• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Is Confusianism separate from Taoism

angrymoose

angrymoose
I confess total ignorance about confusius.

I've been told by a Taoist master that considering Confusism as separaate from Taoism is a western simplification.

What are your thoughts on this?

Please share.

Forgive my ignorance about Confusius.
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
Generally speaking, many religions can and are practiced together due to their own characteristics and cultural circunstances. There is nothing particularly strange about that, either.
 

angrymoose

angrymoose
Generally speaking, many religions can and are practiced together due to their own characteristics and cultural circunstances. There is nothing particularly strange about that, either.

The claim was that the separation between the traditions was artificial and that it happened centuries after the works were created.

I'm not sure. I'm ignorant about Confusiusm.
 

wmjbyatt

Lunatic from birth
Well, the claims is not exactly artificial at the level of actively entertained thought. There were, within just a few generations of Confucius and Lao-Tzu, very precise philosophical arguments between the disciples of Confucius and the disciples of Lao-Tzu. Confucius's own grandson became Taoist and rejected many Confucian notions.

In practice, however, (that is, in the day-to-day lives of the Chinese people [which notion is itself a dramatic oversimplification of the ethnic and national identities, historically]) Confucian thought and Taoist thought coexisted quite peacefully in the Chinese folk religion, getting good and mixed in with a lot of other influences.

Furthermore, as philosophical systems the two are not incompatible, even at the level of conscious discourse. Confucianism and Taoism are predicated on EXTREMELY similar cosmologies: it's fair to say that both Confucius and Lao-Tzu believed the world to be eternal in both directions, they both had a notion of the universe as unfolding itself through an unidentifiable and inexpressible primitive power/force/firmament kind of thing (what Lao-Tzu called "Tao"), they both believed that individual humans were best served when operating a harmonious relationship with the world around them.

The primary difference is that Lao-Tzu believed (to slightly oversimplify) that organized society was itself a disharmonious system that, under ordinarily experienced circumstances, was not in keeping with the Tao. Thus, Lao-Tzu believed that we should strive for a state of harmony with NATURE as it is usually understood: the trees and rocks and stuff. Confucius, on the other hand, was much more concerned with the role and place of the individual in society. I don't believe he had much of an opinion on the global relationship between society and nature, and he thus thought that man, being placed in society, should strive for harmony within that society.

This difference leads to some explosive ethical differences: Taoism reeks of anarchism, whilst Confucius actively and explicitly taught conformity to authority. Both, however, recognized the values of mindfulness, non-ego, and non-attachment. Confucius even spoke about the beauty of wu-wei, an iconically Taoist idea: in the "Analects," Confucius said that the greatest Emperor of all time did nothing but sat and faced South, and thus his rule was perfect (he even actually used the words "wu wei" in that section, to my understanding).

Anyway, the point of all this is that the separation is, like all separations, not entirely clear-cut, and the two doctrines don't HAVE to be separate. The separation, however, is not "artificial," and there was real dispute between real adherents of the schools very rapidly in their development.
 

Leftimies

Dwelling in the Principle
To me, sometimes it feels like the two are different sides of the same coin. And that coin is to be called Shenism. Just kidding XD

No, but seriously, all the three are connected and closely related. I think that as a humanist who trusts in just order, Confucianism is the way to go. However, Heaven worship and Shangdi (THE Key point of Confucian religious side) is something that exists within Taoism too. Spirits, such as the Kuei (a Taoist concept of vengeful spirit/demon associated with Yin side of business) can be found from Confucian thought as well, and, to hold great importance there.
So maybe not separate after all. But yeah, they kinda are...

Now that I look back on it, I proved to be completely useless X(
 
Top