Study Of The Tang Dynasty Family Loyalty And Filial Piety

Loyal and filial piety concept has a long history, it played an important social function since it came out and it formed a system of moral and ethical norms in the Qin and Han Dynasties. The politics was unstable during the WeiJin Dynasties, it caused a serious imbalance of family loyal and filial piety, people at that time strengthened the filial piety idea too much to miss the loyal idea. The loyal filial piety concept was reconstructed during the SuiTang Dynasty; it has formed a new loyal filial piety idea in the multicultural Tang Dynasty.The power of an empire relies on the stability and prosperity of the families. The king of the Tang Dynasty praised and encouraged the loyal activities by building policies and propagandizing his thought. The loyal filial piety especially loyal idea is the ultimate objective of the king, economically prosperous and politically privileged bureaucratic gentry families are the main strength on which the king family relies. They serve the country, defend the feudal official festival stubbornly and rush toward the battlefield loyally; groups of ordinary people as monks and nuns, priests, their loyalty concept is consistent with the upper class.The family is a part of society and social upheaval will lead to changes in the concept of family loyalty inevitably. The Tang Dynasty, which lasted nearly for three hundred years, has gone from prosperity to the fortunes of the historical process of failure, the family loyal idea presents to slide from the dreariness to the strengthening to even, its social function also moves toward the attenuation from the strengthening, these changes are also consistent with the changes of Confucianism thought.Loyalty is the basis of filial piety and filial piety is the purpose and sublimation of loyalty, the two are essentially the same, but there is often a conflict hard to reconcile between the two. The king family take loyalty as a center and they hope the loyalty and the filial piety unify harmoniously, once endangers the rule they would give up filial piety for loyalty. The bureaucrat hereditary scholar classes believe that we should pay equal attention to the loyalty and the filial piety, once we cannot have both, keep loyalty is the only way out and it also caters for the ordinary people.The family loyalty and filial piety develop to different degrees due to different kinds of factors in the Tang Dynasty, political, economical, thought and cultural factors are the main reasons. All in all, The Tang Dynasty has inherited the Qin and Han Dynasties' family loyal filial piety view, then through their own transformation and development, it also has laid foundations for the Song Dynasty family loyal filial piety view.