Confucianism vs Taoism: Two Answers to the Same Country
Confucianism and Taoism grew out of the same collapsing Zhou order and gave opposite advice about it. This guide sets out how they differ on human nature, learning, ritual, government and the word dao itself, what Confucius actually taught, and why most educated Chinese people held both positions at once for two thousand years.
What is the difference between Confucianism and Taoism?
Confucianism and Taoism differ on where a person should look for the good life: Confucianism looks to human relationships and the conduct that keeps them in repair, Taoism to a pattern in things that human effort keeps disturbing. Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE in the small state of Lu, taught that people become fully human by being shaped, through ritual, study, music and the daily obligations of family and office, and that an ordered society is the workshop where that shaping happens. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi treat the shaping itself as the problem. Their advice runs the other way: stop contriving and let things take their own course. Five disagreements do most of the work between them. They use the words dao and de in incompatible senses. They differ over whether human nature needs correcting. They value opposite kinds of learning. They recommend opposite styles of rule. And they take different views of ritual, spirits and death. What they share is a period, a set of older classics, and an audience of literate men arguing about how a collapsing order might be fixed.
The tidy opposition is partly a later invention. Neither side called itself by the names English uses. Confucius was Kong Qiu, and his followers were the ru, a word for the ritual specialists and teachers he came out of; rujia and ruxue are what Chinese has always called the tradition. The Latin name Confucius came from Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the compendium Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, printed in Paris in 1687, did much to fix it in European usage. The category daojia, the school of the way, was applied retrospectively. It appears in Sima Tan's survey of the six schools, preserved in the final chapter of the Records of the Grand Historian, written roughly two centuries after the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi were circulating. Sima Tan was sorting a messy inheritance into boxes for imperial readers. The thinkers he sorted did not think of themselves as members of rival denominations, and passages in one text turn up almost verbatim in the other. The spelling wobbles too. Tao and Dao are one Chinese word in two romanization systems, Wade-Giles and pinyin, so Taoism and Daoism name the same thing; the older spelling stuck to English book titles and the newer one to scholarship, and this article follows that split.
Is one of the two more individualistic than the other?
Taoism is the more individualistic of the two, though the word fits awkwardly. The Zhuangzi defends the man who refuses office and keeps his usefulness hidden. He declines to be measured by anyone's standard. Confucianism has no equivalent, because it treats a person as constituted by relations: son, subject, elder brother, friend. Strip the relations away and nothing is left to describe.
Do Confucianism and Taoism actually contradict each other?
On several points they contradict each other outright. Confucius held that ritual and humaneness repair a broken society; Daodejing chapter 18 says humaneness and rightness appeared only once the great way was abandoned, which makes them symptoms rather than cures. On other points they diverge without colliding, since a text about the sage's inner state and a text about mourning grades are answering different questions.
What do the two traditions agree about?
They agree that the world of their own time was disordered, that force and law alone cannot fix it, and that the fix begins with the ruler's own condition rather than with new institutions. Both assume that practice transforms a person where argument cannot, and both describe a sage whose responses have become effortless. The overlap runs deeper than the polemics admit. Analects 15.5 praises the sage king Shun for governing by wuwei, non-action, saying that he composed himself reverently and faced south and that was all, which puts the central Daoist term for rule inside the Confucian book.
What did Confucius actually teach, and what do ren, li and xiao mean?
Confucius taught that a person becomes fully human by cultivating character through relationships, ritual and study, and three words carry most of that teaching: ren, li and xiao. Ren, usually rendered humaneness or benevolence, is written with the graph for person beside the number two, so the word points at conduct between people. In the Analects it is the summit quality, and Confucius withholds it from nearly everyone, including himself. Li covers ritual propriety, from the state sacrifices and the mourning grades down to how you hand someone a cup and how you enter a room. Xiao is filial devotion, the debt owed to parents living and dead, which the disciple Youzi calls the root out of which ren grows. Around those sit yi, rightness, and shu, reciprocity, which Confucius offers Zigong as the single word to practice for a lifetime: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. The target of the whole program is the junzi, a title Confucius took from the hereditary aristocracy and redefined by conduct. He denied inventing any of it. His own claim was that he transmitted, and that what he transmitted was the practice of the early Zhou.
