The place of filial piety in ancient China.

• Author: Holzman, Donald

To my great surprise, when I first began a study of filial piety in ancient China, I found very little secondary material on the subject.(1) Perhaps scholars in traditional China thought that filial piety was such a self-evident phenomenon in Chinese life that there was little use in examining it for itself, while scholars in contemporary China perhaps see it is a thing of the past and think that to study it would be to beat a dead tiger. Whatever their reasons, I think the role filial piety has played in Chinese society and still continues to play is much too important to leave uninvestigated. Although it may seem unnecessary to do so, I prefer to begin this study at the beginning, in an attempt to show that, probably at the very earliest stages in their history, the Chinese gave filial piety an extremely exalted position - treated it as something one might almost call an absolute, a metaphysical entity, something so exalted in their minds that it becomes difficult for us of another culture to appreciate it today. A brief discussion of the origin of filial piety in China will show that this phenomenon seems always to have been central in Chinese life and very seldom, if ever, called into question. After examining this early and quasi-unanimous belief in the universality of filial piety, I intend to describe, in a series of translations from the Hou Hanshu, the peculiar passion for filial piety that took hold of the country at the beginning of the Latter Han dynasty (A.D. 25-220). It is this "peculiar passion" that is my main concern here, for the excesses to which filial piety was carried at that time illustrate an aspect of Chinese psychology that, once understood, will help us appreciate much that usually remains incomprehensible in Chinese history.

If we can believe the archeologist Chang Kwang-chih, there is evidence that the prehistoric Chinese were already ancestor-worshippers. He tells us that the burials in Banshan [Chinese Text Omitted], eastern Gansu, a late Yangshao culture that is dated around the beginning of the third millen-nium B.C., were made in the highest hills (as they are often today):

The probable lineage arrangement in the village cemetery and the regularity of the individual burials within the cemetery in many cases make it highly probable that the cult of ancestors to symbolize lineage solidarity had already been initiated during the Yang-shao stage...(2)

However we interpret these burials (and I see no reason to doubt Chang's hypothesis), the earliest written records in China, those scratched on tortoise carapaces and on bones (jiaguwen), suggest that the worship of ancestors played a central and absolutely vital role. Although the word for filial piety, xiao [Chinese Text Omitted], does not appear in this material,(3) the worship of the all-important supreme deity, God on High, Shangdi [Chinese Text Omitted], could only be carried out through the worship of the Shang king's own ancestors. In order to make a request to God on High for good weather, or good crops, or victory in battle, the Shang king had to make the request to his own ancestor and only by the intercession (pei [Chinese Text Omitted]) of these ancestors could his plea reach Shangdi.(4) Filial piety or, more exactly, ancestral piety, was an essential element in ancient religion and thus in ancient life in general. This method of reaching the gods through one's ancestors is typically Chinese. In the religious systems we are most familiar with in the West, the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, contact is made directly with God. This is another example of the often remarked down-to-earth quality of Chinese thinking. The idea of a direct leap from the human world to a transcendent, metaphysical world seems not to have appealed to the ancient Chinese. Their natural tendency was to reach out to what was nearest to them, their direct ancestors, and through them attain to the deity.

These remarks on Chinese attitudes toward their lineage and their ancestors belong, strictly speaking, to the prehistory of filial piety in China. The earliest appearance of the word for filial piety is on a bronze vessel that can be dated to the very last years of the Shang dynasty or the earliest years of the Zhou,(5) that is, roughly around 1000 B.C. The etymology of the character is, for once, clear. It shows an old man being supported by a child. Li Yumin has counted sixty-four inscriptions containing the character for filial piety that can be dated from the Zhou dynasty before the end of the eighth century B.C. and seventeen datable to the Spring and Autumn period (roughly the seventh and sixth centuries).

