Ideas & Ways of Taoism & Neo-Confucianism

Taoism is associated with the life and writings of Laotse, born 571 B.C. (Yutang 6), although the spiritual thought expressed in Tao appears to have preexisted its written form by many years (Runes 668). Its fundamental metaphysical principle is that reality is unstable and elusive, or in a constant state of change and flux. Such a concept of reality has the effect of organizing the physical universe, even though that universe eludes understanding.

"We have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it." What the electron is doing inside the atom is summarized in the following line: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." Somewhere in the quantum of light, the corpuscular and the non-corpuscular meet and confuse and exasperate the investigator of truth (Yutang 16).

To the degree a perpetually changing reality cannot be explained, the universe seems unapproachable except mystically. But Yutang implies that there is some

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n a linear continuum of development, reflecting influences from Taoism, Buddhism (especially from its school of Ch'anism ), and Confucianism itself. According to Feng, these three lines of thought "were heterogeneous and even in many respects contradictory. Hence it took time for philosophers to make a unity out of them, especially since this unity was not simply an eclecticism, but a genuine system forming a homogeneous whole. Thus there are both similarities and differences between Taoist and Neo-Confucian cosmology, as we shall shortly see. The differences that are identifiable appear to spring from different conceptualizations of the nature of reality and the nature of human experience of the physical universe. To see how this comes about, it is useful to look at how Neo-Confucianism evolved. One feature of the evolution is Taoism, and according to Overmyer (315ff), the consensus of current scholarship is that Taoism is indigenous to China. He suggests as well that it accounts for certain of the religious dimensions of Confucianism, which began to flourish in China in the early fifth century B.C. Confucianism is characterized by a rationalistic ethos associated with "reciprocity in man's relations with his fellow man . . . sin
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Nature Laotse, Taoism Waley, Confucianism Taoism, Buddhism Taoism, Buddhism Chinese, Indeed Laotse, BC Yutang, Feng Chou, Plato Runes, Laotse Chuangtse, _ _, _ _ _, yin yang, ___ ___, ___ _ _, _ ___, _ _ ___, ___ _, supreme ultimate, taoism neo-confucianism, treasury philosophy, philosophical library 1955, _ ___ ___, york philosophical, physical universe,
Approximate Word count = 3517
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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