How is taoism similar to buddhism

Unlike it, though, Buddhism rejects ritual and the caste system. Confucius, or K'ung Futzu, lived at the same time as the Buddha. Confucianism's main goal is the attainment of inner harmony with nature. This includes the veneration of ancestors. Early on, the ruling classes of China widely embraced Confucianism.

Taoism shares similar principles with Confucianism. While some Chinese still practice Confucianism and Taoism, these religions have lost much of their impetus due to resistance from today's Communist government. Previous Judaism Christianity and Islam. In part, this strategy allowed us to embrace the complexity of those ideologies and their associated teachings.

However, this also allowed for the creation of a scale that could be sensitive to individual differences. Furthermore, even for individuals that have strongly internalized most of the tenets of a specific ideology like Confucianism, individual tenets might show stronger or weaker links within specific interpersonal relationships e. For example, the Confucianism tenets of interpersonal harmony avoiding conflict with others by suppressing one's feelings and human heartedness striving to be kind and loving to others are both drawn from the same ideology.

However, it is quite possible they could have different impacts, with the restrictive tenet of interpersonal harmony being associated with lower well-being and the empowering tenet of human heartedness being associated with greater well-being. Thus, by creating a scale comprehensively assessing as many as 20 distinct subscales, the TTEA inventory would offer researchers with up to 20 unique constructs to help model the complexity of cultural differences in cross-cultural studies.

As scales assessing Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are only just beginning to emerge within the literature, the exact nature of the links between these ideologies and individual functioning or individual well-being remain less clear. This is particularly true for the individual tenets of these various ideologies.

However, given the rigid social constraints associated with Confucianism, we anticipated that endorsement of the more restrictive and self-denying tenets of Confucianism would be associated with higher levels of collectivism, filial piety, and face concerns and with lower levels of well-being.

As Buddhist teaching promote the practice of decentering from suffering, we anticipated that endorsement of Buddhist beliefs might be associated with higher levels of well-being e. Similarly, as Taoist teachings emphasize embracing the cyclic nature of life, endorsement of Taoist beliefs might also be associated with greater peace of mind, life satisfaction, and non-reactivity. To accomplish the goals just outlined, an item pool of items was created in English from 71 items drawn from eight existing measures and 51 items developed by the authors to enrich and diversify the conceptual content of the pool—ensuring that each proposed tenet was represented by multiple items.

That pool of items along with all study materials was translated and back-translated into Japanese, traditional Mandarin, and simplified Mandarin. Four studies were then conducted—one in each language—yielding five culturally distinct samples: people from China, people from Japan, people from Taiwan, Asian Americans, and White Americans. We then used exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, along with correlational analyses and measurement invariance analyses to develop and validate the item Three Teachings of East Asia TTEA Inventory across those cultural groups.

For Asian Americans, Although significant differences emerged across the five cultural groups examined, those differences were fairly modest. The demographics presented across the samples suggest that the studies were successful in recruiting a diverse array of individuals from each of those countries.

The studies and all of their associated materials were evaluated and approved by a university institutional review board to ensure adherence to ethical standards for human subjects research. The survey was presented online using the surveygizmo platform and the first page of the survey allowed respondents to select the language in which the survey would be presented. The respondents were then presented with information sheets in their chosen language to obtain informed consent prior to providing any survey responses.

Participants has to be at least 18 years of age to participate to ensure they could provide their own consent. Much of the recruitment was conducted with crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon. The sample of individuals living in the US was recruited from Amazon.

As an equivalent crowdsourcing platform was not available in Taiwan, the vast majority of individuals living in Taiwan or identifying as Taiwanese A smaller proportion The entire survey including the information sheet and the recruitment materials were translated from English to simplified Mandarin, traditional Mandarin, and Japanese.

All translators were fluent in English and their relevant languages and had at least 2 years of translation experience.

For the Japanese version, the initial English-to-Japanese translation and the Japanese-to-English back translation were conducted by two separate professional translators.

