| A | B |
|---|
| Cosmic Unity | Chinese understanding that all things are interrelated and interdependent. Human responsibility entails how to live in harmony and balance with all things in order to maintain this cosmic unity. |
| Ancestor Worship | Traditional Chinese understanding that through the worship of one's ancestors, one helps to maintain cosmic unity. Attending to the welfare of one's ancestors brings their blessings to family & community, while neglecting the ancestors is said to bring misfortune & disharmony. |
| Qing Ming | Traditional Chinese festival held 106 days after the winter solstice, at the beginning of spring, for families to honor their ancestors. The whole family gathers at the gravesite of their ancestors to sweep the gravesite and tend to its care, offer prayers and incense, and have a picnic to renew their ties with the past and with each other. |
| Yin and Yang | Two dynamic, interrelated forces (known as complimentary opposites) that comprise all things. Everything is said to exist as a combination of these two forces, Yin is feminine, moist, supple, the shadowed side of a mountain, winter; yang is masculine, dry rigid, the sunlit side of a mountain, summer. |
| Confucius | Historical person (552 - 479 BCE) whose teachings eventually influenced all of east Asia. He sought to develop an ethical system of government in order to maintain a virtuous society. He believed that virtue and ethical conduct can be taught and so stressed education as a means to a just, ordered, harmonious society. |
| Filial piety | Confucian idea of respect and obligation that children should have towards parents and people in subordinate positions should have to people in senior or superior positions |
| The Five Relationships | Confucian model of the ideal social relationships, related to his ideas of reciprocity and filial piety. |
| The Tao | The way of all things; said to be "the unnameable," "the eternally real," "the inexhaustible source and order of the universe." |
| Lau Tzu | Legendary founder of Taoism. The name Lao Tzu can mean "Old Man" or "Old Baby." The TAo Te Ching is attributed to him. |
| P'u | Literally, "wood-not-cut" usually translated as the Uncarved Block. Taoist understanding that "things in their original simplicity contain their natural ower.. that is easily ... lost when that simplicity is changed." |
| Wu Wei | Actionless action; "going with the flow" of things. |
