The Book of Lord Shang

The first chapters advise promoting agriculture and suppressing other low-priority secondary activities, as well as encouraging martial virtues for use in creating and maintaining a state army for wars of conquest.

Even in Imperial China, Huang Zhen of the Southern Song dynasty did not believe it to have been written by Shang Yang himself, considering him to have been a more 'gifted law official', at least as compared with the Records of the Grand Historian.

Although highly composite, it forms a "relatively coherent ideological vision", likely reflecting the evolution of what Zheng Liangshu (1989) dubbed Shang Yang's 'intellectual current' (xuepai 學派).

[9] In comparison with the Han Feizi, though considering them to be "digressions of minor importance", Yuri Pines notes in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that the Book of Lord Shang "allowed for the possibility that the need for excessive reliance on coercion would end and a milder, morality-driven political structure would evolve."

"[13] As such, the philosophy espoused is quite explicitly anti-Confucian: Sophistry and cleverness are an aid to lawlessness; rites and music are symptoms of dissipations and licence; kindness and benevolence are the foster‑mother of transgressions; employment and promotion are opportunities for the rapacity of the wicked.