Discrepancies were resolved via discussion between the first author and the first translator. For both Mandarin translations, the first author was primarily responsible for the English-to-Chinese translation and was assisted by two doctoral students from China and Taiwan, studying in related fields to hone the translations.

A professional translator then was used for back-translation. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus among the first author and the two doctoral students.

Answers were averaged so that higher scores reflect higher levels of the construct being assessed. Cronbach alphas were estimated in each cultural group. A pool of items assessing tenets of East Asian ideologies 51 items assessing tenets of Confucianism, 38 assessing tenets of Buddhism, and 33 assessing tenets of Taoism was curated for the current study see Supplementary Table 1.

To build on previous published and unpublished measurement work in this area, a total of 71 items in that pool were drawn from seven existing measures: the East Asian Relational Norms Inventory EARN; Park, ; Park et al. Based on the conceptual definitions of the targeted tenets for each of the three ideologies, the authors wrote another 51 items to augment the item pool, diversifying the pool beyond the content of the previously developed published and unpublished scales.

This included additional items to increase and deepen the representation of specific tenets within the pool as well as generating entirely new sets of items assessing tenets unassessed by previous scales i. These items were written in collaboration by the three authors and were written to maximize their alignment with the language used to describe each of the tenets within classic texts on Buddhism e.

As mentioned above, in lieu of subjecting the items to an initial qualitative review by a panel of subject experts and trimming the item pool based on those subjective opinions, we chose instead to make use of a panel of experts in developing our conceptual definitions at a key earlier stage of the development process.

We then chose to retain the full diversity of the item pool and use exclusively quantitative findings from a markedly large and diverse sample spanning five cultures and four languages to select the final items for the TTEA scale.

In this manner, we balanced both developing a comprehensive conceptual framework as a foundation for the measure with prioritizing a rigorous empirical development and validation of the resulting scale to ensure its robust psychometric properties across all languages and cultural groups. The survey included a number of measures of individual functioning. Mindfulness e. Judging thoughts and feelings e. Peace of Mind e.

Psychological distress e. Somatic anxiety e. When we tried to extract 21 factors to explore the stability of this EFA solution , the additional factor failed to contain a single item i.

We then conducted similar EFA analyses within each of the culture groups. Taken as a set, these item-pool trimming EFAs allowed us to identify 61 items comprising 18 factors that: 1 consistently emerged across all cultural groups, 2 conceptually aligned with the expected tenets, and 3 contained the 2—4 items most internally consistent i. This also allowed us to screen out items that failed to robustly load on any of the main factors i. A final set of 61 items were therefore chosen for the TTEA inventory.

Two additional factors consistently emerged from the EFAs in the five cultural groups: impermanence and mindfulness. Although these factors mapped onto targeted tenets within our conceptual definitions, EFAs examining the higher order structure of the factors extracted see below suggested that those two tenets demonstrated strong cross-loading across the three main East Asian ideologies i.

Thus, those two tenets were evenly associated with Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, suggesting that they might be common and pervasive aspects of these three Eastern ideologies in general. As one of the goals of the TTEA inventory was to distinguish among those three major ideologies, we chose not to include those subscales on the final measure.

Although the full item version of the TTEA inventory will provide researchers with a comprehensive tool for evaluating and deconstructing cultural differences providing four composite scores and 18 individual tenet scores to be examined as possible mechanisms , the length of the scale might hinder its adoption across a wide range of future studies.

Thus, after selecting the final 61 items of the TTEA inventory, the two most prototypical i. To determine if the final items of the TTEA inventory functioned comparably across all five cultural groups, we used the multi-stage process outlined by Van de Schoot et al. We specifically used the parameterization setting the means and variances of the latent subscale factors to 0 and 1, respectively, to focus the analyses on the equivalence of the factor loadings see Figure 2A in Van de Schoot et al.

