The Tao-Te-Ching is in no way a “scripture.” Instead, it is a book of poems that shows how simple it is to follow the Tao and live in peace with yourself, other people, and the world.
You would fall in step with the Tao, which runs through everything and naturally controls, binds, and releases them. If you let go of the artificial rules and regulations that were supposed to improve life, you would find that life regulates itself naturally. Lao-Tzu thought that the more rules you asked for, the harder you made your own life and the lives of others. The biggest difference between Taoism and Confucianism is that Taoists don’t believe in strict rites and rituals. Even though Taoism and Confucianism have a lot in common, they are also very different in significant ways. Taoists also came to respect nature and its spirits, which is very similar to the Shintoism of Japan. So they honored their ancestors as part of their daily lives.Įven though the Tao-Te-Ching doesn’t directly support ancestor worship, it became a part of Taoist rituals.
Confucians believed that everyone’s ancestors who had died still lived on in another place and the presence of the gods. Instead, they went somewhere else where they kept living. They concluded that when people died, they didn’t just stop living. The grass grew again, and the tree that looked dead came back to life in the spring.
The things they saw in nature shaped their ideas about life, and one of the ideas they added was the idea of eternity. The peasant classes of the Shang Dynasty, who lived close to nature, turned Taoism into a religion. Sima Qian doesn’t say what happened next, but if the story is true, Yin Hsi would have made copies of the Tao-Te-Ching and passed them out. He stopped writing after finishing it, gave the book to Yin Hsi, and walked through the western pass into the mist. However, before Yin Hsi allowed him to leave the civilization for good, he asked Lao-Tzu to write a book for him, and Lao-Tzu agreed, sat next to the guard, and wrote the Tao-Te-Ching on a rock (The Book of the Way). When he tried to leave China through the western pass, the gatekeeper Yin Hsi stopped him because he knew he was a philosopher. He was so upset that he couldn’t change the way people behaved that he decided to leave the country. However, Lao-Tzu got tired of the people and the corruption he saw in government, which caused so much pain and suffering for the people. Lao-Tzu thought that everything should have balance and that people could get along well if they feel about each other’s feelings once in a while and realize that what’s best for them isn’t always best for everyone else. The historian Sima Qian (145–86 BCE) tells the story of Lao-Tzu, a natural philosopher in charge of the Royal Library in Chu. After a campaign to eliminate non-Communist religions, however, the numbers dropped dramatically, making it hard to figure out how many Taoists there are in the world. In the Tao, everything is one and linked.īefore the Communist revolution in China happened 50 years ago, Taoism was one of the most popular religions. The Tao is the essential thing that makes things happen in the universe. Most of the time, this translation is “The Way.” It’s hard to say what this means, though. So, Taoism is both a way of thinking and religion.
It grew out of the folk religion of the Chinese people, especially in the country, and became the official religion of China during the Tao Dynasty. Taoism, also called Daoism, is a Chinese philosophy that dates back to 500 BCE, and the credit goes to Lao Tzu.
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