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Difference Between Lao Tzu And Confucius

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The Philosopher’s Struggle
In the world today, knowledge is a very valuable thing. The world can be a scary place, and without knowing how to be happy and live in harmony with others, it can be hard to survive. Luckily, there are those who have given us advice and instruction on how to live, and who have told us the secrets to earthly happiness. One would probably suspect they are politicians or millionaires or movie stars, but they aren’t. In fact, they lived around fifteen hundred years ago, in China. Their names were Lao Tzu and Confucius, and they were Chinese philosophers.
Lao Tzu is better known as the founder of the religion and philosophy Taoism, which has a large following in China and some other parts of the world. Confucius was another philosopher who lived around the same time as Lao Tzu. He is also the founder of Confucianism, one of the better-known philosophies around the world.
In the world of Chinese philosophy, one cannot find better words than those spoken by Lao Tzu or Confucius. While they seem similar, they are indeed different in many ways.
Lao Tzu was a philosopher who lived around 600 B.C. According to Langely (2004):
Lao-tzu lived in central China in the 6th century BCE, at the same time as Confucius, who is said to have visited him as a young man. Lao-tzu worked as keeper of archives for the Chou dynasty. In later life, tired of Chou corruption, he tried to flee to Tibet. But he was stopped at the border and refused permission to leave unless he left behind a record of his teachings. In three days he …show more content…

Confucius was born around the year 551 B.C., and he was a thinker, politician, and philosopher, and also the founder of the Ru school of Chinese thought. Fung Yu-lan, one of the greatest authorities on the history of Chinese thought and philosophy, compares his (Confucius’) influence to be a parallel to Socrates’ in the West (Riegel, 2013,

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