Step 0—Configural Invariance i. As shown in the upper portion of Table 3 , when that model was estimated in a multiple-group analysis with no constraints between the groups i. When that model was estimated in each of the culture groups separately, the models continued to demonstrate adequate fit, indicating that the CFA model is valid in each of the groups and suggesting a common factor structure across all five groups and all four language versions of the TTEA inventory.

Step 1—Metric Invariance i. When the factor loadings of the model were constrained to be equal across the five culture groups, the multiple-group model continued to demonstrate reasonable fit see Table 3 , suggesting that respondents attributed the same meaning to the latent dimensions of each tenet across the different translations and groups. Step 2—Intercept Only Invariance. When the intercepts for the latent tenet dimensions were constrained to be equal across the culture groups, the model demonstrated slightly poorer fit as the TLI fell just below the 0.

Following the guidelines outlined by Van de Schoot et al. By releasing roughly 1 out of every 9 or 10 items on the scale, the model demonstrated acceptable fit. This partial invariance suggests that the meanings of the levels of a majority of the items remained reasonably equivalent across groups i.

Step 3—Partial Scalar Invariance i. When both the factor loadings and a large majority of the intercepts were constrained to be equal across the groups, the model continued to demonstrate adequate fit Table 3 , suggesting sufficient measure invariance to support scores being directly compared across groups on the TTEA subscales see Van de Schoot et al. Step 4—Full Uniqueness Measurement Invariance.

Finally, when the model from step 3 was also constrained to have equal item residuals across groups, the model continued to demonstrate adequate fit, suggesting that the 18 tenets are essentially measured reasonably identically across all five groups and four languages, at least for the majority of items on the scale.

Taken as a set, these results support the cross-cultural measure invariance of the versions of the TTEA inventory developed in this study. Given this invariance, the remaining CFA models were conducted in the full sample.

Table 3. Confirmatory factor analyses examining measurement invariance and correlational structure of the TTEA. In contrast, when solutions with fewer factors were attempted, those analyses yielded increasingly large numbers of items with poor i.

The scree-plot and the Kaiser-Guttman criteria supported extracting four higher-order factors across the subscales of the TTEA Table 5. As expected, factors representing Buddhism and Taoism emerged. Table 4. Table 5. As shown in the bottom half of Table 3 , a model mirroring this structure i. In contrast, a model testing 18 tenet subscales forming just one higher order East Asian ideology factor demonstrated poor fit as did a model testing the items of the TTEA inventory simply forming four ideologies and a model testing the items of the TTEA inventory forming a single dimension of East Asian beliefs.

The items of the TTEA inventory all displayed strong loadings on their respective latent tenets, and the latent tenet variables displayed strong loadings on their respective ideologies. We examined Cronbach alpha coefficients for the TTEA subscales and the four composite scores across the five cultural groups, split by gender Supplementary Table 2. As shown in Table 6 , 10 of the 18 TTEA subscales demonstrated significant average differences between men and women in the sample.

Most of these differences were fairly modest Cohen's d's ranging from 0. However, the Taoism subscale of embracing contradiction and the empowering Confucianism subscale of human heartedness were endorsed slightly more strongly by women than men.

All three empowering Confucianism subscales also demonstrated slightly higher endorsement in individuals younger than Stronger differences emerged on all of the TTEA subscales across the five cultural groups Cohen's d's between pairs of cultural means showing the greatest differences on each subscale ranged from 0.

Focusing on the TTEA composites, respondents from Japan were significantly lower on endorsing Buddhist, Taoist, and Empowering Confucianism ideologies, but were comparable to respondents from Taiwan on their fairly high endorsement of Restrictive Confucianism principles Figure 1.

In contrast, White American respondents were significantly lower than most groups on their endorsement of Buddhism, Taoism, and Restrictive Confucianism principles, but had some of the strongest endorsements of the Empowering Confucianism principles likely as those beliefs are more consistent with trends in the western self-help culture. Asian American respondents also had some of the strongest endorsements of Empowering Confucianism similar to white Americans , but also strongly endorsed Buddhism and Taoism similar to Chinese and Taiwanese participants , reflecting more blended ideologies.

