Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
FILIAL PIETY.
When the early Jesuit missionaries to China compiled their valuable Memoires concernant les Chinois, they devoted the half of one large volume to the literature which has grown up around the doctrine of filial piety. It is noteworthy, however, that there is a marked abstention from either praise or blame of this celebrated article of faith—for so we may almost call it—on the part of the editors of the series. But we have heard the filial piety of the Chinese commended in the highest terms by foreign critics, and even by foreign missionary critics. One writer, at any rate, has gone so far as to say that in the long-continued existence of the Chinese Empire we have a fulfilment of the Fifth Commandment—"Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land." It would be idle to speculate what connection there may be between respect to parents and a prolongation of land-tenure in any given society, and equally idle to attempt to prove, from what we know of Chinese history, that the doctrine of filial piety as practised in China has directly or indirectly conduced to the preservation of that country in a national and political sense. Our object is less ambitious, and we will state our meaning in the fewest and most pointed words at our command. Briefly, then, the doctrine of filial piety, as practised and interpreted in China, is in many ways a curse and a calamity to the people. It is a flagrant and flagitious example of a virtue exaggerated into a vice. The admiration of the Chinese is extorted for numerous instances of filial piety that have come down from antiquity, and they are taught to believe that upon this is based their loyalty to the Throne. No brighter pattern of this so-called virtue exists than that of the great Emperor Shun, who, cursed with an unnatural father and a malignant stepmother, who on one occasion burnt his house down over his ears, and on another threw him down a well, went about roaring and weeping to Compassionate Heaven in the channelled fields. And why?—because of his parents' cruelty? No; but because of his own imagined vileness—vileness which can have been the only cause of their ill-treatment of him, so virtuous a person shrinking from imputing any blame to those who had given him life. Is not such a type degrading? Then there was another bright example, an old philosopher, who at the age of seventy used to dress himself up in a baby's frock and dance around and roll about the floor, shaking a rattle or beating a little drum, simply to amuse his doting parents, who are said to have cackled with delight as their venerable offspring jerked himself about and frolicked for their entertainment. Nearly all the instances of filial piety held up to the Chinese for imitation are equally grotesque and mischievous. But worse remains behind. No man, be he a viceroy or a general, or what he may, or whatever age he may have attained, is a free agent so long as his father is alive. In the eye of custom and the law he is a child—a minor. The highest and most cultured man in China may thus be legally at the disposal of an unlettered and narrow-minded boor, if it happens that his father was born and has remained a peasant, and he himself has risen. The ethical works of China teem with admonitions to children how to perform their duty to their parents, but there is scarcely one that touches upon the duty that parents owe their children. It is not too much to say that a Chinese father has more absolute power over the members of his family than the Emperor has over his realm. Only last year the Peking Gazette recorded the horrible fact of a mother burying her own child alive, and the Emperor condoning, even if not actually approving, the loathsome crime. Had that son, even by accident or in a fit of lunacy, caused the death of the virago, he would have been slowly sliced to death and the flesh peeled off his bones. Some time after this, an unhappy woman, in trying to save herself from outrage at the hands of her father-in-law, killed him; and instead of being commended for her virtue, was condemned to death by the slicing process. Such is the doctrine of filial piety in China, so much cried up by those who have never studied it. When Voltaire adopted as the motto of his life the stirring war-cry, "Ecrasez l'Infâme" what was that Infamous he sought to crush? It was the vile and intolerant spirit that hated, persecuted, tortured, and did to death all who took the liberty of thinking for themselves. That spirit exists still, and everywhere, though in a different form. It is that which gives the license or affords an excuse for all cruelty and rank injustice, and we deliberately affirm that there is no cruelty or injustice ever perpetrated in China grosser than that which is based upon this pernicious doctrine of filial piety. To be filial a man must be a grovelling slave, ready to repudiate his own knowledge and sacrifice his prospects in life at the dictum of a possibly prejudiced and ignorant father. To be filial a man must never dare to cherish a new or independent thought, for his ancestors had never had such thoughts, and would probably have condemned them if they had. Superstition and obstructiveness of the most fatal type are thus made to hinge upon the doctrine of filial piety—which is by no means confined to a domestic application, but runs through the entire social polity of China—just as they were made to hinge upon Church traditions in the Middle Ages. Fanaticism and its offspring cruelty—the spirit that leads men to bind each other's souls and torture each other's bodies—constitute, to our mind, a sin for which a new name ought to be discovered. It may almost be called sacrilege against the human race, and this is the unpardonable sin, or what should be considered such by all wishers for the mental and corporeal enfranchisement of their fellow-men. The worst feature of it all is, that the evil of which we complain, like evil in the abstract, is simply poisoned and distorted good. Reverence for parents is a natural and human feeling. It has been the mainspring of some of the most beautiful actions ever performed by men. No one will dispute the propriety of the Chinese in placing the relation of paternity and sonhood among the five primary relationships of mankind. But where it is pushed to such an extreme as it is in China, where the father is endowed with the authority of an absolute and irresponsible despot, and the son lowered to being the slave of another man simply because that other man was instrumental in bringing him into the world, it becomes an outrage, a mischief, and a folly. It strikes at the root of all sense of right and wrong. Such is the perversion of that sense among the Chinese at present that probably not one man who reads the Peking Gazette will think there is anything strange in the fact of the Emperor protecting the human tigress who murdered her own son in cold blood. The child is taught even by the proverbial philosophy of China to look upon his parent as a god, while the parent appears to wield autocratic power over the life he has been the accidental means of giving.
There is possibly only one element in this distorted doctrine which is at all healthy. The Emperor, as Son of Heaven, owes filial duty to his Celestial Progenitor, and if he does not pay it his commission is withdrawn. In plain language, if he is a bad sovereign, the disfavour of Heaven is shown by manifold disasters and portents; and when this is the case the people have a right to rebel against the man whom Heaven thus openly rejects. So far, the extreme phase of filial piety results beneficially for the people. But in all other respects it is liable to prove a blight and a hindrance to the country, at once representing and encouraging the old bad spirit of conservatism and cruelty which worked such desolation among men in the bygone ages of the world.