The Family Ethics And Modern Values Of Yuan Family Instruction

Yuan Family Instruction is honored as the second famous family instruction works, another landmark following Yan Family Instruction in the history of the Chinese family instruction works. It is a set of statesman and self-cultivation experience summarized by Yuan Cai on the basis of learning from predecessors and personal feeling. Yuan Family Instruction eliminates the rigid and orthodox color in the traditional family instruction, and advocates practically useful and human natural family ethical principles and norms. At present, academic circles’ attitude to Yuan Family Instruction isn’t in accordance with its higher status in the history of family instruction, their study on Yuan Family Instruction exists obvious deficiency, while the study from the perspective of ethics is more scanty. Though the study on the rich family ethics embodied in Yuan Family Instruction, the article analyses the principles and norms of statesman and self-cultivation comprehensively, evaluates the values and limitation of the family ethics objectively, exploits the underlying essence of the traditional family ethics strenuously, injects fresh blood into the construction of modern family ethics, and provides a valuable reference to solve a variety of family ethic problems existing in contemporary society.This article takes the family ethics of Yuan Family Instruction as study objective from the perspective of the ethics, though in-depth study of historical book, uses comparative, historical and intersectional methods synthetically to analyze the writing background and the main content, then makes a historical evaluation and discusses the modern value, finally, both reaches the understanding of the traditional family instruction, and provides new enlightenment for the construction of modern family ethics.The study on the family ethics of Yuan Family instruction in this article includes three parts:The first part elaborates the background which the family ethics of Yuan Family Instruction forms. The background mainly includes two aspects: one is the development background of family instruction culture. Based on the investigation to the cultural background and development course of family ethics, this part reveals the causes and characteristics of family instruction flourishing in the song dynasty, and highlights that Yuan Family Instruction is the result of the development of family instruction; The other is the social and historical condition at that time. Based on the investigation to all Yuan Cai’s life, and combined with the characteristics of his time in aspects of politics, economy and culture, this part reveals that Yuan Family Instruction Instructions is a product of the times.The second part is the key section of the article that focuses on the main content of family ethics contained in Yuan Family Instruction. This part mainly discusses the three aspects about the content structure of the Book. Firstly, How to deal with the main family relationships are elaborated, including the relationships between father and son, husband and wife, the senior and the young, the elder brother and the younger brother, and concrete moral put forward; Secondly, many constructive principles about family management included in Yuan Family Instruction are extracted, specifically, some beneficial ethical concepts about consumption, security, management and business are expounded in detail; Lastly, the construction of the family ethics are based on personal self-cultivation. This part expounds the principle of moral that individuals should abide by in such aspects as treating people, making friends, survival and cultivation etc, emphasizes that family moral education, reading and learning, and environmental influence are an important way to improve the personal cultivation.The third part deeply analyzes the positive and negative historical influence of the family ethics on the base of the understanding of the background and the content of the Book. Though the analysis of the characteristics of modern family and its ethics, this part explores the conflict and fusion between the family ethics of the Book and the modern family ethics, focuses on excavating the values of the family ethics of Yuan Family Instruction to the construction of modern harmonious family ethics, especially in optimizing the family ethics relationships, promoting the efficiency of the family management and improving the individual moral level.