In contrast to the other groups, the respondents from Taiwan and China were significantly stronger in their endorsements of Restrictive Confucianism tenets. Table 6. Means and standard deviations of the TTEA inventory split by gender, age, and cultural groups. Figure 1.

Differences across cultural groups on the four main ideologies assessed with the TTEA Inventory composite scores. Table 7 presents the correlations among the tenet subscales and the higher-order composite scales of the TTEA inventory. As can be seen in the table, the subscales corresponding to each higher-order ideology demonstrated moderate correlations with one another, suggesting that although they share sufficient variance to be collapsed into more general composites i.

Although the correlations among tenets were the strongest within tenets assessing the same higher-order ideology, the correlations in Table 7 also suggest that some tenets, for example cyclic nature, correlated modestly with other ideologies i.

This is possibly due to the cross-pollination of these ideologies within East Asia. As shown in Table 8 , the TTEA subscales demonstrated only low to modest correlations with a large set of conceptually related yet distinct constructs from the nomological net from the cross-cultural literature.

Specifically, the ideologies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Restrictive Confucianism along with a majority of their individual tenets were weakly associated with feeling less embarrassment at the prospect of seeking professional mental health treatment, suggesting that adopting traditional East Asian tenets e. However, those three ideologies were largely uncorrelated with positive counseling attitudes. In contrast, higher endorsement of the tenets of empowering Confucianism was associated with stronger positive attitudes toward counseling, suggesting potential points of intervention for promoting treatment seeking.

Turning to the remaining correlations, Buddhism, Taoism, and Empowering Confucianism were all correlated with greater mindfulness and life satisfaction.

In contrast, Restrictive Confucianism was correlated with greater psychological distress, whereas Empowering Confucianism was correlated with lower psychological distress.

Finally, both Buddhism and Empowering Confucianism were correlated with higher somatic anxiety. All of the dimensions of the TTEA inventory showed significant correlations with culturally informed behaviors like collectivism, filial piety, and face concerns, highlighting how such tenets might inform behavior and individual functioning across various cultures.

Taken together, the generally low to modest size of the correlations in Table 8 suggest that the TTEA inventory is assessing a set of tenets that is distinct from related constructs like collectivism and mindfulness, underscoring its potential unique contribution to the literature. Table 8. Correlations with existing scales to demonstrate discriminant validity. To evaluate how the TTEA inventory might provide insights into models of individual well-being, we ran regressions predicting current vitality, life satisfaction, and collectivism using the TTEA composite scores as simultaneous predictors Model 1's and models using the 18 subscales as simultaneous predictors Model 2's of each outcome.

The Model 1 results suggested acceptable levels of collinearity among the four composites of the TTEA inventory as the Variance Inflation Factors for those predictors ranged from 1. As shown in the first block of rows of Table 9 , each of the four ideologies assessed by the TTEA inventory was uniquely predictive of current levels of vitality i.

Thus, higher endorsement of Buddhist, Taoist, and empowering Confucian beliefs were each uniquely linked to higher vitality and life satisfaction highlighting the potential life-enriching benefits of those ideologies. In contrast, greater endorsement of restrictive Confucian beliefs was uniquely linked to lower vitality and life satisfaction, suggesting the potential costs of subjugating one's own needs for those of society as a greater whole. Although greater endorsement of each of the four ideologies uniquely predicted greater levels of collectivism, Buddhism and Restrictive Confucianism emerged as particularly strong predictors.

Table 9. Multiple regressions predicting individual well-being and collectivism. As shown in the lower portion of Table 9 , when the 18 TTEA subscales were used as predictors for these outcomes, a far more nuanced pattern of findings emerged. Within these models, Ziran i. However, unique predictive associations also emerged for both individual well-being outcomes. Thus, when predicting vitality, interpersonal harmony was uniquely predictive of lower vitality whereas conforming to social norms was predictive of slightly higher vitality although neither of those tenets emerged as significant predictors of life satisfaction.

