The Vinegar Tasters

Picture this: you're in a museum staring at a painting of three old men surrounding a pot, tasting the contents inside. One of the men wears a sour expression. Whatever is in that pot is just not the taste it should be. Another of them is puckering with bitterness, almost as if he saw the creation as the very embodiment of suffering. The last of them wears a vastly different expression. He is smiling, enjoying his meal, despite the clear tang of the recipe. This very depiction, called The Vinegar Tasters, represents the three philosophies of ancient China. In the painting, the vinegar represents life and the vast differences in how people saw it. 

The first man is Confucius. He believed that life was sour, tainted by deviation from past precedents. Out of the three, Confucius needs no introduction. He founded Confucianism on the grounds of respecting your elders, and is one of the best known philosophers from Ancient China. His image is partially associated with how we view all of China's history to this day. Confucius believed that respecting your elders and past rituals was the best way to live a virtuous life. As the world inched towards modernity and rejected those old customs, life, to those who followed the grounds of Confucianism, became more sour. 

The man in the middle represents Buddha (also known as Siddhartha Gautama), who, like Confucius, is a well known figure in ancient times. The Buddha founded Buddhism, an ideology that centers around personal enlightenment and reaching Nirvana, a type of heaven which can be achieved by the elimination of greed, hatred, and ignorance. He sees the vinegar as bitter, because Buddhists thought the essence of life was suffering due to the need for personal satisfaction. This belief began with the Four Noble Truths in the Dharma, the embodiment of the Buddha's teachings. To Buddhists, the cycle of rebirth was a process that they wished to end, hence why the vinegar is so bitter.