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The Basic Principles Of Ancient Chinese Philosophy

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The Chinese region is profound and quite extensive. In Chinese culture and history, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism seem to blend together. In the Shang Dynasty around 2000 BC, the people of China were polytheistic, worshipping many gods at a time. People of this time worshipped their own ancestors as gods, as they believed they became like gods after dying. The basic principles of ancient Chinese philosophy consisted of five features: spiritual existence, morality, harmony, intuition, and practice. The philosophies before the Qin era were marked by various ancient philosophical views. Most influential of these views were those of Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism, and Mohism. According to Laurence Thompson, author of Chinese Religion: An Introduction:
In China, people did not belong to an institutionalized sect, nor did their religious life have anything to do with signing articles of faint. Religion in China was so woven into the broad fabric of family and social life that there was not even a special word for it until modern times, when one was coined to match the Western term. (Thompson 1)
Thus, Chinese religious culture is a profound and deeply intricate part of Chinese life even today. Most of China’s ancient beliefs still exist today and, because of it’s great size and population, subsequently has a larger impact on the modern world than one might think.
Although ancient Chinese philosophers studied different kinds of philosophical issues based on experience and

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