On Yangzhu's Thought Of Human Rights

During Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Yangzhu, who is the member of ZhuZiBaiJia, proposed the preliminary thought of human rights. He claimed that everyone should live"for myself", what's more, pursue comfort and freedom in life. Therefore, he was personally against absolute monarchy, privilege and grabbing possessions of others by total violence. In that unrest period with fierce fighting, life of common people was treated worthless, thinkers all racked their brains trying to assist their monarchs to unify the states into one whole word. The thought of Yangzhu at that time was really precious and it is the only one which revealing the humanistic sparks in history. This paper takes《LieZi·YangZhu Pian》as basic researching material and criticism from other members of ZhuZiBaiJia as reference. It displays thoughts system of Yangzhu as complete as possible and explains the bud of human rights idea of Yangzhu from different angles as values, society, life and"ming shi"(Chinese character as"名实"). Although the idea is quite something as we see now, it finally turned out to be a flash in the pan in China's thousands of years history. We just can not help regretting that it is not handed down and fulfilled by descendents. Here I analyzed the phenomenon and proposed my own idea. Thoughts of Yangzhu are valuable culture heritage, researching on it, in some degree helps raise human rights consciousness of modern citizens.