Yang Zhu c. 440 BC – c. 360 BC

Yang Zhu was a Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period, founder of the school traditionally known as the Yangist, who became famous in early Confucian polemic for the doctrine that one would not pluck a single hair from one's body even to benefit the empire. The Mencius portrays him, alongside Mozi, as one of the two great heretical voices of the age, and the seventh book of the Liezi, traditionally attributed to him, develops a hedonist and individualist philosophy of life. He may be read as the founder of an early Chinese tradition of self-cultivation rooted in the value of the individual life rather than in the obligations of family, ruler, or state.

Yang Zhu, also known as Yangzi or Master Yang, lived during the Warring States period of China, probably in the second half of the fifth and first half of the fourth century BC. Almost nothing of his life is recorded; the dates conventionally given are around 440 to 360 BC. No writings of his own survive; his teaching is known only from quotations and refutations in the works of his Confucian and Mohist opponents, principally the Mencius, the Han Feizi, the Lüshi Chunqiu, and the Huainanzi, and from the seventh chapter of the much later Daoist text Liezi, which bears his name.

Mencius regarded him as half of the great heresy of his age — paired with Mozi's universal love — and gave the famous summary that Yang Zhu would not pluck out a single hair from his body even to benefit the entire world. The extant fragments turn on the principles of weisheng — the preservation of life — and weiwo — for-oneself — and argue that the supreme good is the natural lifespan of the embodied self.

Whether Yang Zhu is best understood as a hedonist, an individualist, an early proto-Daoist of inner cultivation, or simply a critic of self-sacrificial Confucian and Mohist altruism remains debated; he stood at the beginning of a Chinese tradition of individualist self-care that runs through the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi to the recluses of the Wei-Jin era. He is presumed to have died around 360 BC.