CHAPTER XIX.
FILIAL PIETY.
TO discuss the characteristics of the Chinese without mentioning filial piety, is out of the question. But the filial piety of the Chinese is not an easy subject to treat. These words, like many others which we are obliged to employ, have among the Chinese a sense very different from that which we are accustomed to attach to them, and a sense of which no English expression is an exact translation. This is also true of a great variety of terms used in Chinese, and of no one more than of the word ordinarily rendered "ceremony" (li), with which filial piety is intimately connected. To illustrate this, and at the same time to furnish a background for what we have to say of the characteristic under discussion, we cannot do better than to cite a passage from M. Callery (quoted in the "Middle Kingdom"): "Ceremony epitomises the entire Chinese mind; and in my opinion, the Book of Rites is per se the most exact and complete monograph that China has been able to give of herself to other nations. Its affections, if it has any, are satisfied by ceremony; its duties are fulfilled by ceremony; its virtues and vices are referred to ceremony; the natural relations of created beings essentially link themselves in ceremonial—in a word, to that people ceremonial is man as a moral, political, and religious being, in his multiplied relations with family, society, and religion." Every one must agree in Dr. Williams's comment upon this passage, that it shows how "meagre a rendering is 'ceremony' for the Chinese idea of li, for it includes not only the external conduct,
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