The Origin And Development Of The Content Of "Gong"

In the history of Chinese traditional ideology, "Gong" is a critical category. Besides representing dignitary identities and public places, contrary to "Si", "Gong" has more significantly ethical implications of "fairness", "justice", and "equity" et al., making "Gong" dominates "Si" in all aspects. In Chinese history, these ethical implications of "Gong" continuously combined with "heaven", "methodology" and "truth", guiding the rulers to constitute the strategies for governance, becoming the factors that affect Chinese political and legal ideology, and penetrating in the developing path of Chinese conventional social order.The principles of "Gong" are derived based on Chinese peoples'particular belief in "Heaven". Quoted from Liu's Commentaries of History, the sentence "Sunlight unselfishly illuminates the land, the land unselfishly supports all things on earth" indicates the unselfishness of Heaven, which keeps growing in the framework of Chinese traditional ideology. "Gong" inherits the unselfishness of Heaven, and presents an appearance of fairness and justice, enabling "Tian Xia Wei Gong" to be a social ideal beyond the political formations. With the consensus on "Tian Xia Wei Gong", ruler's political moral and personality are extremely important. In the history of Chinese monarchy, "Tian Xia Wei Gong" gradually changed to another form of "Tian Xia Wei Jun", and the rulers'unselfishness was actually becoming selfishness. By the end of Ming Dynasty, some ideologist had started to thinking and observing that the scope of "Gong" enlarged, changing from "Rulers'selfishness" to the big "Gong" of "Peoples'selfishness".Since Song Dynasty, the definition of "Gong" had continued to be combined with "Justice". From the strong opposition between "Gong of Justice" and "Si of People's desire" to the weakness of such opposition, emphasizing the automaticity of people's desire, single people's desire had been substituted with all peoples'desires, and the "Gong" of the humans could be achieved through fulfilling all peoples' desires. From the peoples' perspective on nature, such "Gong of Justice" becomes a kind of reasonable order with the concept of natural law.