Yan Parental Instruction "family Ethics And Modern Enlightenment

Yan Zhitui, the most learned scholar, was a famous historian, writing phonological expert, thinker, and educator in Wei, Jin and the Southern and Northern Dynasties. Living in a period of long-term wars and chaos in China's history, Yan dedicated the latter half of his years to summarizing his life experience, his philosophy of life and household management skills into a book called Family Instructions of Yan, the classics of Chinese Family Instructions. The aim of writing this book is to educate his descendants and guarantee the prosperity of his family.Family Instructions of Yan is characterized as rich contents and complicated system. Besides the pedagogy, it still covers some fields such as sociology, literature, phonology. Based on predecessors' achievements, this paper elaborates family ethics in Family Instructions of Yan for better understanding Chinese traditional family ethics and supplying useful suggestions for constructing the modern family ethics.This paper consists of four parts. The first part discusses the background of family ethics in Family Instructions of Yan, which is related with the special times of Wei, Jin and the Southern and Northern Dynasties:the frequency of wars, hunger threat, the decline in Confucianism and the emergence of Buddhism and metaphysics. On the other hand, his personal experience plays an important role in writing this book. After acting as a senior civil serve in four dynasties and witnessing the replacement of dynasties for three times, Yan who was born in a noble family and experienced various sufferings realized the importance of Confucian ethics to the stability and unity of a family.The second part talks about family ethics on how to educate children, manage a family, learn knowledge and be a man. Where it comes to children's education, he puts forward prenatal education, preschool education, and lifelong education, and emphasizes moral education, courtesy education and language usage. As to education methods, he stresses the influence of parents on children and promotes the proper punishment if necessary. On household management, Family Instructions of Yan is the first to use Confucianism to remain harmonious relations between family members, including husband and wife, father and son, brothers and step-parents and stepchildren relations. He not only discusses the importance of handling these relationships, but also puts forward the principles of dealing with these issues, holding that the family relationship determines to a large extent t success or failure of the whole family. He also advocates a proper frugal attitude toward household management, recommends a concept of marriage focusing on the characters of spouses rather than their wealth and cares about the way to keep good health. As far as scholarship is concerned, Yan promotes diligence and argues that the purpose of study is to gain virtue, and puts knowledge into practice. In order to learn well, a person is required to read extensively so as to broaden his vision. On how to be a man, Yan warns his children should be honest and content with their present life, and careful when making friends.On the base of thorough analysis of the main contents of the Family Instructions of Yan, the third part makes comments on its positive significance and historical limitations. It contributes greatly to the inheritance and development of Confucianism, and other Family Instructions. Specifically, Family Instructions of Yan illustrates the main ideas of Confucianism and tends to bind words and deeds of daily life to Confucianism, which spreads the essence of Confucianism. Because of these, Family Instructions of Yan was viewed as the pioneer in the history of Chinese ancient Family Instructions. Since its publishing, it has created a unique Chinese literature genre and been regarded as the first systematic and theoretical work of Family Instructions. The following Family Instructions adopted its fundamental value and formed the basic elements of our present education system. The historical limitations of Family Instructions of Yan lies in utilitarian thought for study, feudal hierarchy based on education, the feudal ethical code built on sex discrimination and superstition concerning karma and reincarnationThe last part is related with its enlightenment on modern family ethics education in the following aspects. Firstly, its educational thoughts such as preschool education, self-reliance and the influence of environment exert an important effect on modern families and school educations. Secondly, its household management focusing on family ethics, frugality and rational marriage plays a positive role in constructing a harmonious family at present. Thirdly, its scholarship concepts related with life time education, extensive reading, serious learning, and the unity of learning and acting are very helpful for us to form a good academic atmosphere. Besides that, modesty and honesty advocated in his book are still important factors to establish a harmonious personal relationship. The points mentioned above are the ultimate aim for us to learn Family Instructions of Yan today.