MOZI. Very little is known about the life of the fifth-century BCE Chinese thinker Mozi (Master Mo), although a number of clues suggest that he may have been trained as an artisan. He was the first major thinker to challenge the heritage of Confucius (551–479 BCE) and is best known as the founder of the Mohist school or lineage of thinkers that flourished in the fourth and third centuries BCE, but he fell into obscurity soon after. Although the teachings attributed to Mozi, under the eponymous title Mozi (the core of which is held to represent Mozi's own writings rather than elaborations and accretions by later Mohists), were transmitted to posterity, they exercised little influence after the third century BCE and were largely ignored until the nineteenth century.

Whereas in early Confucian writings it is the figures of the ruler and the father that served as authority models, Mozi...