Paragraph: (History-Anthropology/oanc-China-History-3.txt)
Sent 1: In the rest of the world, China's supreme sage, Kongfuzi (K'ung Fu-tzu), is better known by the romanized name "Confucius." He was born in 551 b.c.
Sent 2: in what is now Shandong Province in eastern China.
Sent 3: So profound was his influence that eleven Chinese emperors made pilgrimages to the birthplace of the Great Teacher.
Sent 4: You, too, can pay your respects at the vast temple raised on the site of his home in the small town of Qufu (Chufu), and at his tomb in the woods just to the north.
Sent 5: The classics of Confucius, while seldom addressing spiritual and metaphysical matters, set standards for social and political conduct that still underlie many of the Chinese ways of doing and perceiving.
Sent 6: Confucius laid great stress on the proper and harmonious relationships between ruler and subject, parent and child, teacher and student, the individual and the state.
Sent 7: These relationships were deemed to be hierarchical and dictatorial.
Sent 8: If the order was disturbed, dire consequences inevitably resulted.
Sent 9: The son who disobeyed the father would bring disaster upon himself and his family, just as the emperor who defied the "mandate of heaven" or ignored the good of the empire brought ruin upon the nation.
Sent 10: Over the centuries Confucius has suffered more changes of fortune than probably any other philosopher.
Sent 11: Honored soon after his death as the greatest of scholars, he was later revered as semi-divine; you can still visit temples to Confucius in many Chinese cities.
Sent 12: During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), however, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary force.
Sent 13: It was only after the death of Chairman Mao (1976) and the opening of China to the outside world under more progressive reformers that Confucius, too, was "rehabilitated." Unlike Confucius, about whose life many specific and even colorful details are known, the philosopher Laozi (Lao Tse or Lao-Tzu) is an enigma.
Sent 14: Estimates of his date of birth vary by well over a century.
Sent 15: One legend even says he taught the young Confucius.
Sent 16: Laozi is immortalized by his book of thoughts on man, nature, and the universe, Daodejing ("The Way and Its Power"), which became the major text of China's greatest indigenous religion, Daoism (Taoism).
Sent 17: With its emphasis on nature, intuition, the individual, paradox ("The knowledge which is not knowledge"), and the cosmic flow known as "The Way," Daoism became the religion of artists and philosophers.
Sent 18: After the death of Confucius, the Zhou Dynasty entered a period of strife known as the "Warring States" period (475–221 b.c.).