In contrast, when predicting life satisfaction, not self i. Turning to the prediction of collectivism, conforming to social norms emerged as a particularly strong predictor, as did not self, punishing karma, and relational hierarchy, thereby highlighting the aspects of collectivism that require individuals to place the needs of others before their own.

These findings begin to highlight the potential utility of the TTEA inventory to shed light on various cultural differences across a wide range of behaviors and outcomes, as they demonstrate how the measure offers researchers 18 individual tenets and four larger composites as possible mechanisms to begin to characterize the rich ideological fabric underlying various cultures. The TTEA inventory represents a conceptually grounded and comprehensive measure assessing 18 different tenets of East Asian thought—not only integrating work from previous scales but also offering a concrete method of representing the larger ideologies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism within cultural models.

Most previous measurement work in this area focused on creating single-dimension broad-band scales to assess a general East Asian worldview e. More recently, researchers have developed more conceptually-focused scales assessing single tenets e. The TTEA inventory instead offers a unifying conceptual framework not only grounded in the foremost East Asian philosophies, but also assessing unique tenets specific to each of them.

The TTEA inventory therefore not only clarifies the ideological structure of Buddhism, Taoism, Restrictive, and Empowering Confucianism, but synthesizes these tenets into a cohesive framework illustrating the dynamics among these metaphysical ideas. With over a thousand citations, the single-dimension AVS has dominated research on East Asian values, focusing that research primarily on tenets related to Confucianism assessed by the AVS Kim et al.

Research on the AVS has yielded mixed results, sometimes uncovering links to higher functioning Kim and Omizo, , to lower functioning e. The TTEA inventory offers a method of potentially clarifying those mixed results by deconstructing Confucianism into two broader domains restrictive vs. In fact, the results with the TTEA inventory suggest that the two Confucian composites and the eight Confucian tenets can show meaningfully different patterns of correlation.

Thus, the mixed results with the AVS are likely being driven by particularly strong associations between specific outcomes and specific components of Confucianism. At a broader level, the TTEA inventory distinguishing between the self-denying, restrictive aspects of Confucianism i.

This distinction aligns with the arguments of Hwang see Hwang, for a review who suggests that the ethics of Confucianism could be practiced in two different ways. One form of practicing Confucianism is targeted toward ordinary people as it encourages them to restrict their self-centered impulses i. Thus, the second form of practicing Confucianism focuses on encouraging upright and noble persons to pursue self-fulfillment and self-actualization i. The current findings suggest that these two distinct aspects of Confucianism are not opposite to each other like the two ends of one continuum.

Instead, these two ideologies should be viewed as distinct yet related, coexisting alongside one another in individuals' moral approaches to life. As the TTEA inventory is the first scale to operationalize these two distinct aspects of Confucianism within a self-report scale, the inventory allows researchers to quantify and distinguish the unique natures of those two domains within models of functioning. In fact, the Empowering Confucianism subscales represent entirely new additions to the literature, offering researchers the first cross-culturally validated measures of self-cultivation, leading by example, and human heartedness.

Given the hierarchical structure of the TTEA inventory, researchers and clinicians have a range of options when using the scale in their work. A researcher or clinician interested in understanding more fine-grained or detail-oriented links between ideological tenets and specific behaviors or outcomes would likely examine the 18 individual subscales separately.

In the case of clinicians, this could take the form of an ideological profile for an individual client to help guide therapy with that client. Given the documented disparities in mental health treatment seeking and treatment dropout e. For researchers, use of the TTEA inventory could take the form of treating those 18 subscale scores as separate constructs in models of individual functioning.

