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Translators’ Preface From its origins in the prehistoric past, an ever-evolving Chinese culture has been unique among the world’s civilizations, both in terms of its unbroken continuity and in the rich and varied institutional, material, and conceptual artifacts its peoples have produced. At the same time, this richness and variety guarantees that many of these artifacts will have at least partial counterparts in other civilizations, thus making it difficult to isolate, in brief compass, what it is about Chinese culture that does indeed make it unique. Nevertheless, upon entering into China’s past, certain major themes will emerge as they are repeatedly expressed in different facets of Chinese life. One of these themes is the centrality of the family, which has thoroughly permeated the sociopolitical, economic, metaphysical, moral, and religious dimensions of Chinese history since at least the early Neolithic period. A fair argument can be made that all relationships within a Chinese world—social, political, and indeed cosmic relations—are conceived of in familial terms. In the classroom the teacher is “teacher-father or teachermother ” (shifu 師父 or shimu 師母) and students are “older-sister student and younger-brother student” (xuejie 學姐 and xuedi 學弟); from earliest times the Emperor was known as the “Son of ‘Heaven’” (tianzi 天子) and as “Father and Mother of the Heavens and the Earth” (futianmudi 父天 母地); later his country-level civil servants who represented the dragon throne were colloquially designated as the “Father-Mother Officials” (fumuguan 父母官); in the cosmos, even the heavens and the earth (tiandi 天 地 or qiankun 乾坤) stand in familial relationships to one another. To be sure, family structures and associated values are found in virtually every culture past and present; kinship relations have been a central focus of anthropological field studies since the discipline began, and family values have been prominent in the development of Western civilization since the days of the Hebrew Scriptures. Eight of the Ten Commandments are negatively phrased; the obligation to honor our parents is one of the two that are not. xi But in China, family values were discernible, and discernible as fundamental , throughout the culture. Physical evidence of ancestral sacrifices has been found in archaeological remains from as early as the fifth millennium BCE. It should therefore come as no surprise that family reverence was one of the most basic and defining values of the Chinese people, especially the early Confucians. Indeed, one may even go so far as to say that, for them, filial reverence was a necessary condition for developing any of the other human qualities of excellence. In the Confucian tradition, human morality and the personal realization it inspires is grounded in the cultivation of family feeling. In the Analects of Confucius, we read: It is a rare thing for someone who has a sense of family reverence and fraternal responsibility (xiaoti 孝弟) to have a taste for defying authority. And it is unheard of for those who have no taste for defying authority to be keen on initiating rebellion. Exemplary persons (junzi 君子) concentrate their efforts on the root, for the root having taken hold, the proper way (dao 道) will grow therefrom . As for family reverence and fraternal responsibility, it is, I suspect, the root of consummate conduct (ren 仁). (1.2) Given this centrality of family feeling in the evolution of a Confucian moral sensibility, we have tried, on the basis of the Xiaojing 孝經—the Classic of Family Reverence—and the supplemental passages found within the other early philosophical writings, to articulate what we take to be a specifically Confucian conception of “role ethics.” This role ethics takes as its starting point and as its inspiration the perceived necessity of family feeling as ground in the development of the moral life. A large body of writing—much of it didactic and exhortative—has been devoted to the subject of family feeling, not least of all the text translated here, the canonical Xiaojing, or Classic of Family Reverence. Anyone at all skeptical of the importance of family values in classical and imperial China will quickly be disabused of their uncertainties by reading this short work. But if read hurriedly, without sufficient background and reflection, the Classic of Family Reverence will almost surely be dismissed as elitist, paternalistic, sexist, and at once oppressive and repressive in its prescriptions , and consequently worthless for helping citizens of the twenty-first century to rethink the idea of family values in a shrinking yet ever more populous world. Such a negative reading of the text would not be altogether strenuous; countless Chinese men...

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