Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Taoism and Early Chinese Civilization

The article from the New York Times, called Reconstruction Taoism's Transformation in China, helps advocate the basic rules and information about Taoism. This knowledge I have gained about Taoism can help me understand more about early Chinese civilizations. Taoism is a philosophy that is associated with the common expression, "go with the flow." However, not many people follow the philosophy. Historians have pieced together ancient China primarily with texts. The Taoist religious texts are found in a huge collection called the Taoist canon. However, up until a fairly recent date, it has just been considered a big mess. It was unable to date, so you couldn't truly use it to supply knowledge about ancient China. Now, this has changed. We have the rock of Kristofer Schipper and Francsiscus Verellen that gives a date for every document. The Taoist Canon provides an aspect  of what the ancient Chinese society was like. The search for deepening our knowledge about ancient China is similar to the search that was done to find out more about early Christianity. In both cases, there are very little amounts of physical evidence. We know that the Chinese never had any other form of a political leader other than an emperor. However, the early history of Taoism shows something different. It was a theocracy based around "tianishi", which means celestial matters. The goal of the celestial matters was to achieve "great peace" which would include each individual being treated justly. However, the founder, Zhang Daoling never took the title of an emperor.

No comments:

Post a Comment