The Analects is not a book Confucius wrote. It is a compilation of short exchanges assembled by disciples and their disciples over generations, and its twenty books were laid down in strata. E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks pushed that idea hardest in The Original Analects of 1998, dating book 4 earliest and reading the rest as accretions laid down over roughly two centuries. Few sinologists accept their passage-by-passage chronology. Almost none defend the book as the work of one hand at one time. That is why the text repeats itself, disagrees with itself on small points, and never defines its own key terms. Two later thinkers pulled the inheritance in opposite directions. Mencius, in the fourth century BCE, grounded ren in feelings anyone can locate in themselves. Xunzi, a couple of generations later, grounded it in the shaping power of ritual and teachers. Zhu Xi, who died in 1200, settled the dispute for the next seven centuries by selecting the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean as the Four Books and writing the commentaries that came with them. From 1313 those commentaries were the examination syllabus, and they stayed so until the examinations were abolished in 1905.
What does ren mean literally?
The character ren combines the element for a human being with the numeral two, which is why translators reach for humaneness, co-humanity or benevolence, and why no single English word holds it. The graph suggests a quality that only exists in company. Confucius never gives a definition, answering the question differently for each student, and in one exchange he reduces it to loving people.
Is li just etiquette?
Li is more than etiquette, because Confucius treats form as the thing that makes an intention real rather than as its decoration. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette, in his 1972 book Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, argued that li works like a ceremony whose power comes from being performed at all. A greeting done properly creates the relation it expresses.
Does the Analects contain a golden rule?
The Analects gives a negative version of it. Asked by Zigong for one word to guide a whole life, Confucius answers shu, reciprocity, and glosses it as not imposing on others what you do not desire yourself. The negative form does real work. It restrains where a positive rule would prescribe, and it leaves other people's business to them. It appears more than once with slight variations, and the Doctrine of the Mean repeats it as the measure Confucius admitted he had not yet met in serving his own father.
Why do Confucianism and Taoism use the same two words, dao and de, so differently?
Confucianism and Taoism use dao and de differently because Confucius means by dao a human path that can be walked, taught and lost, while the Daodejing means something that came before heaven and earth and cannot be named. In the Analects the way belongs to people and to a historical order. Confucius says that it is people who are able to broaden the way, and that the way does not broaden people, which is close to the reverse of the Daodejing's position. He speaks of the way of the former kings, the way of a state, the way a son should conduct himself. It has specifiable content, and a person can hear it in the morning and die content that evening. The Daodejing disqualifies that procedure in its opening line: a way that can be put into words is not the constant way. De splits along the same seam. For Confucius de is moral force, the standing that makes people cooperate without being compelled, which he illustrates by comparing a ruler who governs by de to the North Star, which holds its place while the other stars turn toward it. For the Taoist senses in full, see Tao Te Ching: What It Teaches and How to Read It.
Dao was ordinary vocabulary before either tradition claimed it. The word meant a road, and by extension a method, and as a verb to speak or to guide. Every school of the Warring States had a dao in that plain sense: the Mohists had one, the Legalists had one, military strategists had one. What the authors of the Daodejing did was refuse to fill the word in, keeping the bare term and treating any specification of it as a falling away. Chapter 38 sets that out as a ladder of decline. When the way is lost there is de; when de is lost there is ren; when ren is lost there is yi; when yi is lost there is li, and li is called the thinning of loyalty and good faith and the head of disorder. Read as polemic, that passage lines up the Confucian virtue vocabulary in descending order and dates each rung to a further stage of collapse.
Did Confucius use the word dao himself?
Constantly, and always in the walkable sense: a way of governing, a way of serving a parent, a state that has the way or lacks it. The word is common in both books, and tallying occurrences settles nothing, since the two differ in length by a factor of three. What separates them is what the word can be attached to. Confucius could say a state possesses the way, a sentence the Daodejing could not construct without irony.
What does de mean in Confucianism?
De in Confucianism is the moral force a cultivated person accumulates, which draws cooperation without commands. The Analects opens its second book by comparing government by de to the pole star, still while the rest of the sky orients on it. It is closer to earned authority than to private virtue, and Confucius assumes it is visible to others and transferable through example.
Why does the Daodejing attack ren and yi by name?
Chapters 18, 19 and 38 treat ren and yi as evidence of decline rather than remedies for it. The Guodian bamboo slips, the oldest known manuscripts of the text, read chapter 19 without the phrase that cuts off ren and discards yi, substituting different targets. The three Guodian bundles cover roughly two fifths of the received text, so whether the sharpest anti-Confucian edge was added later or the burial simply held a partial selection is not a question the slips can settle.
Do the two traditions agree about human nature, or does a person need shaping?
