This paper provides insights into the relationship between language and politically relevant aspects of culture in India and China which are as follows: attitude toward revolution and tradition, the domination of politics over religion or vice versa, and a concern for the liberty of the individual. The paper introduces a novel approach to the comparative study of civilizations by advancing the political-linguistic explanation. In so doing, it combines Hajime Nakamura’s hypothesis of the strict connection between language and culture (understood as a way of thinking) with Samuel P. Huntington’s emphasis on the impact of cultural differences on the political dimension of society – so that our explanatory model can be expressed as follows: language→culture→politics. As far as language is concerned, the focus is on the basic structure of Sanskrit and Chinese; besides, special attention is given to Indian and Chinese philosophies of language. Culturally, the most relevant schools of Hindu philosophy may be called “ultraconservative” since they tend to ground unchanging meaning firmly in metaphysics and rely on the supreme authority of ancient religious texts. In contrast, the Chinese typically considered language a social mechanism for shaping our behavior (so the relation of language and society is the most crucial); they also expressed clearly divergent views on naming. In short, at least four distinctive perspectives are essential: (1) conservative Confucianism, (2) anti-traditional and highly authoritarian Legalism, (3) egalitarian and linguistically skeptical Laozian Daoism, (4) nonconformist and proto-libertarian Zhuangzian Daoism.

An important objective of this article is to enrich the heritage of Polish education regarding knowledge of traditional purposes of education, especially the Taoist one. In addition, the author resolves the problem related to the occurrence of the main antinomy between Western pedagogy, which is individualistic and collectivist approaches in education, also visible in the Far East model of education. Main goal of this article is to enable a better understanding of the ideas and ideals of education contained in the Far Eastern philosophical and religious systems. The author is also looking for relationships and common education values in consideration currents Taoism and western directions pedagogy, in order to create a basis for dialogue and common understanding. By referring to the hermeneutic reconstruction and comparative studies, author represents the ideals of education in the mainstream of philosophical Taoism, as a true man - zhenren and related categories: dao, de, wuwei, pu and ziran. He analyzed the work assigned to Laozi, Zhuangzi, Liezi and other Taoists. The author also presents the ideals of mainstream education in the form of religious Taoism changsheng busi - physical immortality and neidan purposes, as well as Taoist principles of moral conduct. He takes into consideration the contribution of Li Shaojun, Wang Chunyang, Zhang Boduan and religious schools of Taoism. From the author’s research you can find out that the ideals of education Taoist both analyzed trends are often very similar, moreover - identical with the ideals of education in Mahayana Buddhism and have a lot in common with Western pedagogical directions. These are compounds with naturalism pedagogical, cultural pedagogy, psychology and pedagogy humanist Carl R. Rogers and other trends of humanistic education like Gestalt pedagogy, in addition to personalistic pedagogy and existential pedagogy, ecological pedagogy and many others. Author’s interpretation of Taoist ideals departs from previous positions, in which Taoism was rejecting the importance of the role of society in human development.