Daoism Essay

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The concept of Dao is one of the central concepts in Chinese philosophy. Term Dao means "the Way", or "Harmony". Daoism is not a movement or religion, but it is a normative, practical concept, it is a way or guide to action to achieve a harmony. Daoism is associated with Laozi, which means "old master", who was the teacher of Confucius, the greatest thinker of ancient China. There are 3 steps in Daoism. The first, Daoism 1.0 or primitivism. The concept of Daoism 1.0 is that Dao can only exist in nature, outside of "manmade" civilization, and can only be achieved by turning back to nature. It proclaims being natural and rejects any human-made environments. The goal of primitivism is to achieve harmony by giving up everything manmade because anything unnatural, manmade creates constraints for achieving harmony. …show more content…

Confucius said that all people have an instinct for virtue. People are not struggling to be moral, morality is a natural feature of people. All people have moral seeds, they just need moral education to let seeds sprout and grow up. One of the major Daoist virtue is ziran which is naturalness and spontaneity. Ziran is a state where people are in touch with nature and follow their basic nature. According to Daoism 2.0, the biggest problems that people have created and the biggest constraint on the way to achieving ziran is a language. It teaches that in order to conceive the world, people need to go back to nature, to abandon stereotypes which distance us from a natural vision of life. Language is not naturally occurred and thus it can damage people's nature. By speaking up words, people reduce their ability of intuition, and by naming things, people create standards. Since language is unnatural, it gives people tools that do not exist in nature, and it creates a harm for people because in order to find the way to harmony people need to be

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