百家

   bǎijiā    百家    baijia ‘hundred schools’

   bǎijiā    百家    baijia ‘Hundred Schools’, flourishing of intellectual thought in the pre-Qín period, somewhat inaccurately portrayed as distinct “schools” by Hàn dynasty scholars and thereafter.

   bǎijiā    百家    baijia ‘hundred schools’, referring to the diverse schools of thought that flourished during the pre-imperial period, including Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, Legalism, and others. The schools were only clearly taxonomised in the Hàn dynasty in such works as the Shǐjì ‘record of history’ and Hànshū ‘book of the Hàn’, and their historical reality has been rejected by later scholars. Yet the labels have stuck, and with them the view that the míng jiā ‘school of names’ and the mò jiā ‘Mohists’ played a defining role in the early history of logical thought in China.  C.f. bǎi jiā zhēng míng ‘contention of a hundred schools’.