But let us look into the inscriptions themselves to see what they have to say about filial piety. The information they give is scanty, but precious, for it is the first written record of filial piety in China. Almost all the vessels carry similar messages in the short phrases containing the word "filial piety": they say that the makers or donors of the vessels upon which they are inscribed "make offering of their filial piety" to their dead father (kao [Chinese Text Omitted]), or to their dead father and uncles (zhukao [Chinese Text Omitted]), or to the ancestral temple (zongshi [Chinese Text Omitted]). Other inscriptions, not less numerous, speak of making a "retrospective" or "memorial" offering of filial piety (zhuixiao [Chinese Text Omitted]) to one's father or mother, or parents or grandparents. The majority of the inscriptions thus concern filial piety towards dead parents and make one wonder whether indeed the word xiao originally referred to a religious act, a form of pious commemoration of one's ancestors, and that it only later took on its present meaning of filial respect for living parents. Arthur Waley thought that xiao "seems originally to have meant piety towards the spirits of ancestors or dead parents," citing as proof the fact that the references in the Shijing are "almost exclusively to piety towards the dead."(6) For a long time I thought Waley was right, but now I am no longer sure. A few inscriptions refer clearly to the living. The hu [Chinese Text Omitted] vessel called "Shuji liangfu" [Chinese Text Omitted] speaks of "offering filial piety to elder and younger brothers, to in-laws and to deceased fathers and uncles," and other inscriptions refer to filial piety offered to hao pengyou [Chinese Text Omitted], "close friends" and hun'gou [Chinese Text Omitted], "relations by marriage,"(7) which makes one think that at this early time filial piety had a wider application than it came to have later. These inscriptions and a passage in the Shangshu that we shall consider presently make me believe that at an early period xiao already referred to piety towards living relations. That the inscriptions on ritual vases refer almost exclusively to ancestors can, of course, be explained by the fact that most of these vases were to be used in ancestral temples and reference to living parents would therefore be out of place. Whatever conclusion we come to, it is clear that during the first half of the first millennium B.C. filial piety played an important role in the lives of the Chinese of the ruling class, since the term for it figures in a large portion of the relatively small quantity of documents we have from the period.

The two early books of the canon, the Shijing and the Shangshu, both contain the word xiao. In the Shijing the word seems to refer, as Waley pointed out, exclusively to filial piety towards one's ancestors. The word appears four times, for example, in poem no. 209, "Chuci" [Chinese Text Omitted], one of the "Minor Odes" (xiaoya) and one of the best descriptions we have of an ancient ritual - in this case, a harvest banquet. In this poem three of the four occurrences of the word xiao refer to the grandson (sun [Chinese Text Omitted]), who is the vital link in the ritual, for it is through him, as the impersonator of the dead, called the "corpse" (shi [Chinese Text Omitted]), that the ancestors speak. His filial piety in this poem is purely ritual, directed solely toward the dead ancestor. So it is with the other usages of the word xiao in the Shijing.

This does not mean, of course, that filial piety as we know it did not exist in Zhou China. I have deliberately refrained from suggesting just how the most ancient Chinese acted towards their parents, because we have so few sources to describe their attitudes in daily life. Marcel Granet based his description of filial attitudes on the books of ritual elaborated a century or two before the Christian era when the Han dynasty was attempting to set up court ritual on Confucian lines. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to hear him say that the Chinese family was organized like the imperial court, and that

l'idee de respect prime absolument, dans les rapports de famille, l'idee d'affection. Reglee sur le modele des reunions de cour, la vie domestique proscrit toute familiarite. L'etiquette y regne et non l'intimite.(8)

There can be no doubt that the books of Confucian ritual have had an enormous influence on Chinese life, but Granet was wrong, I think, to believe that their prescriptions were the alpha and omega of family life, and that they exclude all human sentiment. We know very little about family life in ancient China, especially on the affective level, but there is a poem in the Shijing that gives us a hint at what the Chinese attitude was towards their parents. That poem is another of the "Minor Odes," no. 202, "Liao e" [Chinese Text Omitted]; it does not contain the word xiao, but is in effect a very moving description of the love of an orphan lamenting the death of his parents. Of course, Chinese attitudes have changed throughout their long history, but this ancient poem and the fact that Chinese poets have echoed it down to the present day, do suggest real continuity.

In any case the genuine, "New Text," chapters...