Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in China > The fa tradition

The Fa Tradition

Fa means standard, model, law. Sima Tan grouped as the fa school (fajia) the statesmen and writers who would order a state by law, reward and punishment: Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), Shen Buhai (d. 337 BCE) and Han Fei (d. 233 BCE), who presented himself as joining the other two. The English “Legalists” renders Sima Tan’s label; none of them used it of himself.

The Book of Lord Shang opens against the authority of the past: “There is more than one way to govern the world and there is no necessity to imitate antiquity, in order to take appropriate measures for the state” (ch. 1, tr. Duyvendak). It counts what weakens a state: “If, in a country, there are the following ten things: odes and history, rites and music, virtue and the cultivation thereof, benevolence and integrity, sophistry and intelligence, then the ruler has no one whom he can employ for defence and warfare” (ch. 3). The word Duyvendak renders “sophistry” is bian, the Mohists’ word for disputation.

Han Fei names the scholars among the “five vermin” of the state: they “cite the way of the former kings to borrow humaneness and right, dress grandly and adorn their disputations, so as to cast doubt on the laws of the day” (ch. 49, rendered from the Chinese). Times change, “when the age differs, affairs differ”, and to rule today’s people by the old kings’ ways is to be the farmer of Song who, once a hare ran into a tree stump, sat by the stump waiting for another. Talk does not plough: “everyone in the realm talks about government, and every household keeps the laws of Shang Yang and Guan Zhong, yet the state grows poorer: many talk of ploughing, few hold the plough.” His conclusion: “in the state of a clear-sighted sovereign there are no texts written on bamboo strips, but the law is the teaching; there are no ‘discourses’ of the former kings, but officials are the teachers” (tr. Pines).

He has a test as well as a verdict. In “Eminence in Learning” (ch. 50) he observes that after Confucius the Ru split into eight lines and after Mozi the Mohists into three, each “taking and rejecting opposite things, yet each calls itself the true Confucius or Mozi; Confucius and Mozi cannot come back to life, so who is to settle the learning of the age?” His answer: “to be certain without cross-checked evidence is stupidity; to rely on what one cannot be certain of is deceit.” In “Inquiry into Disputation” (ch. 41) he asks where disputation comes from, and answers: “from the ruler’s lack of clarity”. “Words and deeds take achievement and use as their target”; an archer who shoots at random and hits the tip of an autumn hair is no good archer, for he had no target. “When such phrases as those of the ‘hard and the white’ and ‘no thickness’ make their appearance, laws and commands come to an end” (tr. Bodde), the paradoxes of Gongsun Long and Hui Shi.

In 213 BCE the First Emperor’s minister Li Si proposed that the Odes, the Documents and the discourses of the hundred schools be taken out of private hands, ending: let those who would learn “take an official as a teacher”.