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Mozi (The Book of Master Mo)墨子

Mo Di and his disciples · About the 4th century BC · China · 36 pieces · 57,470 Chinese characters

The writings of the school that in the Warring States period stood beside the Confucians as one of the "two great companies." It is not the work of one man but what Mo Di and his disciples added generation after generation, and so many chapters set down the same argument in three versions — upper, middle and lower. These are taken as the traces of the branches of the school, each copying it out in its own way. Ten doctrines are the backbone — exalting the worthy, conforming upward with what is right, loving all alike, condemning aggression, thrift in use, thrift in burial, following the will of Heaven, making ghosts clear, condemning music, and condemning fate. "If a man looked on the house of another as on his own house, who would steal?" is in the chapters on loving all alike. The ladder of "Condemning Aggression" — that a man who steals peaches and plums from another's orchard is punished, while a man who attacks another's state is praised — and the three gauges of "Condemning Fate," that to speak without a measure is "like setting the marks of sunrise and sunset upon a turning potter's wheel," stand there too. The last chapter, "Gongshu," is a story. When Chu made cloud ladders to attack Song, Mozi walked ten days and ten nights, met Gongshu Ban, and beat him nine times over with a belt and pieces of wood; and on the way home he met rain and was not let in to shelter inside the gate of that very Song village.

Thirty-six chapters and 311 paragraphs fully translated. The graph counts were matched against the source text chapter by chapter, and all thirty-six chapters were confirmed to differ by not a single graph (57,470 graphs). ★There were seventy-one chapters in all, but eighteen were lost long ago and only their titles remain in the source text (闕). Of the fifty-three that remain, two groups were set aside and thirty-six chapters carried. The first group set aside is the Mojing (經上, 經下, 經說上, 經說下, 大取, 小取; 9,387 graphs). It weighs logic and knowing, but the original is a string of definitions such as 「故，所得而後成也」, and the 「Canon Explained」 is its exposition, in which the graphs are so tangled that the reading parts from scholar to scholar. To put it into another language would be conjecture rather than translation, so it was left aside. The second group set aside is the eleven chapters on holding a city wall (備城門 through 雜守; 14,961 graphs). They are a manual of the craft of city defence, dense with measurements and the names of parts and weapons, and badly damaged (「備突」 has only 106 graphs left). The source text wraps its text in <onlyinclude>, so it was enough to draw out what lay inside. No commentary is attached and there is not one Western quotation mark, so there was nothing to correct. The textquality mark for each chapter is mostly 75%, however (one chapter at 100%, eighteen chapters with no mark). There are four damaged places in 「Moderation in Spending, Part One」, left as □□. From the context they come to something like 「does so」, but they were not filled in by conjecture. ★The last five paragraphs of 「Against the Confucians, Part Three」 cut Confucius down as a man, and readers part over them. They are translated as the source text has them, but there are places that do not hold together — Yanzi (Yan Ying) died around 500 BCE and the revolt of Duke Bai was in 479, so Yanzi could not have spoken of it. Because of this there is a view that the latter part is a later man's rebuttal, but nothing was corrected or taken out.

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The Questions of Lu
Esteeming Righteousness
Geng Zhu
Against the Ru, Part Three
Percipient Ghosts, Part Three
Moderation in Burial, Part Three
Moderation in Use, Part Two
Moderation in Use, Part One
Against Offensive War, Part Three
Against Offensive War, Part Two
Against Offensive War, Part One
Impartial Care, Part Three
Impartial Care, Part Two
Impartial Care, Part One
Conforming Upward, Part Three
Conforming Upward, Part Two
Conforming Upward, Part One
Exalting the Worthy, Part Three
Exalting the Worthy, Part Two
Exalting the Worthy, Part One
Avoiding Excess
Seven Troubles
The Standard of Conduct
Cherishing Officers