Filial Piety (Xiao) and the Family in Pre-Tang Law
Filial Piety (Xiao) and the Family in Pre-Tang Law Geoffroy MACCORMACK (University of Aberdeen) Introduction Xiao, the term normally translated as ‘filial piety’, represents one of the most important values in Chinese culture since at least the beginning of the Western Zhou dynasty. Although it antedates Confucius, it becomes absorbed by Confucianism and eventually emerges as the central Confucian virtue1. Filial piety has thus provided a main plank of the thesis known as ‘the Confucianization of the law’2. According to this thesis, the law in the period from the Han to the Tang gradually incorporated, and made the content of legal obligations, the duties enjoined by Confucian morality. One such duty was respect for obedience to one’s parents or, in a more diluted fashion, to one’s senior relatives. From this perspective, a recent study by a Chinese scholar has argued that, during the Han dynasty itself, filial piety gradually became wholly fused with the law and so became the base of a variety of legal as well as moral obligations3. It is not the purpose of this paper to trace the precise development of the 1 I have said more about this in Filial Piety and the Pre-T’ang Law, in Summa Eloquentia. Essays in honour of Margaret Hewett, edited by R van der Bergh (Fundamina, University of South Africa, 2002), 138-65. 2 This term was introduced by T’ung-Tsu Ch’ü, Law and Society in Traditional China (Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1980, first published 1960), 267-79. 3 Hou XINYI, Xiao (Be Filial) and the Legal System in the Han Dynasty, Cass Journal of Law 117 (1998), 134-47.
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