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The Tacit Understanding Between the Ancient Religions of the West and the Ancient Cultures of China
- 1 University of Toronto, Toronto, M5S 1A4, Canada
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Abstract
This work discusses Maimonides’s and Lao Tzu’s understanding of God/Tao. Maimonides is a leading figure in Jewish philosophy that takes a rather different analytical approach to the Torah from his predecessors. Instead of directly taking Torah and related religious books as guidance, Maimonides believes the right way to interpret Torah is to treat the stories in Torah as metaphors and use wisdom given by God to dig out the meaning behind the metaphor. Differently, Lao Tzu does not belong to any religion, while Lao Tzu found his only philosophy of how to live a better life by avoiding possible harm. After Lao Tzu’s analysis of the change of the matter and the observation of the relationships between matters… Lao Tzu has written his famous work – Tao Te Qing. In this book, he tries to teach people the philosophy of Tao to make them live better. By comparing Maimonides and Lao Tzu, I find that there are many similarities between Lao Tzu and Maimonides’s understanding of the transcendent being despite their rather different backgrounds. This essay will focus on three areas: their theories on the creation of the creatures and the inexpressible feature of God/ Tao, and the emotionless nature of God/ Tao.
Keywords
Maimonides, Jewish philosophy, Religion, Taoism, Philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Qing
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Cite this article
Xue,Y. (2023). The Tacit Understanding Between the Ancient Religions of the West and the Ancient Cultures of China. Communications in Humanities Research,4,13-20.
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Volume title: Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies (ICIHCS 2022), Part 2
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