Neo-Confucianism
BY IVEYA SLAVOVA
Neo-Confucianism was created because Taoism and Buddhism started challenging the main religion which was Confucianism. Confucian scholars met up to discuss a way to fix this problem. They made a new religion called Neo-Confucianism which is a combination of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. This started in the Tang and Song Dynasty. Two of most important people that are related with Neo-Confucianism are Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi (as shown below). Confucians took principles such as “humaneness”, “filial piety”, and “ritual” from Confucianism. From Taoism they took more abstract ideas such as “the Way” (Tao) and they also took an abundant amount of things from Buddhism. Neo-Confucianism wanted harmony. They wanted to uncover “pattern” of life and they believed life, destiny, nature, and existence in general is all some sort of pattern that can be discovered if examined closely.