Mohism took shape within a generation of Confucius's death and defined itself in direct argument against the school forming around his teaching. Where Confucians held that love and duty are properly graded, owed most fully to parents, then kin, then outward to the wider community in diminishing measure, Mozi argued for jian ai, care that is impartial and equal toward every person regardless of family connection. To Mozi this was not sentimentality but a claim about cause and effect: partiality toward one's own family and state, he argued, is the very engine of the theft, warfare and cruelty that make the world unstable, and only a universal standard of care could break the cycle.
The schools clashed just as sharply over ritual. Confucians treated elaborate mourning, music and ceremony as the visible form of genuine feeling and the glue of a properly ordered society. Mozi condemned the same practices as extravagant waste, arguing that a state exhausting its granaries and its people's labor on funerals and orchestras while common people went hungry had its priorities inverted, and he proposed frugal burial and the abolition of court music as matters of policy rather than taste.
Mohism was also unusual among the Warring States schools in becoming an organization rather than a circle of disputants. Its members formed a disciplined order under a chief elder, bound by Mozi's teaching against offensive warfare, and made themselves available to defend besieged cities, developing real skill in fortification to back the doctrine with practice. That combination of argument and discipline made Mohism a serious rival to Confucian influence for two centuries, before Qin and Han left both the order and its ethic without the patronage that had sustained them.