A Research On The Thought Of Official Virtue In Mid-Tang Dynasty

The official virtue is the sum of the concept leading to the goodness, the value of goodness, and the method and the spirit of practice which were developed during the complementing, perfecting and surmounting. The official virtue is of universal meaning and special value and it formed in the social and political practice of the officials as the main practical body. The official virtue is formed on the basis of self-discipline mechanism and external behavior as the core values in Confucianism.The official virtue in mid-Tang Dynasty is the product of the development of economy, society and culture in mid-Tang Dynasty. The unharmonious king-subject relationship in political situation. The Confucianism weak to flourish the official virtue and the imperial examination system which attached too much importance to the literature and neglected the virtue of the expectant officials all put forward severe challenges to the official virtue in mid-Tang Dynasty. So it is necessary to revive the Confucianism, revitalize the philosophy of the Confucius and reconstruct the Confucian ethics morals in order to maintain the ethical order of the society.The ideology about the official virtue was formed on the basis of the understanding of these problems:Firstly, the relationship theory between the nature and the human. Secondly, the theory of human nature which was good or evil in original. The third, what was the Confucian philosophy and how to pursuit it. The understanding of these problems has solved the necessity, possibility and importance of strengthening the moral cultivation.In the traditional ethical society, the human had thought much about the virtue, and formed a comprehensive and abundant theory system. The virtue of cultivating ourselves is the base of inner cultivation and exterior action, and is the basic moral accomplishment for officials too. The virtue of the Monarch and his subjects and the relationship between the Monarch and his subjects directly impacted the political virtue and the political activities and had great influence to the social development.The bureaucratic systems, the laws and the feudal etiquette as the outcome of the socialization and institutionalization of the virtue had left deep moral mark of superstructure. These systems, laws and the etiquette had been accepted by the public and could not be violated by the officials. The requirements to the officials mainly embodied in the following aspects:the steps of selection, appointment and assessment; the feudal etiquette of offering sacrifices to the heaven, the earth, the gods and the ancestors; the laws on how to keep the feudal autocratic order, practice family ethics and perform the official functions.In mid-Tang Dynasty, the ideologists as HAN Yu, LI ao, LIU Zongyuan, LIU Yuxi and LU Zhi had firstly realized the crisis of the official virtue and formed the theories about the official virtue which were of era features and universal significance. These theories including the aids of moral cultivation, the self-cultivation realm and the cultivation method not only had been paid great attention by the public in that era, but also inspired future generations.The intellectual elite had a strong sense of loss and they had deeply queried and introspected the universe、the society and their life in mid-Tang Dynasty. At the same time, the intellectual elite had faced the major changes and the total reform of the theoretical form of Confucianism. The ideology about official virtue in mid-Tang Dynasty had not developed into general knowledge、thought and beliefs, but it had intensively reflected the mainstream ideology of the officer culture and the answers and thinkings of the practical social problems. So we could draw the conclusion that ideology about the official virtue in mid-Tang Dynasty had its great influence、value and status, and it had inherited the traditional virtue in Han Dynasty, reversed the social climate of self-indulgence and disregarding the monarch in Wei and Jin Dynasty, and enlightened the combination of the inner cultivation and exterior action in Song Dynasty.We could find the characteristics of the theories of the moral cultivation by making a comprehensive survey:pay more attention to the Confucianism and be compatible with the Buddhism and the Taoism, inner-cultivation oriented and lay equal stress on exterior political action, complement self-discipline and heterodoxy,etc. when we put the theories of the official moral cultivation in the context of the whole social thought, we also could find that:the original of the official moral cultivation was variety, they had dual worldview and they are contradictory between the Confucian orthodoxy and governance system,etc.