed to the ancestors. As important as the Shang is for its claim to having the earliest Chinese texts and thereby affording us the earliest evidence of Chinese writing and of the Chinese language, and thus to being identified as the beginning of Chinese history, it is really to the following Zhou state that we must look for the origins of most of the ritual and ceremonial practices, religious beliefs, political and social institutions, intellectual discourses, texts and traditions, − the things in other words that in the aggregate we associate with the culture of “Classical China.”

For about two centuries after the Zhou conquest of the Shang in the mid-eleventh century b.c.e. Chinese society was characterized by political institutions and authority rigidly determined by lineage relations within the ruling house. The Zhou are seen to revere a religious entity known as Tian 天 ‘The Overhead, Sky, Heaven’, a religious figure or deity unattested in extant Shang inscription material and therefore probably unknown in the Shang and generally regarded as something particular to the Zhou.¹⁵ For want of written records we cannot know whether Tian was a Zhou religious concept prior to the conquest of the Shang or not. But it is reasonable to suppose that it was; there is no evidence that it was a belief inherited from the Shang, and it is unlikely to have been created out of whole cloth just with the Zhou conquest. In any case early Zhou bronze inscriptions refer to the Zhou king as Tian zi 天子 the ‘Son of Heaven’. The particularly Zhou concept of Tian ‘Heaven’ and the identification of the Zhou king as the Tian zi ‘Son of Heaven’ seem to have become fused with ancestral sacrifice practices and ceremonies inherited from the Shang.¹⁶ As was the case with the earlier Shang, the Zhou king was seen as the pre-eminent medium for communication with the ancestors. Within about a century after the Zhou conquest of the Shang the role of Tian ‘Heaven’ seems to have become central to early Zhou political and religious institutions; we find not just Tian zi the ‘Son of Heaven’, but also Tian xia 天下 the ‘Subcelestial Realm’ designating the whole known world, Tian di 天地 the complementarity of ‘Heaven and Earth’ and most importantly Tian ming 天命 the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the term reflecting the claim that Heaven has shown favor on the Zhou, passing its Mandate (mìng 命) from the Shang to the Zhou, and thereby justifying the Zhou overthrow of the Shang and legitimizing Zhou rule.¹⁷ As a consequence the Zhou state enjoyed during this early period a kind of pax caeles, a fundamental sense of legitimacy, authority and security granted and guaranteed ultimately by Heaven.

By the early decades of the eighth century b.c.e. this agreeable state of affairs had broken down. There now was a sense that the pax caeles had come to an end. Heaven seems to have withdrawn its Mandate and is no longer looking with favor on the Zhou state or protectively over Zhou society. The Zhou king and Zhou people now feel alienated from what had been earlier regarded as a secure relation with a benign and compassionate Heaven. Such phenomena as a major earthquake in 782 and aggressive incursions by alien people from the north and west into the Zhou domain at about the same time are seen as signs that Heaven had distanced itself from the Zhou ruling house and withdrawn its favor and its Mandate to rule. There is an account, taken traditionally as factual history, that around 779 the Zhou king, named You, displaced his legitimate queen and the heir she brought him, preferring instead a great beauty of mysterious and unnatural birth and of melancholy temperament named Bao Si and the son she bore him. This kind of disregard for the sanctity of the Zhou house and the proprieties of legitimate hereditary rule aggravated a growing social malaise and was thought to have contributed to the perception of great displeasure on the part of Heaven.¹⁸

The early classic of poetry, known as the Shijing (translated variously as “Book of Songs,” “Book of Poetry” or “Book of Odes” among other possibilities), one of the pre-eminent works of early Chinese literature, includes many poems registering a high measure of praise and reverence for the early Zhou state and its rulers and heroes, including both the historical and the legendary. But the same venerated Shijing classic also includes poems that reveal a dramatic degree of alienation from Heaven. Poem 192, for example, includes these lines:

When father and mother bore me, why was I caused to suffer so. … The grief of my heart is ever increasing. … The people are now in peril; they look upon Heaven as uncaring. … There is no one whom Heaven does not oppress. … The august God on High,—whom does he hate so? … The majestic House of Zhou,—Bao Si has destroyed it.¹⁹

In the immediately preceding poem, number 191, we find the following:Verse

Verse “Heaven has sent a plague down upon us, Death and destruction are everywhere. The people’s words are full of spite, Why does no one stop this sadness? … Mighty Heaven, now unkind, Do not oppress our people so. … Mighty Heaven now inconstant, Brings down on us this hardship; Mighty Heaven now uncaring, Brings down on us this great pain. … Now inconstant is mighty Heaven, Disorder is forever on the land …Footnote

Ode 191; translation by Joseph R. Allen in Waley and Allen 1996, 165–66.

And in the following poem, number 193, we find these lines:

On the first day of the month the sun was eclipsed; we found it ominous. … The moon was eclipsed, now the sun is eclipsed; this prefigures calamity. … Thunder booms, lightening flashes, things are not peaceful. … Rivers overflow, mountain tops collapse, high river banks become valleys, deep valleys become hills, … why has nobody brought an end to these disorders?

Eclipses, the actual celestial mechanics of which were of course not understood, and these other kinds of natural disasters as set out here are inevitably associated with a displeased Heaven. And in 194 we find this:

The grand and great Heaven no longer extends its grace; it sends down famine and death, strikes at and destroys the states in all four directions. Great Heaven is now terrifying. We are all together made to suffer. … The House of Zhou is destroyed.²¹

Another series includes such laments as this:Verse

Verse … we have no house, no home Because of the Xian-yun.Footnote

Xian-yun is the name by which an aggressive, presumably non-Zhou group of people is known historically. They are recorded as having lived in an area to the northwest of the Zhou heartland and to have made repeated incursions into Zhou territory. Whether they are ethnically, i.e., linguistically, Chinese or, as is often assumed, non-Chinese, is impossible to determine on the basis of extant evidence. In simple terms they are referred to as ‘barbarians’, but this label has the same imprecision here as it does in most usages elsewhere. All it means is that the Xian-yun did not share in the Zhou cultural and institutional traditions and were not subordinate to Zhou rule. Historical facts of Xian-yun aggression against the Zhou are drawn from contemporaneous bronze vessel inscriptions. See Li Feng 2006, 141–92.

We cannot rest or bide Because of the Xian-yun. … our hearts are sad, Our sad hearts burn, We are hungry and thirsty, But our campaign is not over, … We cannot rest or bide, Our sad hearts are very bitter; … The march before us is long, We are thirsty and hungry, Our hearts are stricken with sorrow, But no one listens to our plaint.Footnote

Ode 167; translation by Joseph R. Allen in Waley and Allen 1996, 139–40.

And ode 195 opens as follows:Verse

Verse Foreboding Heaven is a cruel affliction, Spreading out over the lands below. Plans and counsels are twisted and vile; When will we ever see their end?Footnote

Ode 195; translation by Joseph R. Allen in Waley and Allen 1996, 174.

