What is the origin and original meaning of filial piety culture?
There is a sentence in The Book of Songs, the earliest collection of poems in China, which fully explains the original meaning of filial piety: in the process of productive labor and constant struggle with nature, it is a sacrificial activity that respects and worships ancestors. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, the original meaning of filial piety gradually bid farewell to obscurity and thinness and became obvious. With the development of social productive forces, human beings have realized the importance of human resources, that is, "many hands make light work". Filial piety, reflected in ideology, has been given a new meaning-bearing children and carrying on the family line. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, social progress made people's understanding of nature and ghosts and gods tend to be rational in production practice. The disintegration of patriarchal clan system has made people's ancestor worship activities from complex to simple; The establishment of a family form based on the system of "one husband and one hundred mu of land" made supporting parents the most basic obligation of blood relationship in the family, and being kind to parents became the core content of filial piety culture at that time. A hundred schools of thought contended during the Warring States period, which brought great ideological liberation to the whole society. Confucius, the originator of Confucian culture in China, closely revolved around the core connotation of good parents, enriched and developed the profound connotation of filial piety culture, put forward the idea of "benevolence", found a reasonable human foundation and philosophical argument for the integration of filial piety into Confucian traditional culture, and completed the transformation of filial piety from religion to morality and from clan ethics to family ethics. With the continuous improvement of Confucian masters such as Ceng Zi and Mencius, China's filial piety culture has been fully developed. In the Han Dynasty, filial piety began to enter the political arena and was brought into the feudal moral system, which became the ideological basis of China's feudal patriarchal autocratic rule. Dong Zhongshu, a great Confucian in Han Dynasty, clearly put forward and systematically demonstrated the theory of "two cardinal guides", and determined the ethical relationship between father and son, monarch and minister, and husband and daughter. Filial piety began to directly obey the moral standard of "father is son" and indirectly serve "the monarch is the minister and the husband is the wife" Since the Han Dynasty, rulers or thinkers of all dynasties have consciously regarded filial piety culture as the ethical and spiritual basis of feudal political rule.