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The Chinese word Tao (pronounced "DOA") means a way or a path. Confucians used the term Tao to speak of the way human beings ought to behave in society.
In other words, Tao, for them, was an ethical or moral way.
From the point of view of Taoism, however, the Confucian concept of Tao was too limited.
Taoists preferred to understand the Tao as the Way of Nature as a whole.
They believed that Confucians, by insisting on a purely human Way, exaggerated the importance of man and failed to pay attention to the lessons which Nature has to offer about time and change, gain and loss, the useful and the useless.
What Confucians regarded as essential to being human - the practice of ritual - the Taoists saw as just so much contrivance and arrogant insistence on the man-made a opposed to the natural.
They advocated that, rather than dwelling on the practice of ritual, each individual should cultivate his own Te, the virtue or power that is received from the Tao.
In addition to being unsympathetic to the Confucian idea of ritual, the Taoists tended also to be mistrustful of that other great human invention, language.
This was perhaps because they realized that all those who speak are locked in time and confined to a particular human identity. What was needed, from their point of view, was not logical argument or the arts of persuasion, but quiet atonement to the rhythms and cycles of nature and to the process of change.
Now...you summaries the above differences to be your answers!
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Due tomorrow! please answer! Confucianism and Taoism differences ?
