The Scholar-officials’Practice of Filial Piety and Its Institutionalization in Tang China
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Cheng, Ya-ju
Abstract
This dissertation studies the scholar-officials'' practice of filial piety and its institutionalization in Tang China. Filial piety was the dominant ethic in traditional Chinese society. It was considered to be nature and right, and how to practice it was not at one’s own will, usually guided or limited by specific cultural values, norms, institutions, and the contexts of situations. In this dissertation, the ‘filial piety’ was not referred to extreme or unusual behaviors, but those which were considered the basic duties of children or what were urged to do for parents. It included reverent caring, mourning, deceased parents buried in family graveyard, requested to bury themselves beside deceased parents, got official titles from the emperor to honor the deceased parents, offered sacrifices to ancestors, and to benefit deceased parents by the power of religions. The scholar-officials desired to nurture and honor parents with official’s payments and status, but to be an official in Tang dynasty, leaving homeland and undertaking official travels were shared experience in general. Official career deeply influenced the practice of filial piety of the scholar-officials. Meanwhile, with the Confucianization of the law from Han to the Tang, some norms of filial piety on ‘five canons’(五經) became the formal laws and official institutions, and it was scholar-officials to be requested to obey strictly. Official institutions of filial piety usually favored the great officials therefore when they succeed in officialdom also carried out their filial piety. But most scholar-officials were inferior officials, they must need other institutions to help them carry out filial piety especially when their parents had been dead. The belief of saving sinful souls by religious power was popular during Tang dynasty, people donated to religions to benefit deceased parents, and it was considered a necessary way to repay parents.
Subjects
filial piety
caring for parents/mourning for parents
buried in family graveyard
confer official titles to the deceased parents of officials
ancestor worship
benefit deceased parents by the power of religions
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