fight when he was told to do so by his ruler. This notion progressed even
further as army discipline and coordination increased. Every warrior now
had tofight only when his duly assigned commander ordered him to, and
not before, and to subordinate himself to the army’s military and political
goals. War and martial arts fully became an instrument of the state. To act
otherwise was to become an outlaw and to be punished.
Just as thinkers and other sellers of skills roamed about trying tofind a
place at a ruler’s court to practice their trade, some individuals rejected or
functioned very much outside the new bounds of authority. We see for the
first time a new sort of man, a righteous hero who is neither bound by
political authority nor by fear of death. This“knight-errant”acted vio-
lently and without restraint, using his martial skills to avenge wrongs or
insults. In another form, he was also an assassin, that ultimate outsider to
carefully constructed political authority. Where in the past such violent
behavior had been simply a part of aristocratic culture, in the Warring
States period it was the action of an outlaw.
Knights-errant and assassins were valorized in history andfiction in
response to the subordination of individuals to the state. For the rest of
Chinese history, infiction if not in fact, righteous heroes always found
themselves at odds with the state. Although Confucius argued for the
supreme value of the moral man over the warrior or functionary, he was
himself of the knightly class and trained in its skills. He did not, therefore,
reject the martial arts, or even denigrate them, so much as he wanted to put
them in their proper place. Confucius respected, for example, the tradi-
tional archery contest and all the values that went with it. Archery would
repeatedly come up in the works of other thinkers, demonstrating its
central conceptual place as the ultimate martial skill and marker of martial
arts. This would remain true despite the emergence of new weapons, like
the sword, the advance of theji (halberd), and ourfirst mentions of
unarmed combat.
illustration 4.Mao spear head, Warring States period, Laufer Collection.
Courtesy of the Field Museum and Ernest Caldwell. Photo by Ernest Caldwell.
The Warring States Period 35