Different cultures produce their own particular way of structuring the world they see around them. They use religion and ritual to explain, to gain control, and to express their own sense of connectedness to their environment. Pre-scientific societies develop their own mythologies to explain the origin of the universe and of human life. A comparison of three such societies shows how varied these ideas can be, with reference to the Maya, the ancient Chinese, and the Indians of the American southwest.
The New Text School in China was dominant throughout most of the Former Han dynasty and was given its name only later in apposition to the Old Text school, which rose to prominence in the time of Christ and gained ascendance through the Later Han dynasty. By "old" text the name means that the work was written in the archaic and obsolete script of the Chou dynasty, while the New Text was written in the newer form of scripts then in use. There were wide ideological differences between the two schools:
Textually speaking, the New Text school's version of the classics is generally considered more authentic than that of the Old Text school. Ideologically speaking, however, the New Text school tended toward various superstitious excesses (such as the belief that Confucius was a supernatural being) which were shunned by the more rationalistic and sober minded Old Text school.
The important concepts embodied in the New Text school include elements of Chinese cosmology and the traditions of the yang and the yin and the Five Elements. These have been important in Chinese philosophy ever since and have spawned other schools of thought related to the concepts as delineated in the New Text school. The concepts of Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy are complex and difficult to grasp, and they are said to be indefinable in the strictest sense because they are such all-embracing conceptions. The terms are used to refer to the two comp...