Ode 258 laments the terrible consequences of prolonged drought, laid at the feet of an uncaring Heaven:Verse

Verse Vast is that River of Stars, Shining and turning in the sky. The king cries out, “But alas, What blame do your find with us?” Heaven rains down death and disorder, Hunger and famine year after year. There is no spirit not praised, No victim who is begrudged them, Token and tally are all expended; How can none of them hear our plea? … We have been unceasing in our prayers, … To Heaven, to earth, offerings and burials; There is no spirit who is not worshipped. Still, … God on High does not come near. Ruin and destruction on earth below; Why does this all fall to us now?Footnote

Ode 258; translation by Joseph R. Allen in Waley and Allen 1996, 270.

The poem continues for another half a dozen stanzas of lamentations in the same vein.

Clearly, there is a strong literary representation here of a despair that the Zhou rulers and the Zhou people seem to have felt in the mid-eighth century in the face of what they saw as a dramatic alienation from Heaven. This is what A. C. Graham has called “the breakdown of the world order decreed by heaven,” and our understanding of it is based virtually entirely on transmitted literary texts, none of which can claim primary-source status.²⁶ All the same, there can be little doubt that such a religious disruption of the confident relation the state had enjoyed with Heaven in the past must have occurred in some form at about this time, perhaps having arisen a century or so earlier and extending over more than a century later in its effect.²⁷

The archaeological record, in contrast to the literary, can claim “primary-source status” for this early period to the extent that the evidence is contemporaneous with the events in question, not having suffered changes or corruption in the course of any transmission. There is a considerable variety of archaeological material available for the Western Zhou, but for studying such cultural aspects as beliefs, ancestral sacrifices, concepts of political authority &c., the most important archaeological evidence consists principally of bronze vessels. And that evidence shows what Lothar von Falkenhausen has called a “decisive transformation” of Shang and early Western Zhou ancestral sacrifices and practices at about this time. He calls this the Western Zhou “Ritual Reform” and identifies three specific features of this transformation.²⁸ (i) There was a marked shift in ritual vessel types away from wine vessels, which had been prominent in the Shang and early Western Zhou and were central to wine-infused ancestral sacrifice practices, to bronze vessels used for meat and grain and other kinds of food consumption. This is seen as a sign of the changing nature of ancestral sacrifice, from what Falkenhausen, borrowing Nietzsche’s Hellenistically-inspired terms, calls a shift from “dionysian” to “apollonian” practices. The former were characterized by “dynamic, even frenzied movement,” the latter by “far more formalized ceremonies … in which it was the paraphernalia themselves, and their orderly display, that commanded the principal attention of the participants.” (Falkenhausen 2006, 48) (ii) Bronze vessels began to appear in what can be called “standard sets” the size and nature of which can be correlated with elite rank according to established sumptuary rules. (iii) New vessel types appear, with a decoration that is singularly unadorned and plain, very unlike the richly ornate decor of the earlier Western Zhou and even earlier Shang vessels. Falkenhausen describes these as “simple and humble,” and he interprets this shift in decor as reflecting a “desire to reform the spirit of ritual by reducing its complexity and linking it with everyday activities.” (Falkenhausen 2006, 50) He concludes this by saying that “These late Western Zhou changes in the spirit and performance of ancestral sacrifices must have constituted, in the collective consciousness of their time, a major break with earlier practices.” (Falkenhausen 2006, 50).

1.3 The Text and Its Tradition: Reactions to the Breakdown of World Order

This dramatic shift in late Western Zhou attitude and practice toward the ancestral cult and attendant sacrifices, documented by unambiguous primary archaeological evidence, in tandem with the apparent “alienation from Heaven” evidence that we find revealed in the early transmitted literary tradition provide a full, two-part picture,—the excavated archaeological and the transmitted literary,—behind Graham’s reference to “the breakdown of the world order decreed by heaven.” There were initially two major reactions to this in the following centuries. The first, and certainly the more enduring, was what Graham calls the “conservative” reaction of Confucius (traditionally, 551–479 b.c.e.) (Graham 1989, 9). It was conservative not because Confucius and his disciples wanted to restore the former spiritual solemnity and ceremonial grandeur of the Shang and early Western Zhou ancestral cult to their pristine ancient form, but because these “first generation Confucians” were intent on maintaining a deep respect for tradition and on preserving the revered status of the ancestral cult, while at the same time extending and adapting the central moral and ethical tenets of these ancient traditions to matters of the immediate societal and political realm.²⁹

The second reaction Graham calls the “radical” reaction of the Mohists, radical because it advocated rejecting the entire edifice of early Zhou ceremonial traditions concerned with the ancestral cult and related elitist matters, and dismissing the Confucian effort to preserve these traditions and practices in whatever modified or refocused shape they might take, except when they may be directed to immediate, practical social good.³⁰ (Graham 1989, 33) The Mohists turned their attention exclusively toward the practical issues and problems of the real world and the everyman. Traditions, beliefs and practices of the past were important only to the extent that they served the practical needs of the present. To be sure, the Mohists did not reject or deny the importance of Heaven outright, but instead of maintaining a solicitous reverence as the Confucians did, the Mohist saw Heaven as a kind of objective guide or model for correct behavior, rewarding the good and bringing misfortune to the bad.³¹

In the early years of the Western Zhou social status was hereditary, and political authority rested in the hands of hereditary aristocratic clans who wielded suzerainty over major cities and over the territory that those cities were able to oversee and control. At first the cities were ruled by extended family members of the Zhou nobility who maintained at least in the early period a strong formal allegiance to the central Zhou court. The lineage bonds that held these cities and their ruling families together became over time increasingly attenuated. Rivalry and competition among evolving cadet lineages increased, leading to the fragmentation of what had earlier been integral territories and to the widespread weakening of political authority. As these junior lineages gradually gained in both military strength and institutional independence they gave rise to new territorial states, which in turn opened a wide door to growing numbers of state-dependent administrative officials. By the sixth century b.c.e. the old social and political order that had taken shape four centuries earlier under the martial and political dominance of the early Western Zhou court had broken down, and the individual aristocratic families now ruling over largely independent states paid allegiance to the Zhou king only in hollow formality, not with any significant measure of sincere deference or genuine respect.

The emergence of numerous quasi-independent states, some great, some small, some powerful, some less so, was, not surprisingly, accompanied by endemic inter-state rivalries, political intrigue and persistent military tension and conflict, sometimes open, more often implicitly threatening, clandestine and subtle. It was precisely this context that brought about the emergence of the “first generation Confucians,” calling for a renewed respect toward the central features of traditional ceremony and statesmanship on the one hand and a recognition of the need to deal effectively with the political exigencies of the real world on the other. To the extent that the ruling class in this increasingly volatile social setting was still constituted of descendants of the old nobility, a part of the conservative Confucian message was to recognize the moral and social demands attendant on people belonging to this elite hereditary class and to adhere to the expected codes of proper behavior, even in the face of diminished personal circumstances. The radical reaction of the Mohists on the other hand was to call for a complete abandoning of elitist tradition and hereditary privilege and for a refusal to accept what was perceived as the social injustices that those traditions and privileges entailed.

