2. The sages’ focus on achieving harmony and virtue here and now is a response to the social conditions in which they lived. For Lao-tzu and Confucius, this was a time of such widespread political and social turmoil that it came to be known as the Period of the Warring States. Although traditional Chinese history holds that the Period of the Warring States began in 453 B.C.E. and lasted for nearly 550 years, some historians push the beginning as far back as 771 B.C.E.

3. The Period of the Warring States was marked by fierce struggles for power waged by a succession of warring princes. The resulting civil wars became increasingly violent as armies ignored the customs and traditional rules of conduct known as li that had previously prevented wholesale pillage and destruction. Each atrocity was answered with an equal or greater atrocity.

4. A.C. Graham, a leading authority on Chinese thought and grammar(studies), describes the teachings of the ancient sages as responses to the “breakdown of the rule of Heaven” and the moral and political chaos that resulted. Instead of asking “What is the truth?” as early Western philosophers did, the Asian sages asked “Where is the Way(Tao)?” Where, they wondered, is the way back to social order and proper conduct?

5. As a result of their practical concerns, the teachings of the sages are marked by what the philosopher Michael Brannigan characterizes “as an intimate rapport(good reltionship) between philosophy and its actualization in society”. Offering anyone who will listen the fruits of their hard-earned “research”, sages perform a complex social function: part physician of the soul, part preacher, part philosopher, part fellow seeker.

6. The sage has no exact equivalent today, at least not in this culture, a culture that encourages individuation and competition, seemingly perpetual social war-precisely what the sages sought to overcome.

7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- gZY4i4Kg3s