Study On The Family Ethics Of The Yuan Family Education

Yuan Cai's masterpiece "The Yuan Family Education", together with "The Yan Family Education" by Yan Zhitui in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, are two parallel works of education. Abstract of Complete Imperial Collection of Four Literature Branches describes the Book in such way: "this book has particularly discussed the ways of conducting oneself in society. It intimately and sincerely educates and encourages the people. Its contents are evident and easy for understanding. Frankly, this book could even compete with the Yuan Family Education " The Book is widely recognized as a paradigm that "was popular with the people at the times when it was written and carried forward as classic educational literature by generations till now." The in-depth study and exploration on family ethic thinking of the Book could help us understand the moral essences and basic ideas and features of ancient family ethic. Meanwhile, it could shed light on the fundamental evolvement and development processes of traditional family ethic so that we could more profoundly and comprehensively perceive its thinking system. From the perspective of reality connotation, by exploring the family ethic thinking in the Book, we might find some essential ideas that go beyond the times and have universal and eternal values. This could play a positive role for the building of socialistic and harmonious family ethic and the solutions of "The Yuan Family Education" issues and household and social conflicts in our present society.This article takes family ethic thinking of "The Yuan Family Education" as study objective, and utilizes historic methodology and comparative approach to discuss and analyze the composition background, major contents, realistic values, and historic influences of the Book. Thus, we could gain profound understanding upon ancient family instructions and meaningful references to the building of modern family ethic. This article discusses the theme from three aspects:The first section discusses the historic and cultural background of "The Yuan Family Education" at the times when it was written. Through overall analysis on political, economic, thinking cultures, and other aspects of Southern Song Dynasty, we could understand the epochcontext when the Book was first compiled. Based on this, we study the historic evolvement of family instructions to perceive the developmental processes of family instructions and discover how "The Yuan Family Education" appeared and the reasons why family instruction culture of Song Dynasty prospered along with its features.The second section studies the major contents of family ethic thinking of "The Yuan Family Education", which is the highlight of this article. The section conducts analysis based on the content structure of the Book. First, family ethic thinking primarily focusing on individual self-restraint is discussed. Numerous proposed attainment principles and norms are mentioned, such as loyalty, trust, respect, integrity, fairness, treating others with tolerance, equally dealing with the poor and the rich, righteous behavior, cautious wording, compliancewith social norms and etiquettes and customs. The significant approaches for self-restraint are better moral education, and emphasis on study and family environment. Second, the harmonization of family interpersonal relationships and the cultivation of family and moral traits are covered in this section, in which the inter-personal relationships between the husband and the wife, between the elder brother and the younger brother, between the senior and the young, with neighbors, along with other norms are discussed. Lastly, many useful family management ethic thinking proposed in the Book is studied. Trade-off with income and expense, living a prudent but happy and secure life, farming land management, management of slaves, maids, and renters, along with other aspects are systematically analyzed from the legal and moral perspective.The third section analyzes the historic values, limitations, and modern applications and revelations of "The Yuan Family Education", based on the in-depth exploration of the major contents of the Book. The rich thinking essences contained in "The Yuan Family Education" is a piece of valuable cultural heritage to the offspring. Although modern families have great differences with tradition ones, and moral norms and family management methods constantly change with family evolvement, the ancient people still leaves us universal family ethic ideas and reasonable family education methods. These are very valuable for the building of modern family ethic. By creative transition and combination with practices, we still could make full play of these unique assets in our modern society.