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Message: <blockquote data-quote="resistor" data-source="post: 2474575" data-attributes="member: 9142">All forms of Chinese mysticism placed a great deal of weight on the mystical properties of writing.  The ideographs of the Chinese writing system were considered to hold a certain magical property of their own, the results of which was that most more developed systems of "magic" featured written spells/incantations/whatever.Beyond that, traditional Chinese thought can be divided roughly into Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.Taoism was the earlist Chinese belief system.  I'm not incredibly well-informed about it, but I know that the I'Ching, the major work of Taoism, is largely concerned with divination and predicting the future.Confucianism was not so much a religion as a belief system about the structure of the world.  Confucianism gave rise to a highly educated class of scholar who did practice magic in a more Western-alchemy style way.  That is to say, they did believe in logical consequences, but some of their assumptions of what was logical/possible were pretty far off base.  If you wanted to introduce Chinese-themed arcane magic, that would probably be the way.Buddhism was marked by a call for restraint.  The Buddha's chief tenet was that all pain derived from desire.  Therefore Buddhists should strive to desire nothing, even to the extent of not developing attachment to anything.That's as much as I can remember off the top of my head.</blockquote>