A Comparative Analysis Of Views Of Death And Life Between Chinese And Western Cultures

Since the beginning of human culture, the mystery of death has been puzzling the human mind. For thousands of years, many religions and philosophic schools were introduced to explain the phenomenon of death to ease men's fear of it. However, none of them is all successful. As a result, due to the inevitability of death, people tend to choose transcendence. And the way one chooses for transcendence reflects the unique cultural features between Chinese and Western cultures.Funeral is the external ritual of death transcendence, which exists both in China and in Western counties but with different rituals. These funeral rituals are the prominent expression of cultural differences, and are also considered as the indicator of the social civilization degree. As a unique social activity and cultural behavior, funeral rituals are as old as civilization of human beings, representing the prototypical human perceptions about the world and their relationship with it. Therefore, the study on funeral rituals remains a humanistic concern by scholars of all times. The contrastive funeral rituals manifest different understandings and interpretations of death on the part of the Chinese and Westerners. This paper is intended to explore the original causes for these distinct funeral rituals from the perspective of philosophy, religion and culture so as to gain a grasp of different characters of the two cultures.Great differences between Chinese and Western culture freeze the apparently different attitudes toward death of the two peoples, which mirror the different modes of thinking and different structure of emotion shaped in the two people through thousands of years. As a result, it is these different views of life and death that nurtured the different characters of two cultures and influenced the course of human history. For Chinese culture. Confucianism and Taoism played an indispensable role in shaping and established ancient Chinese culture, so they are the most powerful approach to interpret the Chinese-characteristic view of death and life. Confucianism focused on practicing "Three Builts", thus laying emphasis on realistic life in order to achieve immortality, while Taoism paid special attention to heavenly law, thinking life and death was simply a matter of nature and appealed for little emotional involvement. On the contrary, the Western view of death and life in ancient was derived from the perspective of "termination" (.i e. death), hence advocating the idea of "soul immortality'This thesis mainly consists of five chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces the significance and innovation of this thesis. Chapter Two is the general literature review of the criticism theory that is applied in this thesis. Chapter Three minutely introduce the different funeral rituals between Chinese and Western countries. Chapter Four intends to make a comparative analysis of the funeral rites, so as to sum up the different view of death and life between China and the West as well as its reasons. The last chapter is a conclusion of the whole thesis.The author offers her own commentary on different attitudes toward death between Chinese and Western cultures by making a relatively thorough exploration and analysis of their respective cultural reasons with the aim to help current people to develop their active world outlook and optimistic view of life.