Confucius
During the Song dynasty, the scholar Zhu Xi (AD 1130–1200) added ideas from Daoism and Buddhism into Confucianism. In his life, Zhu Xi was largely ignored, but not long after his death, his ideas became the new orthodox view of what Confucian texts actually meant. Modern historians view Zhu Xi as having created something rather different and call his way of thinking "Neo-Confucianism". Neo-Confucianism held sway in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam until the 19th century.
The works of Confucius were first translated into European languages by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century during the late Ming dynasty. The first known effort was by Michele Ruggieri, who returned to Italy in 1588 and carried on his translations while residing in Salerno. Matteo Ricci started to report on the thoughts of Confucius, and a team of Jesuits—Prospero Intorcetta, Philippe Couplet, and two others—published a translation of several Confucian works and an overview of Chinese history in Paris in 1687. François Noël, after failing to persuade ClementXI that Chinese veneration of ancestors and Confucius did not constitute idolatry, completed the Confucian canon at Prague in 1711, with more scholarly treatments of the other works and the first translation of the collected works of Mencius. It is thought that such works had considerable importance on European thinkers of the period, particularly among the Deists and other philosophical groups of the Enlightenment who were interested by the integration of the system of morality of Confucius into Western civilization.
Zhuangzi (book)
The "Zhuangzi" is named for and attributed to Zhuang Zhouusually known as "Master Zhuang" (Chinese: "Zhuangzi" 莊子)a man generally said to have been born around 369 at a place called Meng () in the state of Song (around modern Shangqiu, Henan Province), and to have died around 301, 295, or 286. Almost nothing is concretely known of Zhuangzi's life. He is thought to have spent time in the southern state of Chu, as well as in Linzi, the capital of the state of Qi. Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian" ("Shiji" 史記), the first of China's 24 dynastic histories, has a biography of Zhuangzi, but most of it seems to have simply been drawn from anecdotes in the "Zhuangzi" itself. The American scholar and "Zhuangzi" translator Burton Watson noted, "Whoever Zhuang Zhou was, the writings attributed to him bear the stamp of a brilliant and original mind."