For example, as both Buddhism and Taoism offer specific lenses for viewing life, daily stress, and one's place within nature and the broader universe e. The TTEA inventory would provide both an optimized measure as well as a conceptual framework for such investigations. Consistent with this, the individual tenets demonstrated distinct patterns of correlation with dimensions of counseling attitudes, highlighting the rich tapestry of results that can emerge from use of the TTEA subscales.

After examining the specific tenets assessed by the inventory, clinicians and researchers could also create larger composite scores representing overall levels of Buddhism, Taoism, Restrictive, and Empowering Confucianism within specific clients or within their models. This extends work on constructs like collectivism e.

For example, whereas Empowering Confucianism offers insights toward becoming a virtuous and self-actualized person, Restrictive Confucianism seeks to promote social order by encouraging individuals to deny personal needs in certain ways to benefit the community. Thus, our results suggest that the four composites would likely demonstrate distinct patterns of association with culturally informed behaviors.

The TTEA inventory therefore offers a method of distilling the widely-varying cultural backgrounds of all subjects both East-Asian as well as individuals from Western cultures who might have sought out Eastern ideologies and teachings to varying degrees into useful sketches formed by four fundamental scores on the overarching ideologies.

The Taoist section is very poorly written. Overly simplistic and defined incorrectly in many categories. I assume this was written as an introduction for first and second graders. Lots of Buddhists don't believe in any gods or deities at all, making it entirely compatible with atheism. It's only certain schools of Buddhism particularly prevalent in Tibet who believe in deities. I'm an atheist Zen Buddhist, for example.

I believe this comparison to be incorrect in many ways and could use some serious revision. There are many kinds of Taoism, with and with out deities.

Enlightenment and balance in life are seen by some as the same thing, and that is just commenting on the very begging of the comparison because I am must go now. Everything that is written is generally correct, but written in a way that sometimes has a negative, simplistic, western view. In this article, The Buddhist clergy: "Monks and Nuns, who unitedly and exactly follow the teachings of the Buddha under the name 'Sangha'.

It is united but not exact. Sangha is the body of people who follow Buddha and not reserved for monks and nuns. Also it varies between Buddhist denominations and cultures and countries.

Buddhism is a philosophical way of living your life, not a religion that dictates your life like Christianity. So to view this religion properly, you cannot properly define it using western categories and ideals. Almost everything which are said about Buddhism is correct to my knowledge.

I know really little about Buddhism but I know from experience, it is the only way that I can release my stress in a hard time. So I really love my Buddhism and I will always be a Buddhist.

I can call myself a proud Buddhist. Buddhism vs. Comparison chart Differences — Similarities —. Follow Share Cite Authors. Share this comparison: If you read this far, you should follow us: "Buddhism vs Taoism. Comments: Buddhism vs Taoism. Anonymous comments 5 March 16, , pm The Taoist section is very poorly written.

Related Comparisons. Contribute to Diffen Edit or create new comparisons in your area of expertise. Log in ». Terms of use Privacy policy. Statues are used as meditation objects, and revered as they reflect the qualities of the Buddha. They can be used as meditation objects, but they are not that common.

Rebirth is one of the central beliefs of Buddhism. We are in an endless cycle of birth, death and re-birth, which can only be broken by attaining nirvana. Attaining nirvana is the only way to escape suffering permanently. If immortality isn't attained during life, the Tao will continue to evolve and manifest in different forms, in accordance with the entity's general conduct during a state of existence. This applies to all sentient and insentient beings.

It is not a religious duty to marry. Monks and nuns do not marry and are celibate. Advice in the Discourses on how to maintain a happy and harmonious marriage. Buddhists are those who follow the teachings of the Buddha. Ignorance, as all sentient beings. In the Buddhist texts, it is seen that when Gautama, after his awakening, was asked whether he was a normal human being, he replied, "No". If humans are in tune with the Tao, their sufferings will cease.

Taoism teaches that humans are capable of experiencing immortality. To attain enlightenment and be released from the cycle of rebirth and death, thus attaining Nirvana.

No distinctions between men and women.