01:840:211 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Tao Te Ching, Sima Qian, Taoism
Document Summary
Appears for the first time in 19th century - european writings about china. This english term - applied to a set of religious actors, ideas, and practices that in premodern china were variously referred to as daojia ( specialists in/school of the. Dao ), daojiao ( teaching of the dao ), and daoshu ( methods of the dao ) Term refers to the harmonious sociopolitical order of the ancient sage-kings, which was understood to represent the way of heaven on earth. Confucians - kongzi and mengzi argued that through the cultivation of inherent (essential/innate) potential virtue, aided by the rule of a benevolent king, humans could return to and again realize this heavenly dao. Sometime around the 3rd century bce, another work on the dao, offering a rather different perspective, was written - dao de jing (ddj) - and attributed to an author named laozi.
