The cultural meaning of filial piety in imperial China 孝

[@dr.gaosclassroom]

Filial piety was celebrated as the most important moral principle during imperial China and it is still held as a culturally significant social norm in modern China today. However, its legal significance was mostly ignored among many scholars. Recently, the Chinese government issued a law that specify punishment to people who ignore their duties to take care of their parents. This sounds quite unusual among modern nation states because it is usually the duty of the state to look after their elders and a personal responsibility for the elders to plan for their own retirement. However, the Chinese culture has a long history of assigning this responsibility to the sons and daughter-in-laws to take care of their elders when they could no longer support themselves. However, although such practice has its benefits such as bonding the family together and, most times, beneficial to the elders, it also create many problems such as preference of sons to daughters leading to aborting female foetus, abandoning female babies, even female infanticide, as well as generational conflicts and conflicts among siblings about who should take the responsibilities of caring for the elder parents. The one-child policy certainly intensified the situation leading to many social problems we see today. I would love to hear what you have to say regarding the Confucian principle of filial piety. Please leave your comments here.

[@jirik2435]

@dr.gaosclassroom It is similar in this part of the world too. The well known lines from the Taittiriya Upanishad says: mothers are as gods fathers are as gods Teachers are as gods Guests are as gods... You may be interested to read a Chinese translation of it in more detail. ia801908.us.archive.org/14/items/xu_fancheng_wenji_15/15%20徐梵澄文集_第十五卷.pdf The relevant section starts at page 255, Section 11. Xu Fancheng has translated a lot ofthe ancient Indian texts into Chinese so it could be a good reference for you. All of his works seem to be available at this site. The above lines are translated as 奉母如神 ... etc. which I think is a more accurate translation than is possible in English. Filial piety is not emphasised here as much as I guess it is in China where it has been institutionalised and detailed laws are based on the concept.