Political success, even basic survival, in this atmosphere came to depend on a significant measure of demonstrable military prowess combined with crafty and cunning political suasion. The former called for a class of adroit military leaders and, fundamentally, a society capable of maintaining agricultural productivity and population stability, if not growth. The latter led to a social class of educated and adept political and military advisers, skilled in one or another of these areas, who served the courts of the various states and who came often to compete with one another for recognition and status, either as a part of inter-state maneuvering or as advocates for competing policies in a given situation or circumstance. As the numbers of these advocate-advisers grew, their importance increased both at court and within state administrations. They became increasingly specialized in one or another area and skilled in the art of verbal disputation and persuasion. Some became prominent for the vigor of their arguments or the successes of their doctrines, or both.³²

Out of this literate social milieu a wide variety of teachings arose representing the diverse political, social, military and economic doctrines that were advocated and circulated from state to state and court to court. What began as advice for the effective, and sometimes morally correct, governing of a state, from adviser-advocates closely associated with one court or another, especially the courts of powerful states, grew in time to become less state-centered and more abstract in doctrinal and philosophical slant and content, while the individuals associated with such teachings at the same time often retained the authority and status that characterized the old state adviser-advocates. Written materials were comparatively rare; they were costly and difficult to produce, and not easily replicated or circulated. Teachings were likelier to have been conveyed and spread orally than in written form, and this naturally led to the identification of named “teachers” or “masters,” each with his group of largely unnamed “followers”, “students” or “disciples.” It is traditionally thought that writings, when they did appear, were often produced by the students, or disciples and followers of a particular master or teacher, sometimes more than a single generation removed from the master himself. As the teachings took written form they typically came to be known simply by a master’s name, reflecting that master’s doctrinal legacy. Whether the master in question was responsible for the body of teachings that came to be perpetuated under his name or not, or even whether or not he can be historically documented as having existed at all, is less important than the status that he enjoyed and the respect that he had accrued as an acknowledged master. The named master then became a function of the prevailing attitude toward what constitutes acceptable socio-political and philosophical (broadly understood) discourse (Lewis 1999a, b, 53–97).

Distinctive of many of the works that are included in the zi bu Masters category of texts, and in fact the basis for this bibliographic label in the first place, is the fact that the names of these texts often appear to be proper names for individuals to which the suffix -zǐ 子 has been appended, a term that in its lexical origin means simply ‘offspring, child’. These are the names of the masters around whom bodies of texts accrued and took shape and who serve as the nominal authorities validating the teachings of those texts. The association of this commanding, authoritative status of the names of the texts with a concern for ethical or social morality that the texts often reflect sometimes leads to the mistaken identification of a zǐ ‘Master’ as a ‘philosopher’. But neither the word zǐ nor the suffix -zǐ ever had anything to do with philosophy. In fact the suffix -zǐ in Chinese proper names functioned in origin pretty much like the suffix -son in English names such as Johnson, Peterson, Davidson, &c., or as the O′ in Irish names, the Mac- in Scottish names, the -ides in Greek names, the -vic(h) in Slavic names, or the prefix Fitz- (< fils de), or even the aristocratic titles Hidalgo (< hijo de algo), Thane (also Thegn, originally ‘freeman’, cognate with Gk. τέκνον ‘child’) and even English Childe. In all of these cases the original intent was to affirm clan lineage affiliation, often aristocratic or noble, by explicitly indicating that someone was the ‘offspring’ of someone “with a name,” i.e., of noble line. In pre-imperial China it was as important to register in one’s name the fact of aristocratic birth and lineage as it was anywhere else in the pre-modern world, and this is the basic function of the Chinese suffix -zǐ. Belonging to the aristocratic class gave males the possibility of entry into the world of letters and, ultimately, the court. As a consequence of this the works of the zi bu Masters category consist chiefly in the writings of that social class and reflect their concerns, diverse as they may have been.³³ They are not as much philosophy in a classical western sense as they are belletristic essays on questions of proper social and political behavior, sometimes practical, sometimes idealistic, according to the mores and perspectives of the members of the ruling class of the time. Differing perspectives on such questions led to an intellectual environment characterized by frequent debate and extensive disputation, sometimes formal, sometimes indirect.

The chief concern of a large number of these zi bu “Masters” writings from the Warring States period centers on the proper role of man in a secular society. What Graham identified as the breakdown of world order as it had earlier been decreed by a protective, benign Heaven came also to include a breakdown of the old so-called “feudal” order that had served at least in principal, sometimes in fact, as a framework for social and political stability since the founding of the Western Zhou in 1045 b.c.e., more than half a millennium earlier.³⁴ The sense of a breech between Heaven and earth and a loss of the reliable underpinnings of a traditional stable society that had been centered on ceremony and ritual directed toward Heaven and the ancestors led to a focus now shifted to secular matters. The task now was to discern man’s proper role in the social and political world, to reduce the growing tendency toward social and political strife and disarray, and to find a way to re-establish a stable secular world order. Beginning with Confucius this entailed at the same time honoring the traditional ceremonies and the traditional reverence due the ancestors and the past. More than a century and a half after Confucius, in the works first of Mencius (late fourth-century b.c.e.), later of Xunzi (mid-third-century b.c.e.), we find an explicit return to the question of man’s relation to Heaven, extended now to include for the first time in pre-imperial Chinese thought debates on human nature. These concerns are not a call for the restoration of the old beliefs or of the sacrificial ritual practices of Western Zhou antiquity, but, however abstract they may appear, still are typically interwoven with concrete questions of social and political ethics, morality and the proper behavior of rulers and individuals in a secular context, the goal of which was societal stability.³⁵

1.4 The Text and Its Tradition: The Mohists

The Mozi 墨子, reflecting the “radical” reaction to the breech between Heaven and earth, is conventionally recognized as the first primary textual counterpart to the “conservative” reaction registered in the Analects of Confucius, though in content the Mozi text makes no direct reference to the Analects text itself and, with the exception of the dialogic chapters (46–51), is of a very different style. It is understood as a record promoting a social doctrine generally characterized as anti-elitist, pragmatic, rational and to some extent egalitarian, and it falls into the bibliographic zi bu Masters category in respect of both its name and its content. It is in its core parts chiefly a statement about a desire for practical, useful social and political policies on the part of the ruling authorities and by the same token about the pernicious, if not enervating, consequences of holding tenaciously to old, traditional beliefs and ceremonies, now deemed obsolete and irrelevant. And, as with other texts in this category from this period, the name of the text, ending with the suffix -zǐ, is traditionally taken to be the name of the author of the text.³⁶ For the Mozi, as for many other zi-named texts of this period, this is a very uncertain presumption. There may have been a real person named Mozi, whose full name is said to have been Mo Di 墨翟, and who is sometimes given the dates ca. 479–381 b.c.e., making his birth year close to Confucius’s death year, and making him nearly a centenarian when he is said to have died. There is very little solid historical documentation for this traditional belief. There is also an alternative view that the term mozi, which could be understood simply as ‘the black one(s)’ or ‘dark one(s)’, is not a proper name at all, but a descriptive epithet used in reference to the presumed swarthy appearances of the allegedly “working class” compilers of this text, who are often said to have been carpenters, craftsmen or even convicts.³⁷ In either case the implied character of the ostensible compiler of the text seems at odds with the general presumption that those names ending in the suffix -zǐ are members of the nobility and with the further presumption that written texts only emerged from an elite, learned stratum of society. How this is to be explained remains unclear.

