Vegetarianism. Taoist religious orders often promote a vegetarian diet in order to minimize harm to other sentient life. Taoist levels of dietary restriction, however, are varied.

As Taoism took root, Laozi was worshipped as a god. Belief in the revelation of the Tao from the divine Laozi resulted in the formation of the Way of the Celestial Masters, the first organized religious Taoist sect. In later mature Taoist tradition, Laozi came to be seen as a personification of the Tao.

Lao Tzu is believed to have been a Chinese philosopher (a person who seeks to answer questions about humans and their place in the universe) and the accepted author of the Tao te ching, the main text of Taoist thought. He is considered the father of Chinese Taoism (a philosophy that advocates living a simple life).

Taoism has never been a unified religion, and has constantly consisted of a combination of teachings based on a variety of original revelations. Within the Daoist tradition, one can distinguish three types of organization and practice: literati, communal, and self-cultivation.

One of the main ideas of Taoism is the belief in balancing forces, or yin and yang. These ideas represent matching pairs, such as light and dark, hot and cold, action and inaction, which work together toward a universal whole.

The Four Noble Truths comprise the essence of Buddha’s teachings, though they leave much left unexplained. They are the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering.

For 49 days, he sat beneath a fig tree and then he arose enlightened. Siddartha became the Buddha, the enlightened one, and the fig tree became the Bodhi tree, the tree of enlightenment. The Bodhi tree has come to represent a number of symbols in Buddhism. The tree is associated with the path to enlightenment.

The fundamental principles of Mahāyāna doctrine were based on the possibility of universal liberation from suffering for all beings (hence the “Great Vehicle”) and the existence of buddhas and bodhisattvas embodying Buddha Nature.

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