ABSTRACT
Mo Tzu—Master Mo—was himself raised on the teachings of the Sage, but his was no Confucian "school for gentlemen," for he denounced the rituals on which Master K'ung had set such store as luxuries the ordinary folk could not afford. Mo Tzu also charged the Confucians with an almost blasphemous fatalism. The Communists have spurned family loyalty as feudalistic and one of the "poisonous elements" of Confucianism. Mo Tzu roundly condemned the gracious living and dying required of men by Confucian Li as inadmissible frivolity and a waste of the people's labor. Rich ceremonial burials, heavily ornamented coffins, embroidered shrouds, and the prescribed period of three years of mourning were abominations: "A coffin, three inches thick, is sufficient to bury a rotting body, three pieces of cloth are enough to cover a stinking corpse." Music? "Making music is wrong!" he thundered.