Confucianism and Taoism disagree about human nature, and Confucianism disagrees with itself so sharply that the internal split is wider than the gap with Taoism on some points. Confucius says little: people are close to one another by nature and diverge through practice. Mencius filled the gap by arguing that human nature tends toward good the way water tends downward, and that everyone carries four sprouts, the beginnings of humaneness, rightness, propriety and wisdom. His proof is a thought experiment: anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm, before any calculation of advantage. Cultivation, on this view, means growing what is already there. Xunzi took the opposite line, arguing that human nature is bad and that goodness is deliberate human work, comparing a person to warped wood that has to be steamed and pressed against a frame before it will run straight. Ritual, for Xunzi, is that frame. The Daoist texts reject the terms of the argument. What they praise is the unworked condition before shaping, and the Zhuangzi's chapter on horses' hooves accuses the famous trainer Bo Le of ruining horses by improving them.
The stakes were practical. If Mencius is right, the ruler's job is to remove obstacles so that people's own tendencies can develop, and education is largely recovery. If Xunzi is right, ritual and law are load-bearing, and a society that relaxes them will not drift toward mildness. The debate was live in Mencius's own text, which records his exchanges with Gaozi, who held that nature is neither good nor bad, like water that will flow east or west depending on where you open a channel. Mencius's position eventually became the orthodoxy, largely because Zhu Xi built his curriculum on it. Xunzi was pushed to the margins for centuries, partly because Han Fei and Li Si, named in the Records of the Grand Historian as his students, became the leading theorists and administrators of Legalism and the Qin state. Twentieth-century scholarship brought him back. Eric Hutton's one-volume complete English Xunzi appeared from Princeton in 2014, and Xunzi's account of how ritual manufactures the dispositions it appears merely to express now draws more philosophical attention than Mencius's sprouts do.
What are the four sprouts in Mencius?
The four sprouts are the felt beginnings of the four cardinal virtues. The heart of compassion is the sprout of ren; the heart of shame and aversion is the sprout of yi, rightness; the heart of deference is the sprout of li; and the heart that distinguishes right from wrong is the sprout of zhi, wisdom. Mencius calls them sprouts because they die without tending.
Did Xunzi really say human nature is evil?
Xunzi's chapter title says human nature is e, a word covering bad, ugly and detestable, which older translations render as evil. His argument is narrower than the word suggests: born appetites, left alone, produce conflict over scarce goods. He does not deny that anyone can become good, and he insists that any person in the street has the capacity to become a sage.
How do Taoist texts describe what shaping does to a person?
As damage disguised as improvement. The Zhuangzi's horses run free until Bo Le arrives with branding irons, bits and stables, after which most of them die and the survivors are obedient. The same chapter treats potters who force clay into circles and carpenters who force wood into squares as models of the sage who forces people into humaneness and rightness.
How do Confucianism and Taoism differ on learning and self-cultivation?
Confucianism cultivates by addition and Taoism by subtraction, and both traditions say so in almost those words. The Analects opens with the pleasure of learning something and practicing it at the proper time, and Confucius reports that he once went a whole day without food and a whole night without sleep to think, gaining nothing, and that studying would have been better. His curriculum is concrete: the Odes, ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing and calculation, worked at until the forms become second nature. At seventy, he says, he could follow what his heart wanted without overstepping the line. The Daodejing states the inverse in chapter 48: in the pursuit of learning one gains daily, in the pursuit of the way one drops something daily, dropping and dropping until nothing is contrived. The Zhuangzi gives the practices a name. Yan Hui reports that he has achieved zuowang, sitting and forgetting, having let limbs and intellect fall away, and Confucius, cast as a character in the story, asks to become his student. Elsewhere the same book teaches xinzhai, fasting of the mind.
The disagreement is narrower than it looks, since both traditions want a person whose right response comes without deliberation. They differ on the route. Confucian practice trusts drill: repeated performance of forms that at first feel external until the person's spontaneous reaction has been rebuilt. Taoist practice distrusts drill because it suspects the forms of installing something foreign. The Zhuangzi's cook, carving an ox for nineteen years without dulling his blade, is the closest the tradition comes to an account of skill, and even there the point is that he stopped looking with his eyes and let the knife find the gaps that were already in the animal. Religious Daoism later built out an enormous body of physical training, breath work, standing forms and internal alchemy, which is treated separately in Qigong for Beginners: Forms, Breathing and Daily Practice.
What did Confucius mean by learning?