The received Mozi text has 53 chapters. According to the Chinese bibliographical tradition the work is said to have had originally 71; this means that at some point(s) in its transmission after the Han period the text has lost 18 chapters. What is usually regarded as the core part of the work, that is, the part that gives the text its most widely recognized philosophical and political nature, consists of 32 chapters of the extant 53. These are the narrative essays that present arguments surrounding a set of ten basic doctrinal theses associated with Mohist social philosophy. Each argument is dealt with three times, in three different chapters. This is usually taken as suggesting that within the Mohist “school” there were three competing perspectives on the argument in question; each perspective coming to be represented in one of the three pertinent chapters.³⁸ Not all of the chapters for all ten of the theses are extent in toto; some seem to exist only in fragmentary or digest form and some are not extant at all.³⁹ The ten core theses and their original triads of chapters are:

1. Shang xian	尚賢	“Exalting worthiness”	Chapters 08–10,
2. Shang tong	尚同	“Exalting conformity”	Chapters 11–13,
3. Jian ai	兼愛	“All-inclusive caring”	Chapters 14–16,
4. Fei gong	非攻	“In opposition to aggression”	Chapters 17–19,
5. Jie yong	節用	“Moderating expenditures”	Chapters 20–22,
6. Jie zang	節葬	“Moderating funerals”	Chapters 23–25,
7. Tian zhi	天志	“The inclination of heaven”	Chapters 26–28,
8. Ming gui	明鬼	“Getting a clear idea about ghosts”	Chapters 29–31,
9. Fei yue	非樂	“In opposition to ritual music”	Chapters 32–34,
10. Fei ming	非命	“In opposition to notions of fate”	Chapters 35–37.

In addition to these ten theses, chapters 38 and 39 are called Fei ru 非儒, usually referred to somewhat uncritically as “In opposition to Confucians” or “Rejecting Confucians.” The word rú 儒 in this pair of chapters (only the second of which is extant) is conventionally taken as referring to the doctrines associated with Confucius and called, in modern Western terminology, “Confucianism.” If in fact there had been such a doctrine or “school of thought” in the pre-imperial age, the proper term more sinico should be “Ruism,” not “Confucianism,” since the Chinese tradition never uses the name Kong(fu)zi 孔(夫)子 ‘Confucius’ explicitly to designate a “school of thought”, as mentioned in footnote 29. In fact it is now recognized that the term rú was not used to refer to any particular doctrine per se, nor was it used to refer to the adherents of any particular doctrine, certainly not advocates only of the teachings of Confucius. The meaning and use of the term is not completely clear, partly because it seems to change over time. By the Han dynasty it had come to refer to, among other things, a class of scholars of ancient texts whom we might call ‘classicists’. At the same time it was used to refer to government officials and, finally, to “Confucians” as that label was used in the Han period.⁴⁰ Prior to that it seems to have denoted a class of people concerned with ritual and ceremonies in some sense, and this might easily have overlapped with disciples of Confucius and adherents of Confucius’s teachings. The earliest texts to use the word in any sense are the Lun yu itself (Analects of Confucius) and the Mozi.⁴¹ The one extant Fei ru chapter is more explicitly directed at what are seen as the excesses of the conservative “Ruists” than are the other core parts of the Mozi. It displays the same argumentative, sometimes mildly caustic, confrontational style as the preceding 30 chapters and is often regarded as of a piece with those.⁴²

In their conservative way the Ruists at this time are the masters of ritual and ceremony, things that the Mohists deemed largely useless and arid. The following excerpt from chapter 39 should give an idea of the attitude and style of the Mohist’s anti-Ruist rhetoric.

The Ruists exaggerate ceremonies of ritual and music in order to drive people to excess. They will prolong mourning periods and contrive laments in order to hoodwink the relatives of the deceased. They will claim Fate as a pretext and indulge poverty, yet they live high and mighty. They turn their backs on the basics, abandon responsibilities and plunge forward in idleness and indolence. They are avaricious toward food and drink and irresponsible toward productive efforts … They stuff their cheeks like hamsters, gaze upon things in a stupor like a billy-goat and rise up on their haunches like a bloated wild-pig. When a proper gentleman ridicules him the Ruist responds angrily, “useless fellow, what do you know about being a good Ruist?” … They will beg for grains until the crops are in, then it will be grand funeral ceremonies that they will pursue. With kids and kin all in tow they will be able to get their fill of food and drink. In the end, officiating at a few funeral ceremonies would suffice to put them in good shape … when there is a funeral in a wealthy household, the Ruist is then greatly delighted. He will exclaim with glee, “here is the next key to our food and clothing.”

The received text of the Mozi in addition to this 30 or 32 chapter core part consists of four other parts, viz., seven initial epitomic chapters on diverse aspects of personal behavior (chapters 1–7), six chapters of didactic dialogues (chapters 46–51; these come closest to matching the style of the Analects), 20 on the techniques of military engineering and defensive warfare (chapters 52–71) and finally six chapters that have often been called ‘scientific’ or ‘logical’ or ‘dialectical’ and that deal with what may be understood as matters of optics, mechanics, geometry, logic and ethics (chapters 40–45).⁴³ These six are in many ways the most atypical parts of the whole Mozi text, not to mention the most challenging to understand. All the same, they share the same general character of much of the rest of the Mozi in showing a concern with and attention to aspects of the immediate world as opposed to philosophical, religious or ceremonial predispositions toward the ancestors or traditions of the past. Specifically, these six chapters consist of

• chapter 40: Jing (part A) 經上 “Canons” (part A)

• chapter 41: Jing (part B) 經下 “Canons” (part B)

• chapter 42: Jing shuo (part A) 經說上 “Explanations” (part A)

• chapter 43: Jing shuo (part B) 經說下 “Explanations” (part B)

• chapter 44: Da qu 大取 “The Major option”

• chapter 45: Xiao qu 小取 “The Minor option”

These six so-called dialectical chapters in the aggregate are often called the “Later Mohist” texts or the Mohist “dialectical chapters”, in the Chinese tradition they are called the Mobian 墨辯, because they are thought to reflect the kind of discriminating arguments (辯 biàn) associated with systematic, logical thinking. They are called ‘later’ texts because of an assumption that this kind of thinking generally appears in the textual record later than much of the other political and social discourse, though this is only an assumption. While it may be correct, there is no hard empirical evidence to support the claim. With the possible exception of some of the passages that are identified as ‘sophist’, the particular kind of thinking that these chapters illustrate does not appear anywhere else in the early received tradition either before or after the fourth century b.c.e. A.C. Graham has argued that these chapters show the kind of rigorous thinking that was demanded by the intensity and sophistication of the prevailing Warring States period debates and arguments (Graham 1978, 19–25). At the same time these are the chapters that lead to a claim that the Mozi is an early scientific text. The first four, the “Canons” and the “Explanations” chapters, collectively referred to as the Mohist Canon, are the ones with which the present study is concerned.

