Song Dynasty Family Rituals and the Reconstruction of Confucian Daily Life

Abstract

The reconstruction of Confucianism during the Song dynasty is an important issue in the history of Chinese thought. Song scholar-officials not only introduced ideological innovations and founded the new type of Confucianist “School of Universal Principle” known as “Neo-Confucianism,” but also, in their reconstruction of Confucianism, attended to the specific rituals and introduced the concepts and values of the school into people’s daily life and habits. The observance of ritual privately at home – using ritual to “instruct” and “admonish” the family – became the way for scholar-officials to embody Confucian values effectively in daily life. Song family rituals developed differences from previous eras with respect to text, structure, and meaning. However, as rituals that comprehensively arranged the order of Confucian daily life, they were not merely a static Neo-Confucian text and system. Rather, scholar-officials’ ritual activities were always the concrete, dynamic aspect of the Confucian revival movement. Therefore, we must begin the discussion of family rituals from a wider perspective, first by exploring the motivation and goals of scholar-officials’ rituals. We will then discover how frustrated and compromised scholar-officials of the period felt when the pattern of daily life they had created proved difficult to accommodate to the real world. We will finally take note of the value system that this pattern was meant to demonstrate.