WORLD RELIGIONS

Detailed explanation-1: -Introduction to Daoism. The Chinese word dao means a way or a path. Confucians used the term dao to speak of the way human beings ought to behave in society. In other words, dao, for them, was an ethical or moral way.

Detailed explanation-2: -Daoism taught that people gained happiness and peace by living in harmony, or agreement, with the way of nature. To the Daoists, nature is full of opposites, like life and death or light and darkness. True harmony comes from balancing the opposite forces of nature called yin and yang.

Detailed explanation-3: -The important Taoist principles are inaction, simplicity and living in harmony with nature.

Detailed explanation-4: -An essential characteristic that governs the Dao is spontaneity (ziran), the what-is-so-of-itself, the self-so, the unconditioned. The Dao, in turn, governs the cosmos: “The ways of heaven are conditioned by those of the Dao, and the ways of Dao by the Self-so.”