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Introduction I. Why Study This Text? The Chinese character xiao 孝 (pronounced “sheeow” in a falling, affirmative tone) was originally a highly stylized picture of a gray-haired old person 老 and a young child 子, reflecting as it does generational deference and the reverence it engenders. Ideally, each generation instructs and inculcates in the succeeding generation a reverence for the family by modeling the appropriate conduct toward the generation that preceded them, thus suffusing the family with unconditional love and a sense of belonging. Xiao has conventionally been translated as “filial piety,” and to the extent that the pious are deferential, the term is not altogether misleading, for deference is certainly called for in the Classic of Family Reverence (Xiaojing 孝經). But it is to people living and dead in this world that Confucians defer, not to religious figures, usually associated with the Abrahamic traditions, who inhabit another, transcendent world. Moreover, “piety” often carries a sense of the “sanctimonious” that is absent from the Chinese xiao. Hence, we believe xiao is better rendered as “family responsibility,” “family deference ,” “family feeling,” or “family reverence,” the term we have chosen for our translation of this work. Xiao is the foundation of all Confucian teachings, for without feeling reverence for and within one’s family, the moral and spiritual cultivation necessary for becoming “a consummate human being” (ren 仁) and a socially and politically engaged “exemplary person” (junzi 君子) would not be possible. Significantly, this Confucian “role ethics”—how to live optimally within the roles and relations that constitute one—originates in and radiates from the concrete family feelings that constitute the relations between children and their elders and the interdependent roles they live. Such family feeling is ordinary and everyday yet at the same time is arguably the most extraordinary aspect of the human experience. In attempting to cultivate the proper attitude of and toward family reverence, and to express it appropriately, it is necessary to have a family. This family may be large or small, and may, at least from today’s perspective , include surrogate others who are not related by blood or marriage. But a family there must be in order for xiao to be practiced; to attempt to 1 do so with total strangers, or alone, would be like trying to learn how to swim without water. Families have been around for some time and are found in virtually every culture past and present. Patterns of familial interactions can and have varied widely across time and cultures, as have the definitions of what constitutes a family. While the family as an institution is by no means going to disappear in the immediate future, there are a number of social, economic, and technological factors undermining the family as we have known it, and it is becoming uncertain whether, or in what ways, families will continue to occupy the central role in our lives that they have done in the past. And if not, why study family reverence? Worse, not a few people have thought that the family, at least in anything like its present form, ought to disappear, being only a continuation of chattel slavery in modern form. Some feminists and social reformers have been severely critical of the family on a variety of grounds. Summarizing this critique, one scholar notes: The nuclear family was one of the institutions which came under heavy attack from what was then called “the counter culture.” Some of the criticisms to which it was subjected were specifically feminist; some were not. The nuclear family was said to fulfill certain economic functions which made it a cornerstone of the capitalist economic system. In addition, the nuclear family was said to transmit capitalist ideology, instilling the values of competition , discipline, and possessiveness. Feminists argued that it was oppressive to women; gay liberationists argued that it discriminated against homosexuals; many people complained that it was emotionally and sexually repressive to the marriage partners and some saw it as oppressive to children.1 In addition to this kind of general critique, some people have insisted that the worst kind of family was that put forward by the Confucians . Walter S. Slote argues that “Confucianism was based on authoritarianism , and filial piety was the principal instrument through which it was established and maintained.”2 An equally strong statement comes, this time from a Chinese scholar, Jiwei Ci, whose perceptions are informed by the fact that he was raised within this cultural tradition: These two aspects of Confucian relationships, kinship on the one hand and...

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