Irrespective of the uncertain historicity of an individual named Mozi, the text that has been transmitted from the Warring States period is almost certainly a composite work, an amalgamation of textual pieces from an indeterminate number of hands. To be sure, many of these pieces focus themselves on the same or related social and political questions, and are in that sense homogeneous. Much of the Mozi is distinctive in comparison with other contemporaneous zi bu Masters texts in that its arguments are based on appeals to reason or what can be considered from a Mohist perspective “common sense” rather than on claims of authority or precedent derived from the sage figures and legendary rulers of antiquity. In many respects the doctrines expressed in the text recognize the traditional distinction between nobles and commoners, between an aristocratic class and a plebeian class, as incompatible with a stable, orderly society. There is a marked current of egalitarianism apparent in the core theses. Even in its central ethico-philosophical parts the Mozi is a text constructed primarily along the lines of rational argument and debate from a practical, quotidian perspective and is not based on any highly regarded tradition or on appeals to the wisdom, humane ethics and benign rule of the heroes of the past. To the extent that they deal with matters of the real world, especially its physical and technological aspects, the “Canons” and the “Explanations” chapters, distinctive in content and format as they are in comparison with the rest of the work, often seem nevertheless to be dispositionally aligned with the so-called philosophical parts of the Mozi. For example, one of the best known socio-political doctrines of the Mozi associated with the text’s explicit rejection of outmoded, conservative practices and ceremonies of the past, and its implicit advocacy of an egalitarian ideal is that called jiān ài 兼愛 “all-inclusive caring” (more popularly translated and known as “universal love,” chapters 14–16). The doctrine advocates a kind of equal respect and concern for all people in a society or community irrespective of hereditary status of aristocratic pedigree. The gist is set out succinctly in the following lines from chapter 14:

若使天下兼相愛, 國與國不相攻, 家與家不相亂, 盜賊無有, 君臣父子皆能孝慈, 若此則天下治。

Suppose that throughout the Subcelestial Realm everyone cared for one another, states would not attack one another, family estates would not bring about disorder to one another, brigands and thieves would not exist, lords and vassals and fathers and sons would in all cases show appropriate filial and paternal affection,—if things were like this, then the Subcelestial Realm would enjoy good order.

Compare this with the concrete references in the Explanation parts of sections B 74–75, sections that are primarily concerned with theoretical questions about sets:

Being two, we know their number. So, in asking “How do we know someone’s caring fondly for (ài 愛) people accounts for them exhaustively,” some have been left out from this question. If one is exhaustive in asking about people, then being exhaustive in caring fondly for (ài 愛) those about whom one has asked follows. (B 74)

and

It is like “when knowing their number, then knowing that the caring fondly (ài 愛) exhaustively accounts for them presents no difficulty.” (B 75)⁴⁴

Although the word ài 愛 occurs in these passages without the modifier jiān 兼, the sections clearly relate to a discussion about jiān ài 兼愛 ‘comprehensively caring fondly for’, because they explicitly address the question: is it possible to show care to the set of all people or not?

1.5 The Text and Its Tradition: Modern Reception

In the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and the first years of the Republic of China intellectuals and literary scholars in China became concerned with the implications of the seemingly marked disparity between the rudimentary level of scientific and technological knowledge in China and the considerably more advanced level of such knowledge in the West. This apparent disparity provoked a strong reaction in some quarters, leading to determined and insistent efforts to show that China was not after all as scientifically backward or uninformed as it might at first appear.⁴⁵ The six dialectical chapters of the Mozi are often invoked to show that China was already able to express sophisticated and complex mechanical, optical, geometric and logical propositions and explanations as early as the fourth century b.c.e. Benjamin Elman points out, for example, that from 1886 through 1894 about 25% of the essay topics selected for the Shanghai Polytechnic Prize Essay Competition dealt with the sciences, chiefly with the relation between traditional Chinese learning and Western science. In particular, in the Spring of 1894 we find this essay contest theme: “Itemize and demonstrate … that the Jing shang and [Jing]shuo shang [Canons, part A and Explanations, part A, i.e., chapters 40 and 42] from the Mozi had already raised the Western principles of calendrical studies, optics, and mechanics.”⁴⁶ Intense concern with the chronological priority of Chinese science over Western continued into the twentieth century. This concern took both nationalistic and genuinely scientific focuses.

Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) stands out prominently among early Republican intellectuals as particularly concerned with the political and social importance of introducing Western scientific learning into China (Elman 2005, 341 and passim, Kurtz 2011, 313–18). Liang was both a traditionally trained scholar of classical Chinese texts and history and a major political figure in the early years of the Republic. He served the new Republic as Minister of Justice in 1913 and as Minister of Finance in 1917 (Hsü 1959, 1–2). At the same time he shared in the desire to find a basis in early Chinese texts to demonstrate that in some sense what we see as modern western scientific thinking was already present in the classical Chinese tradition (Kurtz 2011, 319–27). To this end he produced a carefully detailed textual study of the Jing and Jing shuo chapters of the Mozi, which he called Mojing jiaoshi 墨經校釋, published in 1923. In his Preface to this work Liang sets out explicitly his view of the extent to which the Later Mohist texts reflect a kind of scientific thinking comparable to that in the modern West. We include a translation of the Preface here.⁴⁷ Liang Qichao exemplifies a perception of the relation between Chinese and European knowledge traditions that shaped until recently the reception of the Mohist Canon throughout modern times from its first reconsideration in the late eighteenth century after a millennium and a half of studied disinterest.⁴⁸ With our work we propose a reassessment of this relation that tries to appreciate the Mohist text in its own right, resisting the lure of the conventional comparative model that has prevailed in recent decades assessing the evidence for early Chinese science against the history of western science as a default standard.

