Thoughts on Mohists and Confucian Knights by Shao Han hi, some random ideas.. 1, In the Period of the Warring States, there were a Hundred Schools of Thought - 100 or more different philosophies existed, with their teachers and thinkers espousing means to stop the chaos that erupted throughout the land. The 2 philosophies most useful for creating knightly systems were the Mohists and the Confucianists - the Mohists were drawn mostly from lower-class craftsmen and knightly warriors (xia ke, or knight-errants) and were dedicated to defending the weak against the strong, and the Confucianists looked back to a great era of peace, an Eden-like period of perfection under this legendary lord, the Duke of Zhou, and sought to perfect social interactions in order to recreate this peaceful state. The Mohists followed this man, Mo Zi, whose doctrine can be summed up in 3 steps: 1, Universal Love. I love your father as much as you love mine, you love my brother as i would love yours. With a prevalence of such behaviour, society would acheive order and the wars would be stopped. 2, It is wrong to kill a human being - but to kill a thief or murderer is not to kill a man. By forsaking the law and decency of humanity, the strong, opportunistic bandits and robbers have become animals that must be put down for the safety of the weak. 3, Never go against the Will of Heaven - by doing good, one gets good rewards, and by doing evil, one gets evil punishments. Spirits figure strongly into this pantheon - the good will not be unheard by the celestial courts. Morality is used as a means of social control again - good is its own reward, and once everyone realizes the good of doing good, nobody in their right mind will do ill. Sounds fine and good, right? Mo Zi was a bit of a quixotic fellow, running around with his fellow knights throughout war-torn China, with siege weapons in tow, defending small towns against large armies from other cities, engaging in diplomacy to convert warlords and bandits to the righteous path. But there're dangerous extremes to his theory, which you could use in your "chinese samurai" game campaign... 1, If everybody loves everybody as their closest friends etc, then what about one's own friends? Namely put, if I love your father as much as I love mine, there is nothing special about my family relationship anymore. Confucius criticised this as destroying the bonds of kinship. Also, there was a case where a Mohist official's son was found guilty of murdering 2 people. The court wished to lessen his charge to manslaughter because the official was an old man and he only had one son, if the son was to be executed, there would be nobody to carry on the family line. (Clans being very impt to us Chinese..) But the old man refused and said "Under the law of heaven, it is known that a man who kills another for his own benefit is not a man but a murderer. How can I claim to be a follower of the Way of Justice if I let my son go on such leniency? Where was this mercy for those he slew? To slay a thief is not to slay a man.." and saying so, he killed his own son with the executioner's sword to maintain justice. How's that for Lawful honourable extremes? Good for knightly games.. 2, The man-robber killing thing has been accused by others as being sophistry and manipulation of words and meanings. I leave that up to your interpretation.. But in DnD, we do that already, we kill orcs and gnolls because they're not "men", they're "monsters" that need to be put down. 3, Religion as a social mechanic is awfully mechanical and functional, as the Confucianists have noted. At its logical extreme, doing good and getting rewarded for it may lead one to not doing good at all.. but rather just going through the motions to gain reward, which breeds hypocrisy? Good for knightly courtly intrigue... With all those, i'll like to point out that the Mohists never really got much influence in their time, because the chaos of the era forced them to evolve extreme ideas of peace and social control. They're certainly based on ideas of lawful good, though i could see lawful neutral and lawful evil followers of their philosophy.. and oh yeah. Mohist knight-errants are a staple of Hong Kong movies - those swordsmen in wu-xia flicks are based equally on Mohist, Taoist, and Confucianist ideals hehe. Confucianism lends itself well to designing a series of knights in a fantasy game, because in historical fact, the greatest and most esteemed soldiers of Chinese history are those warriors who are also versed in the Confucian classics as well as military matters. Do you play Dynasty Warriors? The Chinese God of War and Literacy is Guan Yu, or "Guan Gong" as he is more respectfully called - he is worshipped by both policemen and gangsters today as a symbol of loyaly and fratenity to one's brotherhood. Guan Gong was canonized and put into the Pantheon of Chinese Deities in later eras by an Emperor who wished to emphasize the importance of loyalty, wisdom, and education in addition to brute strength and might in the military. (On an off track, Lu Bu, the most powerful warrior of the 3 Kingdoms, is spat upon by most people who read the novels because he is a dumb, ungrateful, and vile traitorous beast. That is the sort of character that would create a great juxtaposition in a knightly game - the principled warrior seeking to restore peace in an era of chaos versus the self-interested brute seeking nothing but his own gain.) In this social system, unlike classical Western European feudalism, peasants were placed on a higher scale. The scholars and officials were on the top of the social scale because they were responsible for ordering society and leading it to progress or perfection; the peasants were one step lower, and were impt because they were the lifeblood of the society, tending to the fields. Craftsmen were lower by a step below peasants, because they did not create raw materials through labour, they merely changed materials into goods. Merchants were lowest of all, because they didn't do work at all to create things, they just sold things for their own benefit. Where is the role of the knightly warrior? Most generals tended to be either officials appointed by the court or peasant conscripts who has clawed their way up. It's possible for anybody at all, theoretically, to become a knightly warrior through merit and loyalty.. But then, the Eunuch warlocks in the court will be very, very helpful if you want a promotion. Enter the intrigue! More layers of plot to wrap the knights around. |