The choice between Confucianism and Taoism tells you everything about a person

The choice between Confucianism and Taoism tells you everything about a person.

suppose one rejects both in favor of Western thought?

Buddhism is more pragmatic and transcendental

Confucianism is why the Chinese have no souls. Or it was because the Chinese have no souls, that they invented Confucianism, it goes both ways. Either way, no western man should ever have an interest in that abomination.

Taosim can be redeemable.

it's a western idea that one must choose between ideologies that compete like piglets scrambling for the mother's teat.

In china one can live their life incorporating Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism seamlessly.

Oriental 'philosophy' is nothing but mystical gibberish and statist apologetics. China never got to the enlightenment

>Confucianism
>respect for order above anything else
>ancestor worship
>fatalism of the most stultifying kind
Spooky as fuck.

Even Hinduism is better than that. Don't know much about Taoism.

Confucianism is what happens to your civilization if you let an autistic STEM tier obsession on "contreeb00tin 2 societee" run your world. On the importance of doing your part, rituals for the sake of rituals, fighting 'moral decay' because reasons.
Truly, a Confucian texts is less shitpost tier "stop degeneracy". I bet Confucius, if he lived today, would be some Sargon of Akkad vlogger.

Taoism is more sensible. It can be used either for anarchistic resistance ( like Bao Jingyan ) or to maintain the status quo ( Guo Xiang ).
It's a rich philosophy. Sadly, not even Chinese people know what Taoism entails anymore. They think it's superstitious spellcasting.

That's mostly a result of a 1000+ years of Neoconfucianism. Which applied a strategy of liquefying the traditions within China in order to serve the Confucian cause.

During the Warring States, you definitely had clear and distinct schools which definitely disagreed and stood in opposition to one another.

interesting, can you recommend me a book for more information about this?

Taoism was wasted on the chinese, it achieved its highest expression in Japan where it fused with various Buddhist traditions.

Confucianism is just dull moralism and worship of authority for its own sake, yet it still lets peasant practice their primitive witchcraft freely. It's philosophy for a termite mound.

>STEM tier obsession on "contreeb00tin 2 societee"
>being this assblasted about majoring in coffee serving techniques
Try actually contributing to society :^)

BTFO!!!!

>Taoism was wasted on the chinese

A surface look on history would agree with you on that. But it still had a millennium long presence in the highest echelons of Chinese society from Han 'till Tang times. So to go with "Chinese genes do not favor wu wei" would be kinda silly. Especially when the world of artists pulled a lot of inspiration from Taoist texts, even in the most conservative of Confucian times.

One could say that the continuous stress outsiders put on Chinese society ( especially after the Tang ) caused a less favorable atittude towards the Taoist approach to ethics and metaphysics. Same happened with Buddhism. It got very popular during Tang times, but then declined, never to really reach the same height again.
The reason for the iron fisted hold on Chinese society by Confucianism is still up for debate. But reading the Confucianists themselves around that era, you do get a sense of them rebuilding after yet another horde leaving and them basically saying "ok, party is over, let's Make Zhong Guo Great Again."

I'm Dutch, so I read a bunch of Dutch scholars writing on this very specific subject. Jan De Meyer in particular. But a good Anglo take on this case would be "Genealogy of the way: the construction and uses of the Confucian tradition in late imperial China." by Thomas Wilson

dank je

MONGOLS KEEP INVADING OUR LAND! VERY BAD PEOPLE! TANG COULDNT KEEP THEM OUT! SAD! NOT HAPPENING UNDER MY HEAVENLY MANDATE! 中国 FIRST

I don't think that the Chinese are "genetically unfit" for Taoism, but it doesn't seems to me it left much of a trace in China after it's millennia long period of influence ended, much like Buddhism for that matter. I'm not very well-read on China, so I might be wrong, or it might be the case in general for religions in China, but it seems to me that these traditions survived better in other parts of the Sinosphere than in China itself, where Confucianism has a strong domestic hold, but not much outside influence, excluding maybe Korea.

Tao Te Ching is the best goddamnest motherfucking shit ever
it makes my peepee so hard

Japan is a clear example of Chinese culture surviving abroad. Ironically, the modern era sees the same thing again. There's more traditional Chinese culture to be found in the SAR's and Taiwan than on the mainland ( thanks to * sniff * communism ).
Even some esoteric Buddhist schools survived in Japan, up until this day, which died a long time ago in China during the middle ages.

But if you want to look for a country where Confucianism had a suffocating tight grip on society, don't look at China, but at Korea. It even led to outright persecutions of buddhists.
And the perfectionism of Koreans has a very clear Neoconfucian origin. So when you see Kpop's plastic surgery dolls, you see Confucius.

>So when you see Kpop's plastic surgery dolls, you see Confucius.
and not just South Korea, but also it's Northern sibling.
The DPRK is what happens when you try to apply the tenets of 1984 into a Confucian framework and pass it off as Communism

>So when you see Kpop's plastic surgery dolls, you see Confucius.

Not sure how my dick feels about this

It's interesting how many Koreans are Christian nowadays. Turns out that Confucians are very welcoming to fire-and-brimstone neurotic American Protestantism.
Kim Il-sung himself was from a Presbyterian family

next time you jack off to kpop idols, remember you are actually jacking off to this, pal

They are. See the Taiping Rebellion. Turned many Confucianists into a millenerian death cult overnight. And many of the founding fathers of the Republic of China were Christians.

>Turned into a millenerian death cult overnight

Millenarian death cults seem like a recurring chinese tradition. Maybe that's why the government was so afraid of the Falun Gong, nobody does mass hysteria like them ching chongs

The Jesuits preceded you in that observation. They saw Chinese society at the time with its Confucianism as ripe for the soul harvesting.

But the Pope was a bit too much on the sperg spectrum and couldn't tolerate the ancestor worship part of the syncretic solution.

I'm expecting Nero-tier persecutions of Christians in the coming decades. The increase of the numbers of Christians within China is worrisome, because of well endowed ESL 'teachers' bringing their Christian values with them.

I'm not sure the Pope not wanting to convert them was a bad idea. It was was honestly better off leaving them for future American missionaries.

The Catholics had a shot in Japan which in my opinion would have went better than in China or Korea, but we all already know how that went for the Church.