Antient Chinese Thoughts – Zhou dynasty

Even before Zhou dynasty conquered the Shang state, the legend of their relationship through the female line to the family of Shan kings had been born. When they conquered the Shang, those people started to identify their supreme deity Tian Shan to the supreme deity Shandy. But this required rejection of contamination koptseptsii of tribal deity. The notion is not so managed to get rid of the legacy of totemism, and its use in China remains limited within the "ancestral body" of individual dynasties. Same term "tian" in the sense of "Heaven" was used to name new archaic religious idea of universe beginning. Here we are to discuss the development of ancient Chinese worldview or cosmology in Zhou dynasty, in particular, the concept of tian or tien (Heaven) and its socio-political implications in early China.