Family Reverence (xiao 孝) in the Analects: Confucian Role Ethics and the Dynamics of Intergenerational Transmission

Abstract

We begin this chapter on family reverence (xiao 孝) from the assumption that within the interpretive framework of the Analects, associated, interpersonal living is taken to be an uncontested, empirical fact. Every person lives and every event takes place within a vital natural, social, and cultural context. Association being a fact, our different roles lived within family and society are nothing more than the stipulation of specific modes of associated living: mothers and grandsons, teachers and neighbors. While we must take associated living as a simple fact, however, the consummate conduct that comes to inspire and to produce virtuosity in the roles lived in family, community, and the cultural narrative broadly—what we have called Confucian role ethics—is an achievement; it is what we are able with imagination to make of the fact of association. Confucian role ethics are perpetuated through family lineages that have complex political, economic, and religious functions. One way of understanding the dynamics of “family reverence” (xiao) as intergenerational transmission is to appeal to two cognate characters that are integral to the continuities of the family lineage: ti 體 (“body,” “embodying,” “forming and shaping,” “category, class”) and li 禮 (“ritual,” “achieving propriety in one’s roles and relations”). The living body and our embodied living is the narrative site of a conveyance of the cultural corpus of knowledge—linguistic proficiency, religious rituals, the aesthetics of cooking, song, and dance, the modeling of mores and values, and so on—through which a living civilization is perpetuated.