A politically shattered China produced a Hundred Schools of Thought
Between about 770 and 221 BCE, rival Chinese states fought constantly, and that turmoil bred an astonishing burst of ideas. Confucius, Laozi, Mozi and Han Fei offered competing answers about human nature and good government. One of those answers would later run the imperial civil service exams for centuries.
The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods gave rise to Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism, each with its own view of human nature and social order. Legalism faded as a coherent school largely because of its link to Qin Shi Huang's harsh rule, although many of its institutions survived into the Han. Under Emperor Wu, who reigned from 141 to 87 BCE, the scholar Dong Zhongshu helped make a cosmologically flavoured Confucianism the state ideology, blending in yin-yang and Five Elements theory.
Buddhism arrived from India during the Han and became a major intellectual force through translators such as Kumarajiva and Xuanzang. Bodhidharma is credited with transmitting the roots of Chan, which Huineng reshaped into a distinctly Chinese tradition prizing sudden awakening. By the mid-Tang, scholars like Han Yu pushed back, accusing monks of neglecting social duty. In the Song, Confucian officials absorbed Buddhist and Daoist ideas into Neo-Confucianism: Zhang Zai grounded existence in qi, and the Cheng brothers stressed li, or principle.
Zhu Xi turned these threads into a full system, urging the investigation of things as the road to knowledge. From the Yuan dynasty onward his School of Principle became orthodoxy and the backbone of the imperial examinations. In the late Ming, amid booming trade and printing, Wang Yangming countered with his School of Mind, which looked inward to innate moral awareness and insisted that knowing and acting are one.
Influence travelled widely. Neo-Confucian and Buddhist thought shaped schooling in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and European Enlightenment writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries admired Confucianism, often through idealised misreadings, in debates about secular government. From the late Qing, translators such as Yan Fu brought in liberalism and Social Darwinism, Sun Yat-sen devised his Three Principles of the People, and later movements including New Confucianism, developed by Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi, carried the tradition into dialogue with Western thought.
Source: Chinese philosophy
