A tradition organized around a question the Greeks never asked so directly: how to order a life and a state. From the hundred schools of the classical age — Confucius, Mozi, Zhuangzi — through two thousand years of imperial Confucian orthodoxy to its modern reformers, it treats ethics, politics and cosmology as one continuous fabric.
Early Zhou religion supplies the vocabulary — tian (heaven), ancestors, ritual — that the first philosophers repurpose for ethics and statecraft.
The Warring States period (fifth–third centuries BCE) produces the rival masters: Confucians, Mohists, Daoists, Legalists, the yin-yang cosmologists and the five phases theorists, and the logicians Gongsun Long and Hui Shi.
The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) consolidates a syncretic imperial Confucianism — Dong Zhongshu is the key architect.
Buddhist ideas arrive via the Silk Road and are digested over centuries; the Wang Bi generation's "Mysterious Learning" (xuanxue) reads the classics metaphysically first.
The Song dynasty (960–1279) answers Buddhism with Neo-Confucianism, culminating in Zhu Xi's synthesis.
Central Ideas
The Dao: Daoism names the way things move when forced by nothing — the frame for wu wei (non-coercive action).
Ritual and humaneness: Confucian ethics builds character through li (ritual propriety) and ren (humaneness) — see Confucian ethics.
Human nature debate:Mencius argues the sprouts of virtue are innate; Xunzi answers that nature is crooked and needs ritual to straighten it.
Impartial care:Mozi's consequentialist challenge — care for all equally, judged by practical benefit.
Law and power: the Legalists, systematized by Han Fei, tie order to institutions rather than virtue.
The Confucian examination curriculum exports the whole tradition to Korea, Vietnam and Japan — see Korean and Japanese philosophy.
European Enlightenment readers (Leibniz among them) mined Confucian statecraft; today translations of the Daodejing outnumber most philosophical classics.
Process thought and virtue ethics increasingly cite Daoist and Confucian sources — a two-way street in global philosophy.