Xue in the Analects means apprenticeship in a practice. Information comes second. It covers texts, but also ritual performance, music, archery and the observation of exemplary people. Confucius pairs it with thinking in one of his best known lines: learning without thought leaves you confused, thought without learning leaves you in danger. Neither half works alone.
What is sitting and forgetting?
Zuowang is the practice described in the sixth chapter of the Zhuangzi, where Yan Hui says he has dropped his limbs and trunk, dimmed his senses, left his body and dismissed his knowledge, becoming identical with the great thoroughfare. The text gives no method, only the report. Later Daoist meditation manuals took the phrase as a name for a whole discipline.
Do Taoist texts reject books?
The early ones are suspicious of them while being books themselves, which they seem to know. The Zhuangzi tells of a wheelwright who informs a duke that the sages' writings are the dregs of dead men, since the skill in his own hands cannot be conveyed in words even to his own son. The Daodejing says that those who know do not speak. Religious Daoism went the other way entirely and produced the Daozang, one of the largest scriptural collections anywhere, whose surviving Ming edition of 1445 runs to well over a thousand titles.
What does each tradition say about government and social order?
Confucianism holds that a ruler governs best through personal example and ritual, Taoism that a ruler governs best by doing as little as possible. The Analects puts the Confucian case in one comparison: lead the people with administrative measures and keep order with punishments, and they will stay out of trouble while feeling no shame; lead them with de and keep order with li, and they will have a sense of shame and correct themselves. Confucius adds the doctrine of rectifying names, holding that disorder begins when a ruler is not really a ruler and a father not really a father. Mencius pushed the logic further than most later officials liked, ranking the people first, the altars of grain and soil second and the ruler last, and defending the killing of a tyrant on the ground that a ruler who has lost the Mandate is no longer a king but a mere fellow. The Daodejing recommends emptying the people's minds and filling their bellies, governing a large state the way you cook a small fish, and in chapter 80 it gives a picture of a small state whose people can hear the neighbors' dogs and never bother to visit.
Both were arguing against a third position that won the practical contest. Legalism, worked out by Shang Yang in Qin and systematized by Han Fei, held that neither virtue nor restraint scales, and that a state runs on published law, measured rewards and severe punishments applied without exception. Qin unified China on that basis in 221 BCE and collapsed within fifteen years. The early Han court then leaned for decades toward Huang-Lao, a version of Daoist quietism attached to the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, favored under Emperors Wen and Jing. Emperor Wu, who took the throne in 141 BCE, turned toward the classicists and established academic chairs for the Five Classics. What the empire actually ran on afterward was a mixture. The Han History records Emperor Xuan telling his heir that the house of Han had its own institutions, blending the way of the hegemon with the way of the king.
What is the Mandate of Heaven?
Tianming is the claim that Heaven authorizes a ruling house to rule and withdraws that authorization when the house misgoverns. The Zhou used it to justify displacing the Shang, and Confucians inherited it. Mencius made it conditional on the people's welfare and read popular acceptance as the evidence of Heaven's judgment, which gave later Confucian officials a principled basis for remonstrance.
Did Taoists ever actually run a government?
Huang-Lao thinking shaped early Han policy under Emperors Wen and Jing in the second century BCE, when the court deliberately kept taxes and interventions low. Later, the Celestial Masters administered a semi-independent territory in Hanzhong under Zhang Lu until his surrender to Cao Cao in 215 CE. Libation officers replaced magistrates. Illness was handled as the consequence of misdeeds and treated by written confession, and travelers could eat and sleep free at roadside lodges the movement kept stocked.
What is the rectification of names?
Zhengming is Confucius's answer to Zilu's question about the first thing he would do in office. If names are not correct, speech does not fit, affairs are not completed, ritual and music do not flourish, and punishments miss their mark. The practical version is that titles carry duties, and a ruler who abandons the duties has forfeited the title.
Are Confucianism and Taoism religions, philosophies, or both?
