 Taoism drew its cosmological notions from the tenets of the School of Yin Yang , and is heavily influenced and informed by the acknowledged oldest text of ancient Chinese classics , the I Ching , which prescribes a system of philosophical thought on the ethics of human behaviours based on articulating cycles of change in the natural and social worlds by means of hexagrams , and includes instructions for divination practice still adhered to by modern @-@ day religious Taoists . Daoism , as Taoism is sometimes referred , diverged sharply from Confucian thoughts by scorning rigid rituals and social classes . The Tao Te Ching , a compact and ambiguous book containing teachings attributed to Laozi ( Chinese : 老子 ; pinyin : Lǎozǐ ; Wade – Giles : Lao Tzu ) , is widely considered the keystone work of this philosophy . Together with the writings of Zhuangzi , which interprets and adds to the teaching of Laozi , these classic texts provide the philosophical foundation of Taoism deriving from the 8 trigrams ( bagua ) of Fu Xi in the 2700s BC in China , the various combinations of which creates the 64 hexagrams as documented in the I Ching . 
