The Formative Age 19
Legalists accepted the importance of rituals to legitimize state power.
The Daoists, who satirized power-seekers and attacked the reliance on
words to convey truth, used highly erudite words to make their case
precisely to the power-seekers of the elite.
China was not alone in experiencing unprecedented levels of
change and uncertainty during the early Warring States period (roughly
600–400bce). Great thinkers around the world responded to profound
changes under way in their societies, including expanded trade in goods
and ideas, the decline of earlier social and political structures, and the
increasing reliance of states on iron weapons and standing armies. The
writings of Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist thinkers and Mozi in China,
the Hebrew prophets in Mesopotamia, the great Vedic scriptures of the
Upanishads and the teachings of the Buddha and Mahavira (the founder
of the Jain religion) in India, and Plato and Aristotle in Greece all sub-
jected their societies’ common beliefs and customs to the cold scrutiny
of reason and challenged political leaders to pay more attention to the
welfare of the common people. Despite contrasts in their approaches
and ideas, they respectively laid the intellectual foundations for great
new empires in Persia, India, China, Greece, and Rome.
Compared with these other societies, early China seems striking in
the following ways: the strong emphasis on the family as the basis of
civilization; the tendency to see the state as an extension of the fam-
ily; the desire and ability to build a large-scale centralized bureaucratic
state; and the emphasis on ancestor worship and belief in the wisdom
of the past as a guide to the present and future (though the Legalists
dissented on this point). Perhaps the two most distinctive aspects setting
early China apart from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and India were
(1) the assumption, at least among the literate elite, that the world’s cre-
ation was simply given and self-perpetuating, not dependent on a divine
power far above human beings, and (2) the tendency to see all things on
Earth and in the cosmos as closely interrelated. In the Chinese view, the
meaning of life could only be grasped by human beings through their
own efforts and refl ections on their own past.