Confucius and Laozi are the two most famous Chinese philosophers. They were contemporaries, lived in the 6th–5th centuries BCE, but their philosophical views differed greatly. Confucius attached great importance to life rules—“pillars of wisdom,” a special ritual of behavior in society. Confucius’s school eventually reached the status of state ideology.
The central concept in Laozi’s philosophy was “Dao,” which can be roughly translated as the “flow of life,” the “great way”—an all-pervading power, both a means and an end of existence. In Laozi’s view, the presence of rigid normative ethical systems in society—such as Confucianism—shows that society has problems which such a system can only intensify, unable to resolve them.