The Research On Allegiance And Filial Piety Of The Pre-Qin Dynasties

"Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" are both important ethical theories of ancient China. "Allegiance" means "to serve the king" and "Filial Piety" means "to provide for one’s parents", which both had been used as essential criterions during the past two thousands years. While people choose to believe that "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" are centralized in their meanings, they did have experienced many conflicts and deep-seated dilemma in ancient dynasties. During the Pre-Qin Dynasties, especially the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, tremendous social transform took place and therefore, both "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" had reformed obviously. Through the study of the materials of these two important ethical theories, especially when the study was combined with the search of social reforming of that time, we may have a better knowledge on the developing procedure of Pre-Qin ethics.Senior scholars have already worked on relevant themes and a vast amount of thesis had been written during past several decades. But it has to be pointed out that most of those research chose to focus on one or two specific school of thought and were often based on microcosmic perspective. Meanwhile, most of these research tended to "describe" the phenomenon itself but failed in analysing and explaining the inner reason of the tremendous transform of the two important ethical theories.During the complex societal change of pre-Qin dynasties, family ethics and political ethics, which were respectively represented by filial piety and allegiance, had a delicate relationship. To be more specific, while for most of time family ethics and political ethics stayed unified, they did have noticeable contradiction in particular situations. Based on the studies of discourses on the relationships between family ethics and political ethics in pre-Qin dynasties, it is clear that during that period, political ethics gradually outweighed family ethics. Based on Pre-Qin document and literature, this thesis tends to focus on the study of the relations between "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" and to explain the reasons of the change that had experienced by the two ethical theories during the change from feudalism to the system of prefectures and counties. To be more specific, this thesis aimed at studying relevant doctrines of different scholars in chronological order, and to analyse the inner cause of the change of the two ethical theories from the perspective of the collapse of feudalism.This paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, "Exordium" is a brief introduction on basic methods and senior scholars’ study which points out the main question and innovation of this thesis. This chapter pointed out that the thesis focuses on discussing the relations between "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" and aimed at solving the problem of what kind of procedure did the two ethical concept experience during the Pre-Qin dynasties. The second chapter aimed at studying the meaning of "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" during the dynasties of Shang and Western-Zhou, pointed it out that both "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety" were completely formed during this period, and that these two ethical theories were relatively independent. Also, this chapter proves that the two ethical theories were widely accepted by most of people at that time. The third chapter, "The collision of Allegiance and filial piety during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods" is one of the most important part of this paper, which discussed materials and relevant viewpoints of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in a macroscopical way. Section one of this chapter focused on the typical examples of the collision between the two ethical theories, and divided these typical viewpoints into three different categories, while section two, "Collisions between Allegiance and filial piety:on the view of Pre-Qin scholars" discussed and analysed the relevant academic viewpoint of Kong Zi, Ceng Zi, Mo-tse, Meng Zi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and Lu’s Commentaries of History in time sequence. The main idea of this section is that from Kong Zi to Han Feizi, "Allegiance" experienced a procedure of being increasingly essential, while filial piety’s importance had been gradually overcame by Allegiance itself, and that to reconcile the two, the monarch built the theory of changing filial obedience into allegiance. To be more specific, this change was mainly caused by the reform of social bracket during that dynasties. Based on the discussion above, the fourth chapter tries to work out an analysis of the great change of the relation of the two ethical theories. The central idea of this chapter is that it was the great change of social structure during the Pre-Qin dynasties that caused the tremendous reversion of filial and allegiance, and that changing filial obedience into allegiance is an inevitable consequence of the collision and dilemma of the two important ethical. In this chapter, a macroscopical viewpoint of why the relations of these two important theories could have such a drastic change during that time was put forward. This conclusion can be explained briefly as follows:the dramatic reform of the feudalism to counties system was the main reason of the gradual change of "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety", to be more specific, while bureaucrat take the place of aristocratic stratum,the object of "Allegiance" had turned to newly-formed bureaucrat stratum, which directly reformed the situation of the relations between "Allegiance" and "Filial Piety".