Fa-chia

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Fa-chia (political philosophy) One of the Six Ways of Chinese Religion. The historian Ssu-ma Tan (d. 110 BCE) wrote of its followers: they advocated deterrent law and punishment, especially in Han Fei Tzu, and in his work of that name, often compared to Machiavelli's The Prince; in Fa-chia, the Tao is simply the working out of power politics: the past is not revered as a repository of wisdom, as it was for Confucius and Mo Tzu: what matters is how the ruler exercises ‘the two handles’ of reward and punishment’.

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