Liang Qichao’s “Preface” to the Mojing jiaoshi《墨經校釋》 梁啟超自序

Were we to search among our country’s wealth of ancient texts for something that, though far removed in time from the present, shows nevertheless a close match to what we call in the modern world a “scientific spirit,” we would need look no further than the Mojing 墨經. The two chief subjects that Mozi’s teaching promoted are said to be ai 愛 ‘caring for others’ and zhi 智 ‘knowledge’. What Mozi spoke of, and what the disciples recounted, in the various chapters such as “Tian zhi” 天志 (“The Inclination of Heaven”), “Shang tong” 尚同 (“Exalting Conformity”), and “Jian ai” 兼愛 (“All-inclusive Caring”), is 90% concerned with the first of these two teachings, that of ai 愛 ‘caring for others’. By contrast, the materials dealing with the second teaching, zhi 智 ‘knowledge’, consist of the two “Jing” 經 chapters, no more than half written by Mozi himself, together with the two “Jing shuo” 經說 chapters, which arose as Mohist disciples across the land recited every aspect of their Master’s teaching, sometimes recounting what they had heard, sometimes incorporating their own opinions.

The text itself does not have more than 6000 words and consists of 179 individual entries. It analyzes in great detail and sets out with great clarity the basic wherewithal of knowing and understanding, including the origins of knowing and understanding, how knowing and understanding are pulled forth from deep recesses and put to use, and finally how one arrives at truth or falls into error. In consequence we can make use of it to distinguish between míng 名 ‘name’ and shí 實 ‘object’ and to come to grips with shì lǐ 事 理 ‘logical reasoning’.⁴⁹ Each time the text remarks on a single notion its observations are in every case sharply discerning and profound. This puts it in marked contrast to the vulgar sophistry that has prevailed for the last two millennia, such that we may recognize it as matching in many respects comparable discoveries of western scholars in the modern age. It takes up questions of mathematics, geometry, optics, and mechanics, revealing heretofore hidden secrets in these areas.

As I have commented, the Mojing is one of the oldest books of logic (míng xué 名學) in the world. Logic (luó jí 邏輯) in the west starts from Aristotle, as much as a century later than Mozi, and has evolved through numerous reshapings in every generation since, becoming grander and more illustrious with each step, to the point where now scholars of all kinds rely on it to great advantage. The Mojing, by contrast, after the demise of the Qin-Han empire, fell into a period of prolonged oblivion. Once its study had come to an end, scholars became uncritically inclined to place equal merit on all sorts of vacuous, obscure, superficial, dubious and discredited theories, such that the mental blindness and intellectual impoverishment of ostensibly learned circles has, to our great dismay, reached an extreme in the present day.

Of later scholars who took up the study of this material, it was only in the Jin 晉 period (265–420) that a certain Lu Sheng 魯勝 (fl. 291) seems to have brought together into a single compilation the four separate sections, “Jing” (shàng and xià) and “Jing shuo” (shàng and xià). He called this compilation the Mobian 墨辯 and prepared a commentary (zhu 注) for it. Lu Sheng’s preface (xu 序) to this work is preserved in the “Yin yi zhuan” 隱逸傳 (“Accounts of Recluses and Hermits”) of the Jin shu 晉書 (ch. 94, comp. ca. 647). The commentary itself would seem to have been lost for a long time; it is not registered even in the “Jing ji zhi” 經籍志 (“Book Catalogue”) of the Sui shu 隋書 (chs. 32–35, comp. ca. 636).

The Mozi text in general is famously difficult to read, and these four sections are particularly so. [There are eight specific sources of difficulty:]

• 1. The original text was written in two horizontal panels, one above the other (pang hang 旁行), but was copied in the course of transmission as if it were written to be read directly from top to bottom. Modern editions reflect this; lines are thus jumbled and mixed and are difficult to put back into proper order.

• 2. The matching “Jing” and “Shuo” lines are separated from each other, such that there is no way to re-connect them except by determining for yourself where they may have originally been linked to each other.

• 3. The proper order for reading the items and passages has become completely mixed up, so that which goes with which is off by a 1000 miles.

• 4. Because the text is so concise, when it has erroneous or missing characters, there is nothing in the tone of its language from which to draw forth any clues for sorting out the correct meaning.

• 5. The wordings of commentaries and exegetic notes have sometimes become inadvertently incorporated into the primary text, and it is now difficult to distinguish these interpolations from the original text.

• 6. As it has been handed down, the text was copied and recopied generation after generation, sometimes with forced explanations, sometimes with the loss of characters or with nonsensical changes, so that in the course of its transmission what were errors early on have spawned still more errors.

• 7. Ancient commentaries and exegeses have all been lost, so there is nothing on which we can rely for confirmation of the correct understanding.

• 8. The meaning of the text is especially abstruse and at the same time has a sense markedly different from the usual scholastic understandings of the age, so that taking up old, traditional assumptions to make sense of it inevitably leads one to misunderstandings and confusion.

Now in the present day no one any longer knows enough to place any importance on this scholarship. Anyone who tries to work with it will come up against these eight difficulties. Thus this work has been like a brilliant pearl dropped into the dust, a rare orchid cast into the weeds, such that for countless centuries no one has given it as much as a backwards glance.

During the Qianlong (1736–1795) and Jiaqing (1796–1820) reign periods of the Qing dynasty textual criticism flourished as a scholarly enterprise. The eighteenth century classical scholars Wang Zhong 汪中 (1745–1794) and Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–1797) both prepared collations and commentaries for the Mozi text, with Bi Yuan’s edition becoming fairly widely circulated at the time. The works that were compiled by father and son, Wang Niansun 王念孫 (1744–1832) and Wang Yinzhi 王引之 (1766–1834), as well as by Yu Yue 俞樾 (1821–1907), all provided collations and exegetic notes, and thus the Mozi text became from then on gradually less incomprehensible. Only when Zhang Huiyan 張惠言 (1761–1802) compiled the Mozi jing shuo jie 墨子經說解, did the Mojing sections begin to receive particular attention.

Two scholars from my own hometown, the late Zou Boqi 鄒伯奇 (1819–1869) and Chen Li 陳澧 (1810–1882), often cited western scholarship to elucidate passages in the Mojing text, and scholars gradually became ever more astonished by the riches concealed in this work. All the same, while there have been discoveries of individual meanings section by section, still we have not yet gotten even one or 2% of the total sense of the text. Sun Yirang 孫詒讓 (1848–1908) compiled the Mozi jiangu 墨子間詁 in which he attempted to analyze more or less all of the doubtful and intractable passages in the whole work. In spite of his assiduous effort in just these four chapters alone, there were notably few places where he was able to come up with good explanations. As for his text critical studies in particular, the parts that he was clear about and able to get right did not reach even to the half-way mark.

Such difficulties at the outset are in principle taken as a given. For some years now European scholarship has been funneling into China, and scholars have relied on this new knowledge to re-consider old areas of study, increasingly coming to realize that the meaning contained in this 6000-word text is exceptionally far-reaching and nearly unbounded in its scope. For example, the works compiled by Zhang Binglin 張炳麟 (1868–[1936]) and Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–[1962]) have both, by building on the accomplishments of their predecessors, been able to adduce new facts, bringing a new respect to the text and advancing its study overall.

