The Origin of the Schools

In the last chapter I said that Confucianism and Taoism are the two main streams of Chinese thought. They became so only after a long evolution, however, and from the fifth through the third centuries B.C. they were only two among many other rival schools of thought. During that period the number of schools was so great that the Chinese referred to them as the "hundred schools."

Ssu-ma T'an and the Six Schools

Later historians have attempted to make a classification of these "hundred schools". The first to do so was Ssu-ma T'an (died 110 B.C.), father of Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-ca. 86 B.C.), and the author with him of China's first great dynastic history, the Shih Chi or Historical Records. In the last chapter of this work Ssu-ma Ch'ien quotes an essay by his father, titled "On the Essential Ideas of the Six Schools." In this essay Ssu-ma T'an classifies the philosophers of the preceding several centuries into six major schools, as follows:

The first is the Yin-Yang chia or Yin-Yang school, which is one of cosmologists. It derives its name from the Yin and Yang principles, which in Chinese thought are regarded as the two major principles of Chinese cosmology, Yin being the female principle, and Yang the male principle, the combination and interaction of which is believed by the Chinese to result in all universal phenomena.

The second school is the Ju chia or School of Literati. This school is known in Western literature as the Confucianist school, but the word ju literally means "literatus" or scholar. Thus the Western title is somewhat misleading, because it misses the implication that the followers of this school were scholars as well as thinkers; they, above all others, were the teachers of the ancient classics and thus the inheritors of the ancient cultural legacy. Confucius, to be sure, is the leading figure of this school and may rightly be considered as its founder. Nevertheless the term ju not only denotes "Confucian" or "Confucianist", but has a wider implication as well.