Connotation Of Punishment And Ritual

With the construction of Chinese legal system being more perfect, the academic study of China’s traditional legal culture has been more deeply. Among them, the study of the origin of the ancient law of China undoubtedly has become a difficult focus.Confined to the lack of historical data former generation of scholars were hard to go further. However, contemporary scholars have harvested fruitful results in the fields of jurisprudence, comparative culture and legal history respectively by virtue of the rich archaeological data and favorable conditions of multidisciplinary subjects. But there are still many issues have not been explored deeply.The origin of Chinese ancient law has a very profound historical background. At the end of the primitive society, with the continuous improvement of social productivity, the handicraft industry was separated from agriculture, which promoted the differentiation of social class and the gap between the rich and the poor. All these have provided the important social foundation for the generation of the ancient law.One of the important origin of Chinese ancient law is war, the so-called "punishment stems from the military". With the development of society, the competition between the formation of tribal and tribal alliances became more fierce, which inevitably led to war. In order to better manage the internal members of the tribe in the war and punish the captive of the hostile tribes, tribal rulers gradually formed a set of rules in the process, which is the original form of Chinese ancient law. This point was mainly reflected in the early classics such as the book Shangshu in terms of literature while concentrated in some vestiges of Henan Longshan culture in terms of archaeological data.Another origin of ancient law is China ritual, which produced in primitive ritual activities, the so-called "ceremonial offerings ". With the emergence of the early state, rulers began to grab the power of sacrifice to the priest and formed a set of constraints within the clan members of a code of conduct using sacrificial activities gradually. The ceremony occurred mainly in worship, worship, sacrifice and war related sacrifice. Compared to the harsh and cruel punishment, courtesy seemed to be milder. As a result, Chinese ancient law had the harsh color of punishment and guiding function of ritual since its existence.Compared with the origin of European law, we can better understand the characteristics of the origin of Chinese ancient law. The ancient law of China was born in the war, which resulted in the difference of the characteristics of the two kinds of legal culture, which was different from the European law. Law of ancient China with obvious characteristic of this group and western ancient law embodies the characteristics of the contract; in ancient Chinese law penalty should be emphasized, ancient western law with certain democratic color; China’s legal origin was full of group standard values, the ancient western private law was focused more on "personal" standard. The main causes of the difference between the two major legal systems were the different natural environment caused by the two major civilizations. As a reasonable result, the East and West in the ancient legal culture carried out their own unique but equally brilliant development paths.