淮南子

"淮南子" by An Liu is a philosophical text compiled before 139 BCE from scholarly debates at Liu An's court. This handbook for enlightened rulers attempts to define perfect socio-political order through synthesizing Taoist, Legalist, Confucian, and Mohist concepts while favoring a less active sovereign. The twenty-one chapters range across religion, history, astronomy, geography, philosophy, and politics, drawing heavily from the Zhuangzi and advocating wuwei nonaction against the Han dynasty's growing centralized government. (This is an automatically generated summary.)