  Mohism never achieved a position of dominance or orthodoxy, but at its peak in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, no school was more influential. This status is attested by no less an authority than Mencius, who lamented that “the statements of Mo Di and Yang Zhu [another rival thinker] fill the world,” and by the attention Xunzi devotes to refuting Mohist economic doctrines. Though their importance is routinely slighted in Confucian-biased accounts of Chinese thought, the Mohists articulated much of the theoretical framework of early Chinese epistemology, logic, political theory, and ethics. Their ideas were a crucial stimulus for Mencius, Xunzi, the Daoists, and the so-called “legalist” political thinkers, all of whom either borrowed Mohist ideas or developed their own views partly in reaction to them. One sign of the Mohists’ status is that their shared critics typically paired them with the Confucians (Ru) as a bloc, referring to the two as Ru-Mo, the two “moralizing” schools devoted to ren (benevolence) and yi (righteousness). Confucianism owes an unacknowledged debt to Mohism for its notion of comprehensive moral concern, as reflected, for instance, in Mencius’s doctrine of extending our natural concern for kin so that it reaches everyone. The phrase “inclusive care” begins to appear in Confucian texts toward the end of the Warring States era — a late passage in the Xunzi refers to “comprehensive benefit and inclusive care” (Book 25) — and by the Han dynasty, we find the Confucian Gongsun Hong explaining the virtue of ren (benevolence) in explicitly Mohist terms, as “extending benefit and eliminating harm, inclusively caring without partiality” (Han Shu, Vol.  58).[18]