Confucianism and Taoism are each both religion and philosophy, and the confusion comes from applying a European category to traditions that never sorted themselves that way. Daoism has an unambiguously religious form with a founding date: in 142 CE Zhang Daoling reported a revelation from a divinized Laozi and organized the Way of the Celestial Masters in Sichuan. That movement produced ordained priests, ranked registers, liturgy, a pantheon, a vast canon and living lineages, including the monastic and celibate Quanzhen order founded in the twelfth century and the married, hereditary Zhengyi priesthood. Chinese distinguishes the texts from the church as daojia and daojiao, though scholars now warn that the line was never as clean as the pair suggests. Confucianism is harder to classify. It had state temples, sacrifices to Confucius, an enormous body of ancestral ritual and a claim on Heaven, but no clergy, no conversion, no doctrine of salvation, and nothing that works like a personal god. Confucius himself declined the questions. Asked how to serve the spirits, he said the questioner could not yet serve people; asked about death, he said he did not yet understand life. For comparative afterlife doctrine, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
The classification problem is partly a translation problem with a date. The modern Chinese word for religion, zongjiao, entered the language around 1900 from Japanese, where it had been coined to render the European term, and it arrived carrying assumptions about congregations and exclusive membership that fit Chinese practice badly. Almost immediately it became a political question. Kang Youwei campaigned in the early Republic to have Confucianism established as a state religion on a Protestant model, and lost. European Christians had run into the same problem earlier during the Rites Controversy, when Jesuits argued that ancestral and Confucian rites were civil honors that converts could keep, and Dominicans and Franciscans argued they were idolatry. Rome sided against the Jesuits, and the papal bull Ex illa die of 1715 banned the rites for Catholic converts. The ban was lifted only in 1939.
Is Taoism a religion or a philosophy?
It is both, in institutionally separate senses that overlap in practice. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi are philosophical texts that predate any organized church. Daoist religion, from 142 CE onward, has priests, temples, ordination grades, exorcism, healing rites and gods, and it treats those same texts as scripture. Reading only the first and calling it Daoism leaves out most of the tradition's actual history.
Does Confucianism have a god?
No deity in the ordinary sense, though it has Heaven. Tian in the Analects is a moral order that can be understood, appealed to and offended, and Confucius says at fifty he knew its decree. Sacrifices to Heaven were an imperial monopoly, performed by the emperor. Confucius himself is honored in temples as a teacher, and Confucian ritual centers on ancestors rather than gods.
Do Daoists worship Laozi?
Religious Daoism worships Laozi as Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao, one of the highest deities in its pantheon and the revealing figure behind the Celestial Masters. That divinization is well underway by the second century CE and is separate from the historical or legendary author of the Daodejing. Philosophical readers of the text have no such practice, and the gap between a book of aphorisms and a god receiving offerings is one of the sharpest illustrations of why the daojia and daojiao labels exist at all.
How did Confucianism and Taoism coexist in the same Chinese life?
Confucianism and Taoism coexisted because most Chinese people used them for different parts of life rather than choosing between them. The standard phrase is the three teachings, sanjiao, counting Buddhism as the third, and by the late imperial period the slogan that the three teachings are harmonious as one was common enough to appear on temple walls. A literate man could study the Four Books for the examinations, quote the Zhuangzi in a letter about his own retirement, hire Daoist priests for a funeral, and observe the Confucian mourning grades for his father, without any sense of contradiction. The division was often by domain. Confucianism governed office, family obligation, education and public ritual. Daoism handled healing, exorcism, longevity practice, local temple festivals and the fate of the dead. There was a life-stage pattern as well: the official who worked within the system and the recluse who withdrew from it were understood as the same man at different points, and Chinese poetry from Tao Yuanming, who quit his post in 405 and went back to his fields, onward is full of that turn.
The mixing shows up in institutions, not only in attitudes. Tang emperors bearing the surname Li claimed descent from Li Er, the Laozi of tradition, granted the Daodejing official standing and at times set it as an examination text. The Ming emperor Jiajing, in the sixteenth century, spent decades on Daoist alchemical practice while presiding over a Confucian bureaucracy. In the same century Lin Zhao'en of Fujian founded an explicit Three-in-One teaching that combined all three. Both traditions also claimed the same divination classic, the Yijing, which Confucians read through the Ten Wings as a book of moral pattern and Daoists absorbed into cosmology and alchemy. How the hexagrams are cast and read is covered in I Ching Beginner's Guide: How to Consult the Book of Changes. Where the three teachings genuinely fought was over patronage and rank at court, and the fighting could be expensive. Kublai presided over a debate between Buddhist and Daoist clergy in 1258 and, as emperor in 1281, ordered most Daoist scriptures burned, sparing the Daodejing.
Is the saying about being Confucian in office and Daoist in retirement accurate?
It is a useful shorthand with obvious limits. The pattern is real in the biographies of officials who wrote Daoist-flavored poetry after resigning or being exiled, and Su Shi in the eleventh century is the standard example. But it flattens people who held both outlooks simultaneously, and it says nothing about the majority of the population, who were neither officials nor recluses.
