Describe the religious life of Chinese people
In the Shang Dynasty the earliest period we know much about, people in China worshipped a lot of different gods - weather gods and sky gods - and also a higher god called Shang-Ti, who ruled over the other gods. People who lived during the Shang Dynasty also believed that their ancestors - their parents and~grandparents - became like gods when they died, and that their ancestors wanted to be worshipped too, like gods. Each family worshipped its own ancestors.
By the time of the Chou Dynasty (about 1100 B.C.), the Chinese were also worshipping a natural force called t'ien, which we usually translate as Heaven. Like Shang- Ti, Heaven ruled over all the other gods.
Around 600 B.C., under the Eastern Chou Dynasty, and for the next two hundred years, there were a lot of new ideas in Chinese religion. First, a Chinese philosopher named Lao Tzu (he may be mythical) created the philosophy of Taoism, which became very popular. Taoism holds that people should not try to get their way by force, but through compromise and using natural forces in their favour. It is partly a philosophy, and partly a religious faith. Taoists believe that there is a universal force flowing through all living things, and respecting that force is essential for a happy life.
Not long after Lao Tzu, another Chinese scholar called Confucius created a different philosophical system called Confucianism, which disagreed with Taoism, but also became very popular.
Two other philosophical schools of this period were one started by Mo Tzu, which suggested that the way to happiness was for everyone to treat all other people as well as they treated their own families, and Legalism (a kind of Confucianism), which believed that people were all basically bad, and needed to be kept in line by strict laws and harsh punishments in order to create order and peace.
