Integration Of Sacred And Secular:the Ritual And Value Of Life

Value of life is a matter of religion, and this research could be regarded as a research of "peasants’ religion". Differ from the bible-Prophetic faith in west world, the superior experience of value that Chinese peasants get in their secular and moral daily, that is the integration of the sacred and the secular. Specifically, the scared value is intrinsic in one’s historical experience and the secular life contains the "ultimate and upmost concern".Unlike the contemporary new Confucianism that trying to explain the "internal transcendence" in traditional China culture from the perspective of the classics. As a sociological study, this paper is an empirical research on peasants’real moral life on base of extensive rural surveys. The ethical living way that integrated the sacred and the secular, reflects the humanist tradition of "moral instead of religion" in China. Actually, the religiosity embodies in peasants’moral life,"Godless religiosity" reflects the feature of "extremely wise but medium" in China culture."The ritual" is a cultural symbol that links society, oneself and the mind. The ritual is mainly characterized by historical experience and the value beyond that. Shaped by the ritual, the experiences of community life, personality and mind have sacred value that beyond their historical experience. For peasants,"ritual" means an "individual-family" structure, which is resulted from family institutions and rules. Under the framework of "procreation", it has special religious meaning that beyond sociology. Namely, peasants participate in family life to realize interpersonal self. The process to take the responsibility of family morality is also the stretch of moral life. Peasants rely on physical body to complete their moral life so as to realize their value of life."The ritual" is not only the social ethics that constraint interpersonal relations within a family, but also the bioethics to build up an "individual-lineage" system. Because of the ethics of life, individuals realize their value of life, meanwhile the value basis of family ethics formulated. In other words, it is the source of the legitimacy of family institution. The most important characteristics of "the ritual" is individual negation. Specifically, it emphasizes intimacy relationships within a family while rejecting individual and personal emotional expression. Actually, family ethics is ethicized from natural relationships. The sociological characters of "non-individualism" formulate the exercise basis for traditional peasants’living ethics, yet contradicts with that of individual-oriented modern liberalism. In the context of modern society, the living ethics of the ritual has long been neglected while the traditional "manner and order" becomes the target of ethics revolution.Political and social revolutions in modern period, referring to modern liberalism, mainly focus on modifications of traditional social institution and ideology. The integrated ritual leads to transformation that breaks up the political and social category and even becomes a "religious revolution". In other words, to change the traditional sociological forms of peasants’moral life is to destroy their belief of bioethics.Peasants’moral is turning to "daily application" with highly practicality. Under the participation of different powers such as political, cultural, economic and so on, two important sociological foundation collapse increasingly, namely the traditional family institution and the rural acquaintances community. Admittedly, they are of equally importance with ethnics transformation at ideological level.Having experienced the democratic revolution of family and transformation within acquaintances community, China was heading to an "individualized" society. It means a broken traditional organization structure instead of a super-individual entity, hence any social organization could be turned into individuals. In peasants’ new moral life, individualism is adored in faith while legislations are used to protect individual "rights" in practice. Admittedly, this new moral life is on the way to realize social freedom.In the context of China, a godless society, absolute freedom might lead to the plight of life value decline. In other words, liberal ethics could solve the problem of freedom well, however, it is far from settling the issue of value loss which is resulted from the destroy of traditional bioethics. For peasants, as the traditional "individual-family" structure as well as the "individual-lineage" bioethics system disrupt, the new marriage and family life becomes a simple accumulation of temporal matters, losing its value basis. Specifically,"the religious revolution in China" performs as the secularization of family life, which, however, formulates the essential confliction for China peasants who regard family as the ultimate and upmost concern. Both so-called "individual life" and "public political life" are secular issues, therefore could not meet peasants’ religious desire.Ever since the new culture movement, after nearly100years, efforts aiming to realize social freedom have achieved some success to a certain extent. The spiritual freedom, however, becomes worse as the sacred of traditional symbols weakens in the value of life. Therefore, the social construction of China in the future should not only focus on issues at social level, but also (or even more importantly) try to solve the problem of religious. Theoretically, the essential is to endow new cultural symbols with sacred value connotation.