How did one family use both traditions at a funeral?
By hiring specialists for different tasks. The family observed Confucian mourning obligations, graded by relationship and duration, and maintained the ancestral tablets afterward. Ritual professionals, Daoist or Buddhist depending on region and budget, were engaged to conduct the rites concerning the soul's passage. In much of south China the ritual specialists could be hired in either register, and families sometimes engaged both. The household was buying services rather than declaring an allegiance, which is the single fact that most confuses readers who expect exclusive religious membership.
Where do the two traditions genuinely conflict?
On whether deliberate moral effort helps or harms. A Confucian who stops working on himself has abandoned the project; a Daoist reader of chapter 38 would say the working is the damage. They also conflict on the value of holding office, on whether social distinctions track anything real, and on whether a sage should be recognizable to other people at all. Confucius wanted his students employed. The Zhuangzi's ideal figures turn down the throne and go on farming.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Taoism older than Confucianism?
As datable traditions, no. Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE, and the oldest known manuscripts of the Daodejing, the bamboo slips excavated at Guodian, date to roughly 300 BCE. Nothing datable places it earlier, and the manuscript and quotation evidence sits in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Tradition holds that Laozi was Confucius's elder and once lectured him, and that story is examined in Tao Te Ching: What It Teaches and How to Read It. Organized Daoist religion is later still, beginning in 142 CE.
Which is easier for a Westerner to start with, Confucianism or Taoism?
Taoism is far easier to start with and Confucianism is more rewarding once started. The Daodejing runs to about five thousand characters and is aphoristic, which is why it travels well and why English has accumulated several hundred published translations of it. The Analects assumes a world of ritual roles, obscure disciples and Zhou history, and it reads as a pile of fragments until a commentary supplies the setting. Start with the Daodejing, then read the Analects with an annotated translation.
What is the Analects and is it worth reading?
The Analects, Lunyu in Chinese, is a compilation of roughly five hundred short passages in twenty books, recording exchanges between Confucius and his students and assembled after his death. It is worth reading, and it is short enough to finish in an afternoon, but read it with notes. Edward Slingerland's translation supplies traditional commentary alongside the text, D. C. Lau's Penguin version is the plain scholarly standard, and Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont translate the vocabulary with deliberate strangeness to slow the reader down.
What did Zhuangzi say about Confucius?
The Zhuangzi puts Confucius on stage repeatedly and treats him two ways. Sometimes he is the butt of the joke, a busybody peddling humaneness to people who need nothing. Sometimes he is the mouthpiece for Daoist teaching, instructing Yan Hui in fasting of the mind and then, in another chapter, asking to become Yan Hui's follower after the student describes sitting and forgetting. The savage attack in the Robber Zhi chapter comes from a later stratum of the book, not from Zhuang Zhou's own hand.
Is Confucianism still practiced in China today?
Yes, in several forms that look nothing like church membership. Family obligation, ancestor observance and the value placed on education carry Confucian assumptions across the Chinese-speaking world. The state has moved from the anti-Confucius campaigns of the 1970s to active promotion, restoring the temple complex at Qufu and funding academies and classics programs. Ceremonies honoring Confucius continue at the Sungkyunkwan shrine in Seoul and at temples across Taiwan, where September 28 is both his traditional birthday and Teachers' Day. Tu Weiming, who taught at Harvard for decades before moving to Peking University, has spent a career arguing that Confucianism is a living philosophy rather than a museum exhibit.
Where does Buddhism fit alongside Confucianism and Taoism?
Buddhism arrived from India through Central Asia during the Han dynasty and became the third of the three teachings. Early translators borrowed Daoist vocabulary to render Buddhist terms, a practice called geyi, matching concepts, which produced lasting confusion and lasting fusion. Chan Buddhism, later Zen in Japan, absorbed a great deal of Zhuangzi's sensibility. Confucian thinkers of the Song dynasty built their metaphysics partly in response to Buddhist arguments while attacking Buddhism for abandoning family obligations.
What is a junzi in Confucianism?
A junzi is the exemplary person Confucian cultivation aims at, translated variously as gentleman, superior person or exemplary person. The word originally meant a ruler's son and marked birth. Confucius kept the term and changed the criterion to conduct, so that a commoner could be a junzi and a duke might not be. Its opposite is the xiaoren, the small or petty person. The Analects says the junzi seeks the fault in himself while the petty person looks for it in others, and that he harmonizes without merely conforming.
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