Confucian Concept Of The Family To Explore

During the Spring and Autumn period, the negative respect of social customs challenged the family ethics and family life, which became the chance for Confucians to dwell on the matters of family. The disintegration of the patriarchal clan system brought the separation of family from state and clan, thus made the value of key family standing out, which caught the eyes of Confucians on family. The family ethnics of ci (kindness), xiao (obedience), you (benevolence), and ti (love and respect), which had already existed in the three dynasties, provided the embryonic form for the formation of the Confucian family concepts. These were the prerequisites for the birth of the Confucian family concepts before the Qin dynasty.The Confucian concepts of family based on the ideas about home life, family relationship, household management, family ethics, and relation between family and state. As for the home life, the Confucians thought that happy and harmony were the keynote of the home life. They believed that the ideal family life should be consisted of the principles of happiness and harmony, the leisurely way of life, the atmosphere full of warm affections, the frugal living style, and the peaceful and amicable residence circumstances. However, the realization of home life full of happy and harmony depended on both the design of the family order and regulation of the family management. The favorable condition of family order was to justify the ethical relations between father and son, husband and wife as well as the elder and the younger. The key for the household management was to make full use of the effect of etiquettes and music. The etiquettes could make each member understand his/her position in family, and the music could help the family members love each other, and strengthen the cohesive force of the family. The focus of Confucian family theory was their attention to family ethics, which was the main part of Confucian family concepts. Meanwhile, house-keeping and state-running became the destination of the Confucian family concepts. No matter how many differences or similarities between family-keeping and state-running, Confucians worked hard for the inherent consistence between them and family-keeping became both the starting point and destination of state-running.Meanwhile constructing concepts on family, this paper highlights two clues. One isthe theoretical change from the Confucius' and Mencius' focus on home life itself to the Xunzi' focus on the moral and social nature of family. The other is the inner logic which lies in the family concepts of Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, and relative books and documents. The reason for the former's development was the requirement for the social and political order design, and the mode of relative thinking determined the latter's development.The Confucian concepts of family before the Qin dynasty exerted great impact on the Chinese history. Their meaning in the intellectual history is the consistence and they also became the foundation of the Confucian Utopia theory, while their meaning in the history of society was embodied in their influence on the social structure of the ancient China. For instance, they had impacted greatly on the formation of the expanded families and the structure of difference. Meanwhile, they exerted impact on the ancient social customs and traditions.