One major obstacle to understanding the early history of China is the still-prevalent notion that discrete schools of thought contended in the Warring States and Han periods, and that these schools of thought were text-centered. 2 A second is the propensity to conflate quite separate accounts of the same events, institutions, concepts, and taxonomies, for the purpose of devising a neater record. Some historians of early China, recognizing these obstacles, have sensed that the word jia 家 does not mean only "schools" or "scholastic lineages" (as it is typically translated). Still more argue against the notion of a China that is homogeneous and unchanging. A majority, however, continue to treat the terms "Ru" and "Dao" as direct and unproblematic references to two scholastic "isms," Confucianism and Daoism, and to ignore discrepancies among the rhetorical constructions in the early sources. 3 This essay aims
Confucius (aka Kongzi) and Zhuangzi are the two most famous thinkers in all of Chinese history, aside from Laozi, the Old Master. They occupy positions in the history of Chinese thinking roughly comparable to those held by Plato and Epicurus in the Western narrative of civilisation, in that they offer visions of the engaged political life and the engaged social self to which later political theorists and ethicists invariably return. For the last century or so, if not longer, Sinologists and comparative philosophers have been apt to name Confucius the ‘founder’ of a Confucian ‘school’, and Zhuangzi, one of two ‘founders’ of a rival Daoist ‘school’, despite the lack of evidence for sectarian factions in early China. What is at stake in this essay is nothing less than a recasting of the entire early history of Chinese thinking in ways both bracing and potentially troubling to modern academics.
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