Chapter on Recording Filial Conduct

AnonymousBashu Publishing House · ChinaJul 2024

4.0

Word count: 191 words
Chapters: 2

Summary

An excerpt from The Classic of Filial Piety, a work of ancient Chinese Confucian ethics. This chapter records the conduct of a filial son in serving his parents: five things he should strive for—respect, joy, concern, mourning, and solemnity—and three things he should guard against—arrogance, disorder, and contention.

Editor's review

Ji Xiaoxing Zhang (Record of the Practices of Filial Piety) is a chapter from The Classic of Filial Piety devoted to the rules of conduct for a filial son in serving his parents, summed up as the "five things to strive for"—respect, joy, concern, mourning, and solemnity—and the "three things to guard against"—arrogance, disorder, and contention. The text is brief and its items are clearly set out, making it a foundational text for understanding how Confucian filial ethics is translated into everyday conduct. Its value lies in breaking the abstract idea of "filial piety" down into concrete attitudes and prohibitions that can be checked against, so that it reads like a list of conduct: it shows both the orderliness of the ancients' reasoning and offers a way to reflect on respect and care in contemporary family relationships. Its strength is its small size and clear structure, which make it suitable as a single, closely read text for beginners to the classics. As for reading setting, it is best read quietly once through, then considered item by item: among the five, how much have I achieved, and among the three prohibitions, which have I violated? It should be noted that this is a selected chapter from an ancient work of ethics whose ideas carry the background of their time; readers should seek to understand and reflect on them rather than adopt them wholesale.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Beginning readers new to The Classic of Filial Piety and Confucian ethics
General readers interested in family ethics and intergenerational relationships
Teachers and students needing a short classic text for recitation or discussion

Not a good fit for

Specialist readers seeking systematic philosophical argument or intellectual history
Those hostile to traditional ideas of filial piety and unwilling to understand their original meaning

Reading tips

Read it through once, then copy the "five things to strive for" and "three things to guard against" into a list and check yourself against each item.
As you read, ask questions grounded in modern family situations: which attitudes still apply, and which need to be understood anew.
It is short, so it suits reciting a small passage each day; reading it over several days gives more than reading it all at once.

About the publisher

Bashu Publishing House China · Founded in 1983

Bashu Publishing House is a publisher centered on collating and publishing classical Chinese cultural texts, with its main publishing areas covering classical literature, Eastern philosophy, ancient poetry, and educational classics. Its library currently holds 1,075 titles, including representative works such as Dream of the Red Chamber, the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering, Renjian Cihua, and Out to the Frontier, involving authors such as Cao Xueqin, Wang Xizhi, Wang Guowei, Wang Changling, Liu Xie, and Yan Yu. These reflect the publisher's focus on literary classics, poetry criticism, and philosophical readings. Its publishing character lies in working around ancient texts and canonical works, with attention to textual collation and presentation. Public information on its more detailed publishing background and series plans is limited; this introduction is based only on the library's book information.

版权信息
纪孝行章第十

FAQ

What exactly are the "five things to strive for"?

They are the five attitudes a filial son should strive to achieve in serving his parents: respect, joy, concern, mourning, and solemnity. They correspond respectively to reverence in daily care, bringing joy to one's parents, sharing their worries, mourning them fully, and being dignified and courteous.

What are the "three things to guard against"?

They are arrogance, disorder, and contention. According to this chapter, a filial son serving his parents should guard against arrogance, against disrupting rules and standards, and against quarreling with others, so that his conduct keeps its proper measure and does not bring shame upon his parents.

This is only one chapter of The Classic of Filial Piety—is reading it enough?

As a single close reading it is enough to focus on understanding the specific items of conduct for a filial son serving his parents; to grasp the whole of The Classic of Filial Piety, one needs to read the entire book, and this chapter can be seen as one of its more concrete and accessible sections.

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About the author

Anonymous Author

Anonymous is not a real personal name but a general Chinese designation for authors whose names are unknown, lost, or unsigned. Neither nationality nor dates of birth and death can be verified, and available public information is limited, so the works attributed to this name are the only basis for description. The collection holds 2,078 works under Anonymous, spanning medicine, classics, historical readings, ancient poetry, classical literature, and philosophy. Representative works include The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon: Lingshu, Mencius, The Book of Documents, Nineteen Old Poems, Complete Song Ci, and The Peacock Flies Southeast. Most of these works took shape through long transmission and editing, emerging either from collective folk creation or from authors whose names were lost over time. In ancient China, the Book of Songs, the Great Learning, and many popular storybooks and plays were signed Anonymous because their authors could not be traced. Anonymous works cross the classics, histories, philosophical writings, medical texts, and poetry; their subjects are broad, and their styles vary from archaic simplicity to clear naturalness, making them important and influential sources for understanding ancient Chinese thought, medicine, and literature.