WI No Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars

What if this event in Chinese history hadn't happened? Maybe someone else unifies China, maybe Qin Shi Huang dies earlier, or maybe he just turns out saner. How is Chinese philosophy and history affected?

I've heard some interesting ideas on the subject, but I'd have to do some more research.

The problem is we by the very nature of the event don't know what these men where like or what they where saying.

eliphas8 said:

The problem is we by the very nature of the event don't know what these men where like or what they where saying.

Click to expand...

Well, we have bits and pieces -- Yang Zhu promoted some kind of ethical egoism; Mo Tzu promoted universal love; Gongsun Long was a brilliant logician, of whose writings all that really remains is the "white horse" paradox; etc. While we don't know how convincing or by what logic or rhetoric they reached these conclusions, we might imagine them being more influential in Chinese thought.

*Maybe*, by the virtue of remaining more diverse than it became, Chinese philosophy could widespread more easily in Asia, other cultures finding more things similar or compatible with their ones? A bit like diverse Greek philosophy made its way (thanks to many other factors) up to far regions and other cultures?

I don't want to pretend it would connect more easily Chinese culture with others that simply, but could it help?

Actually if you read between the lines, the burning of the books was not that damaging. It was more about controlling information than destroying it. First of all, some books (on medicine, divination, agriculture, and forestry) were exempt from the very beginning. Second, the books to be burnt were those outside of the Qin imperial archives. Given that 1) all the books to be burnt were to be handed to government authorities, and 2) government books were not burnt, it's quite likely that copies of each book worked their way to said archives, and few if any of the books were lost permanently with the burning of the books. Later the Qin archives were burnt, so the books were lost permanently, but that's not the POD here.

There probably were books burned and scholars buried, but we shouldn't look at the Confucian lore that developed around this event and take it as fact.