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Chinese Philosophy

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. The major developments in Chinese philosophy during the past three thousand years will be outlined here; ideas that are essentially religious, treated elsewhere, will be noted only as may be necessary to show the religious relevance and historical context of philosophical themes. This overview will be at once chronological and topical, as follows:

1. The pre-Classical background (to the sixth century BCE)
2. Classical philosophy (late sixth to late third century BCE)
3. The first imperial era (to the third century CE)
4. The development of Buddhism in China (to the ninth century)
5. The Confucian revival (Tang and Song periods)
6. The later empire (since the fourteenth century)

The Pre-Classical Background

China circa 550 BCE consisted only of what is now North China; even the states of the Yangtze River valley did not speak the language of what was recognized as the civilized heartland to the north. This known "world" had been in anarchy for more than two centuries, since the overthrow of the last Western Zhou king (in present-day Xi'an) in 771 BCE. By about the sixth century BCE there was a nominal quasi-feudal hierarchy under a powerless successor Zhou "king" in Luoyang, but in fact, the political landscape was dotted with a patchwork of small quarreling states under local lordlings who themselves often had no real power.

Chinese Philosophy article

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