Confucianism: The Role Of Asian Religions In East Asia

East Asian religions, also known as Taoist religions, refer to the religions and philosophies that are dominant in the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese regions and any other places near them. Taoism is the root of all these religions, teaching that nature is the greatest teacher and that everything has a flow and a way. Confucianism teaches that without education and social order there can be no religion, and the act of learning is the religious experience. Buddhism taught that craving, jealously, and gluttony will only bring chaos and that good deeds will bring a good life and a good next life. China,
The story of Buddhism begins with a young prince named Siddhartha Gautama who grew in a large wealthy palace shielded from the pain and chaos in the world. This was until he left the palace and witnessed a dying man a sick man and a dead man once he returned to the palace young Siddhartha could never see the palace in the same way. Once he was old enough he left the palace in the dead of the night to try and find a way out of this endless cycle of death and suffering. For many years he tried extremes to try and find this eternal truth eating only one grain of rice a day, eating as much as he could and fasting for days(Howley 8). One day after all the other practices had failed he sat under the Bodhi tree and meditated until he found the answer to the end of human suffering. He then told his first sermon to his new disciples revealing the eight fold path and the four noble truths, the end to the eternal cycle of ignorance and suffering. Siddhartha from this point on was called The Buddha or “The Enlightened One” the Sage of the Sakya clan. The birthplace of Buddhism was in India and was brought to China by the Silk Road and over time in Asia the religion became fused with local folk religions adding Gods, colorful Llamas (the equivalent to Catholic Saints) and vengeful demons (Howley 10). Over time the religion split into different sects of the same religion according to region. All three of these religions blended and formed the complex thoughts and morals of Eastern Asia. Confucianism and Taoism lived in peace and complimented each other like two sides of the brain due to the fact that Confucianism dealt with social matters while Taoism deals with the meaning of it all. The average man would read the works of Confucius as a normal working man. Then as individual grew older he could ponder the meaning of “The