I for my part have had a great fondness for the Mozi since my youth and for 20 years now have been supplementing the critical exegeses of this text with a lot of marginal notes. Before I ever managed to put my notes into any orderly shape, they fell into a state of disarray or went missing altogether. This winter while at Qinghua Yuan 清華園 I lectured on the history of China’s traditional literature. When the term was over I took advantage of my free time to have another look into those old drafts. I was able to set them in order and come up with a fairly voluminous work that I have called Mojing jiaoshi 墨經校釋. Probably more than half the time I have taken exception to the theories of Bi Yuan, Zhang Huiyan and Sun Yirang. Nevertheless, were it not for the hard work and diligence of those worthy scholars who have preceded me, how could I ever have been able to note down anything about this work? To be sure, we recognize that the enterprise of scholarship is not anything that can be achieved by a single person in a single generation. Rather, it rests without question on being able to continue the work of one’s predecessors. Those respectable men of letters, diligent as they were in regard to their predecessors, and in all cases venerable figures of their age, were broadly learned and exacting in their deliberations. All the same there still remain any number of textual passages for which correct exegeses are yet to be settled and that await the considered scrutiny of later scholars. How else would such a poorly informed and inept bloke such as I dare trust himself to take on this work? If even 40% or 50% of this jiaoshi ‘critical exegesis’ that I have produced is able to be confirmed by the work of future scholars, then I would regard my efforts as richly rewarded.

Lu Sheng in the Preface to his Mobian says: “Draw on the shuo ‘explanation’ to get to the jing ‘canon’; each item will be found to be attached to its respective passage. In doubtful cases, leave it out.” I have taken this advice to come up with a meaningful ordering. If we do not take into consideration Lu Sheng’s endeavor, would we be able to follow by even one or two footsteps in his tracks?

Lunar New Year’s Eve (07 February) 1921.

1.6 Structure and Transmission of the Text

As mentioned above, this study deals with four of the six chapters of the Mozi that collectively are often known as the Mohist Canon. These four chapters are, specifically, numbers 40–41, titled Jing (A & B) 經 (上 & 下), translated as “Canons” and numbers 42–43, titled Jing shuo (A & B) 經說 (上 & 下), translated as “Explanations” (sc., of the Canons). These, together with chapters 44 and 45 (Da qu 大取 and Xiao qu 小取, usually translated “Greater, resp. Lesser, Pick”), are regarded as the “logical” or “scientific” parts of the Mozi, called Mobian 墨辯 in the Chinese tradition. The word biàn 辯 ‘argue’ in this title is often taken to suggest a dialectical style, though argumentative or disputatious modes are rarely expressed openly and are mostly at best implicit.

Chapter 40 consists of Canons numbered A 1–A 98, and chapter 41 consists of Canons B 1–B 82.⁵⁰ Chapter 42 consists of Explanations A 1–A 98, and chapter 43 consists of Explanations B 1–B 82. There appears to have been one Explanation for each Canon, though in a few cases the Explanation is missing and presumed to have once existed but now is no longer extant. The numbering scheme used here reflects A. C. Graham’s editing of the text. Basing himself on earlier work of Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–1797) and Liang Qichao, among others, Graham has recognized that the order of the Explanations is very likely original and has accordingly re-ordered the Canons such that the numbering of the Canons matches the numbering of their corresponding Explanations (Graham 1978).

The textual history of the Mozi prior to its printing in the Ming Taoist Canon (Daozang 道藏) of 1445 is very poorly known, and the received text is notoriously corrupted. The Daozang printing of the Mozi is generally considered the closest thing to an editio princeps extant, in spite of its late date relative to the actual compilation of the text (Graham 1993). This is the version that will be used here, with textual emendations noted as necessary. The “Later Mohist” sections of the text, our focus in the present work, are no exception to the generally corrupted nature of the whole Mozi text. In particular the sequence of sections in the received text of the Jing “Canon” chapters (40 and 41) is very confused. At some point early in its transmission the text was apparently written in two separate, horizontally divided “panels” across the page, one panel on top and one on the bottom of a single sheet (probably paper, conceivably silk or even bound bamboo slips). It would seem that the intention was to read all of the sections, i.e., canons, of the upper panel in toto across before moving to the sections of the lower panel. At some point the text was apparently copied by a scribe who did not recognize this “upper panel—lower panel” arrangement, and simply copied the sections of the text from top to bottom of the whole page, thus inter-weaving the early Canons with the later ones in a confusing shuffle. Individual sections were generally kept textually intact, but the order was corrupted from what must have originally been (top panel:) 1, 2, 3 … 47, 48, 49//(bottom panel:) 50, 51, 52 … 96, 97, 98 to 1, 50, 2, 51, 3, 52 … and so on.

The text of the Jing shuo “Explanation” chapters (42 and 43) was apparently not written in such an unusual way and was thus spared from suffering any similar textually disruptive fate. It appears instead to preserve the original section sequence. In a preliminary section of his Mojing jiaoshi 墨經校釋, called “Du Mojing yuji” 讀墨經餘記 (“Supplementary notes on reading the Mojing”), Liang Qichao recognized that the “head” character of each Explanation was not an integral part of the Explanation statement itself, but instead served simply as a kind of “key word” marker referring to the corresponding Canon, thus providing a link for matching each of the Explanations with its proper Canon (Liang Qichao 1923, 8). The relation between the two parts, Canon and Explanation, seems generally to be what the labels would suggest, viz., a kind of canonical definition or proposition, rarely more than a single line, accompanied by an explanation or example which may be anywhere from a few words to several lines long. It is not at all clear, at least to us, why the text was structured with the Canons in separate chapters from the Explanations. And it will quickly become apparent that the notion of ‘explanation’ is not always as straightforward and useful as we might hope. The brief sketch given here of the nature of the received text and the corruption that it seems to have suffered does not begin to exhaust the extent of textual challenges that this work presents. The comments in the present work regarding textual history and textual corruption and emendation are largely based on A.C. Graham’s thorough summary of the pertinent Qing and twentieth-century scholarship, laid out as a part of his own extensive, text-critical study of the work (Graham 1978, 73–110).⁵¹

The textual emendations that we make, often based on Graham’s work, are generally of two kinds, (i) straightforward corrections of what we take to be erroneous characters, i.e., characters standing as we see it for incorrect words, and (ii) replacing unconventional, obscure or unattested characters with standard ones when the word intended is not in doubt. Instances of the first category are usually the result of confusion between similar graphs. Those of the second kind are typical of the transmitted Mozi overall, a text that is well known for its numerous non-standard characters (relative to the received writing system from the Han period on) generally. As examples of the first kind, at one point in sections A 43 and A 60 the received text writes 但, which is emended in both cases on the basis of intelligibility to 俱; in A 48 the received text writes 庫, which is emended to 運, again on the basis of intelligibility. Both of these can be seen as likely arising from the fact of graphic similarity. As examples of the second, we find in section B 28 the character 剃, conventionally standing for the word tì ‘to shave off fur or hair’, but here used for the word tī ‘ladder’, conventionally written 梯; in the same section we have the word qū ‘to bend or bow down’ (conventionally written 屈) written .

