Zeng Guofan’s Filial Piety Thought And Its Modern Inspirations

Filial piety is an integral part of the Chinese traditional moral and is the essence of Chinese traditional culture. It plays an important role in coordinating relations the family and maintaining feudal rule. Zeng Guofan as faith and heritage of traditional culture worships filial piety. In his more than a thousand letters, which contains rich filial idea. The author thinks it is very necessary to excavate and research filial piety thought of Zeng Guofan. This has important theoretical significance and practical implications.The formation of Zeng Guofan’s thought of filial piety was related with his background. The actual social situation and the decadent state of the family made Zeng Guofan urgently hope to keep the family prosperity and change the social objective through filial piety. This paper summed up and summarized the Zeng Guofan’s idea of filial piety and it’s contents included three aspects such as filial as the foundation of starting person’s own family and career, Ti as the necessary of family’s prosperity and filial and Ti weightier than fame and fortune. It not only has a high official positions and riches among the inheritance of traditional filial piety, but also has his own understanding and thinking. For example, Zeng Guofan against the traditional empty preaching norm, filial piety was proposed to implement into practice. In the treatment of relationship between the brothers, Zeng Guofan pointed out the true love should advise them to correct shortcomings and persuade to make progress. He reconsidered the relationship between filial piety and loyalty, filial piety and filial piety to put forward the high official positions and riches, loyalty, filial piety is greater than the high official positions and riches.Of course, we research the filial piety thought of Zeng Guofan can not just stay in the summary of the thought should also profound reflection on the thought. Through objective evaluation of Zeng Guofan’s ideology of filial piety, the author excavated from the three modern enlightenment: holding a dialectical view of the traditional family ethics and promoting the reasonable factors; attaching great importance to family education as the breakthrough point of social moral construction; treating rationally family relationship and being a man of fine character.