Laozi In Daodejing Analysis

Moral virtue and the purpose of life have been the theme of ancient philosophical writings and the center of life debates, with a diversity of perspectives that reflect time and culture. The earliest great thinkers include Kong Qiu 孔丘, who is more commonly referred to as Confucius; and Daoist sage, Lao Tzu 老子, commonly referred to as the Daodejing (Penny & Ryden, 2008). Here, intellect and logic combined to produce profound, guiding principles that have expanded beyond the Asian culture and remained as models of wisdom in disciplines of thought, behavior, and purpose throughout time. The Goudian Laozi, dated back to the fourth century, contained bamboo slips of texts from both Confucius and Dao (Allen et al 2000). Penny & Ryden’s (2005) translation of Laozi in Daodejing provides a simpler way to understand the classical language and the meaning of the context. This paper will compare and contrast the ideologies and …show more content…
Ancient Asian artifacts, such as the Goudian, show evidence of such establishments by Chinese authors (Allen, Williams, & Laozi, 2000). In 1973, archaeologists discovered two copies of the Laozi in a library of texts inside a Mawangdui, South-Central China tomb that had been sealed in 168 B.C. (Henricks, 2000). Based upon the biography of Tao Tzu, that was written by Sima Qian, the entire book of the Tao Te Ching was written by Tao Tzu. A medieval copy of the Analects of Confucius was discovered in an archaeological dig in the Chinese Dunhang, and was dated at 890 CE (Eno, 2015). The Confucian approach to defining human culture is congruent with that of the Dao, in that a distinction exists between the natural world and social world and that harmony should be sought in both