The Mohist text does not explicitly introduce a meta-terminology distinguishing different types of canon, but from a careful scrutiny of the text itself a division into two categories becomes clear. Canons A 1 to A 87 are all about delineating the meaning of terms and may therefore be referred to as ‘definitions’, and canons A 88 to B 82 usually contain a statement to be explained. Most of these end with the phrase 說在… ‘the explanation lies with …’. These are referred to as ‘propositions’. The relation between chapters, which are an objective feature of the text, and the definitions and propositions, which are identified on the basis of content and formal structure, is as follows:

• Chapter 40 (jing A 經上) includes the canon part of sections A 1 to A 98. Of these, A 1 to A 75 are substantive definitions of terms, A 76 to A 87 are definitions limited to different meanings and usages of the words in question, and A 88 to A 98 are propositions.

• Chapter 41 (jing B 經下) includes the canon part of sections B 1 to B 82. These are all propositions.

• Chapter 42 (jing shuo A 經說上) includes the explanation part of sections A 1 to A 98. Of these, A 1 to A 87 are definitions and A 88 to A 98 are propositions.⁵²

• Chapter 43 (jing shuo B 經說下) includes the explanation part of sections B 1 to B 82. These are all propositions.

The only significant difference between the A set of Canons and the B set is that all of the B set, save one, end with the summing-up formulaic phrase shuo zai X (說 在 X) “the explanation lies with X,” and none of the A set has such a line. With respect to the distinction between ‘definition’ and ‘proposition’ this means that no definition has the phrase shuo zai X and that all propositions have it except those in chapter 40, i.e., A 88-A 98. The X in this phrase is typically a single word or a short phrase that is contained or implied in the corresponding Explanation, and which in the majority of cases the Explanation seems to elaborate on. In some cases it appears to be no more than an illustrative example. We will refer to this X term as the ‘cross-reference term’ of the section. In view of the fact that the Explanation sometimes elaborates on the cross-reference term, it is possible that the shuo 說 of the shuo zai X phrase is intended to be understood in connection with the shuo 說 of the jing shuo 經說 “Explanation” given for each canon, but there is no explicit indication of this.

Graham (1978, 30 and 229–230) proposes to match sequences of definitions with sequences of propositions exhaustively, in an effort to establish a systematic relation between definitions and propositions. In the table here we illustrate Graham’s proposed matching, putting sequences of definitions in the left half opposite sequences of propositions on the right half, without committing ourselves to such an interpretation. While the association of particular definitions with particular propositions is obvious in the case of the sections on spatial extent, duration, and motion, it is less so in the case of what Graham calls “the sciences,” i.e., definitions on corporeal extension on one side and the propositions on shadows and mirror images and on the vertical tendency of weights on the other. The sequences of sections discussed in this book are printed in bold face.

A 1–6: Reflections on reasoning and knowing	A 88–B 12: Procedures for consistent description
A 7–39*: Conduct and government A 21: Force
A 40–51: Spatial extent, duration, and motion	B 13–16: Spatial extent, duration, and motion
A 52–69: Corporeal extension	B 17–24: Shadows and mirror imagesB 25a–29: Vertical tendency of weightsB 30, 31: Problems in economics
A 70–87*: Disputation, terminological distinctions A 70, 71: Model and criterion A 76–87: Terminological distinctions	B 32–82*: Problems in disputationB 52, 53, 60–65, 73–75: Propositions related to spatial extent, duration, motion, ironic appearances, modular correspondences and sets

1. An asterisk (*) indicates a broken sequence.

Our selection of passages from the Later Mohist corpus for translation and analysis is governed by our interest in the emergence and development of theoretical knowledge and scientific thinking. We are interested in the theoretical knowledge that results from reflections on elementary and practical knowledge about the physical environment, i.e., knowledge that stems from experiences within the natural environment and from the handling of cultural, in particular technological, artifacts. Therefore we have selected passages dealing with space, time and motion, materiality, and mechanical and optical devices and arrangements. We have additionally selected the six opening sections of the Mohist Canon, dealing with knowledge and related fundamental concepts, since they show the Mohist’s attempt to differentiate types of knowledge on the basis of varying conditions. This illustrates the systematicity and the reflected character of the Later Mohist enterprise.

Summing up, we have selected the following 68 sections from the Mohist Canon for close study, given here with section numbers following Graham 1978, but with our own descriptive rubric headings:⁵³

• A 1–6: Epistemological foundations;

• A 21: Definition of Force;

• A 40–51: Spatial and temporal contingency and inevitability;

• A 52–69: Corporeal extension (“Geometry”);

• A 70, 71: Model and duplicate;

• B 13–16: Spatial and temporal contingency and inevitability—Reprise;

• B 17–24: Shadows and mirror images (“Optics”);

• B 25a–29: Vertical tendency of weights (“Mechanics”);

• B 52, 53: Mechanical and temporal bases for judgments;

• B 60–65: Spatial and temporal paradoxes, and spatiotemporal and modular correspondences;

• B 73–75: Sets of indeterminate or unknown extent.

Additionally, we have included a lexical appendix of 12 sections:

• A 76–87: Terminological distinctions.

It becomes clear even from this list that the ordering and grouping of sections appear to be deliberately done by the original compilers of the text. The position of a section within the text therefore often provides useful information on the section’s meaning, as we will see throughout our work.

There are about 90 further sections in the Mohist Canon, depending on what is considered an integral part of the text, that we have not included in our selection. They are about such things as ethics, economics, sophistry and logic, and government. The fact that we have not included these sections in our selection of translated and interpreted passages does not mean that we do not take them into account in our overall discussion when pertinent. They constitute the closest, immediate context of the selected passages and cannot be ignored when it comes to understanding what the Later Mohists’ endeavor was all about. While it would be desirable ideally to include them in a full retranslation of the Later Mohist corpus, the leading questions of this book call for, it seems to us, a more focused approach.

Let us finally present two tree diagrams (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2) showing a hierarchical grouping of sections, linking the sections translated and commented on in the Chap. 3 (on the right-hand side) to their overall topic represented in shaded boxes (on the left-hand side). The topics in the shaded boxes also serve as the section headings of the Chap. 3. The tree diagrams, one for the definitions, the other for the propositions, further testify to the highly structured design of the text, a topic to which we will return in the next chapter.

Fig. 1.1

Hierarchical tree chunking the definitions discussed in the following chapters

Fig. 1.2

Hierarchical tree chunking the propositions discussed in the following chapters