'Water is the principle, the first of all things," said Thales of Miletus, who lived between 624 and 546 BC and is regarded by many as the first philosopher in Greek tradition.

What Thales had no way of knowing is that a few decades after he made that remark, Confucius, China's sage of all ages, said something about water that is still being taught at Chinese schools today.

"The greatest good is like water — it nourishes all things without ever striving or competing," said the man, whose death in 479 BC is probably only separated by a few years from the birth of Socrates, believed to have been born around 470 BC. Socrates served as a mentor to Plato, who himself was a teacher to Aristotle.

The fact that Confucianism, named after Confucius, and ancient Greek philosophy had developed concurrently, had partly given rise to the term "the Axial Age". Referring to a time period roughly from 800 BC to 200 BC, the term was coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) to sum up the transformative philosophical and intellectual development taking place around the globe at the time.

"Both traditions had contributed significantly and are still contributing to the discourse on ethics, governance, the nature of knowledge and purpose of human existence," says Wu Fei, philosophy professor at the prestigious Peking University."For that reason, those who study one of them today, me included, are obliged to learn about the other, although the two traditions had evolved separately."

And that's one of the reasons Wu and his fellow scholars, some from Greece, had attended the first World Conference of Classics in Beijing from Wednesday to Friday. Held under the overarching theme of"Classical Civilizations and the Modern World", the event included a parallel forum titled "An Ethical Dialogue between Confucianism and Ancient Greek Philosophy".

"On one hand, we have Aristotle's theory of Form and Matter, which proposed that everything in the natural world is made up of both form (shape, structure) and matter (substance)," says Wu. "On the other hand, we have Confucius telling us that a man should try to strike a balance between external refinement and inner simplicity."

The comparison also reveals a subtle difference in emphasis. The Greek philosopher, who wrote in his Metaphysics that "all men by nature desire to know", was clearly driven by a sense of wonder — an impulse that Plato described as the very foundation of philosophy.

Confucius, for his part, had developed his philosophy as a direct response to societal instability and moral decay he observed around him.

This distinction in focus is also reflected in their respective approaches to truth and knowledge — two core concepts central to any philosophical tradition. For ancient Greek philosophers, knowledge was pursued as a path to understanding the world, often through intellectual debate and critical inquiry. The Socratic method, that of teaching and discovery, involved a process of dialectical questioning. The aim was to stimulate critical thinking by asking and answering questions that uncovered underlying assumptions and contradictions.

Such was the influence of the Greek philosophy on Western thinking that "people always want to see that logical thread when they approach an argument", says Mary Evelyn Tucker, senior lecturer and research scholar from Yale University.

"But that is not the only way of thinking or being human," she reflects.

One example, Tucker, who has done her fair share of study of Confucianism, gives to illustrate her point is a story from the foundational Confucian text Mencius, or Mengzi. Written by Mencius, who lived in the 4th century BC, it's a collection of dialogues and teachings that expand upon and interpret the ideas of Confucius, Mencius' intellectual predecessor.

In this particular story, Mencius observed that the trees on the Ox Mountain were once lush and beautiful, before they were repeatedly cut down for fuel and building materials. Over time, people forgot what the mountain had once looked like and assumed that it had always been barren. Yet, Mencius noted, if the cutting were to stop and the mountain left undisturbed, it would come back to life — and to its former glory — sooner than most could imagine.

For the next two millennia, the story — an evocative metaphor for how human nature can be eroded by negative influences yet still retain the potential for goodness — was revisited again and again by ancient Chinese educators. These scholars devoted themselves to uncovering the latent goodness that Confucianism believes exists within all people.

"Confucianism has a different sense of argumentation — it's not even argumentation — a different sense of education of teaching. It's by metaphor," says Tucker, who has been active in the field of environment and ecology. "The notion is that you learn from nature about your own cultivation. That's a way of knowing and learning that's much more organic, botanical and holistic. Chinese philosophy is holistic."

In other words, in Confucianism, nature is viewed less as an object of study, as it was in ancient Greek philosophy, and more as a moral teacher that offers analogical lessons.

Tucker believes that the man-nature relations inherent to Confucianism has a lot to do with ancient China's agricultural tradition, whereby human life is tied to "the way of nature", to use the words of Confucius.

Wu echoes Tucker's idea, saying,"In Confucianism, interconnectedness is emphasized not only between man and nature, but also between man and society. This explains why the Confucian concept of virtue and moral integrity is inextricably linked to one's social engagement and community role."

One man whose philosophy incorporated "the same profound understanding of cosmology as the Chinese philosophers had" — to quote Tucker — was Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) from the post-Augustan Age of ancient Rome. Like his fellow Stoic philosophers, Seneca believed that the universe is a single, interconnected organism governed by rationality, with every part linked by reason.

It's worth noting that about seven decades before the birth of Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), the founder of the Roman Empire who was greatly influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism, Confucianism was put on the pedestal by the powerful Emperor Wudi of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), who made it the guiding philosophy of his reign and beyond.

"Both ancient Greeks and Chinese understood that they were part of something larger," says Tucker. "In our modern world, we've reduced everything to the present moment, to materialism and technology. We have lost our sense of belonging. That's why we need to look at both traditions and to bring them into conversation with each other, and with the issues facing us today."