A Structural Traceability of the Abrahamic Religious System and Chinese Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist Culture — An Existential Analysis of Religion and Culture Based on Cognitive Reification

This paper, grounded in the theoretical framework of information collapse and cognitive reification, offers a unified existential account of the fundamental differences between the Abrahamic religions and the Chinese traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. It argues that Western religion takes "the human being is reified" as its premise—humans carry original sin, the subject has already been captured by a mistaken model, thus giving rise to an external tradition of "teaching," whose temporal orientation traces backward from the result, and whose evolutionary paradigm is a cyclical revolution of breaking one framework with another. Chinese thought takes "the human being can be non-reified" as its premise—humans are like children, reification is not their original state, thus giving rise to an internal tradition of "family," whose temporal orientation unfolds forward from the process, and whose evolutionary paradigm is a continuous renewal of not reifying frameworks. One sees the result of subjective reification—the human being captured by a mistaken self-model; the other sees the process of subjective reification—the human being is constantly generating models, but the ongoing cognitive activity itself is always greater than any model already generated. Although their starting points and paths are diametrically opposed, both share a single ontological foundation: the original goodness of the human being. It is this common foundation that allows the Eastern and Western religious traditions to each maintain vitality within the dialectical movement of reification and de-reification, pointing in the same direction at the deepest structural level. This paper argues less and explains more, primarily reasoning things through.