Filial piety

Filial piety is the English rendering of the Chinese xiao (孝), the Confucian virtue of devotion, respect, and obligation toward parents and ancestors[1]. The Chinese character combines elements suggesting an old person (the upper part) supported by a son (the lower part), visualizing the relationship the virtue names. Filial piety is also central in Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Confucian-influenced cultures[2].

filial piety is frequently oversimplified when detached from broader Confucian virtue ethics and ritual life.

Filial piety is one of the most important virtues in Confucian thought. The classical text the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing) presents xiao as the root of all virtue: from proper devotion to parents flow proper relationships with the broader family, with rulers, with friends, and ultimately with heaven and the ancestors.

Filial piety in practice includes: caring for parents physically as they age, attending to their emotional and spiritual welfare, honoring them in their lifetime, mourning them properly at death, and continuing veneration after death through ritual offerings and memory. The classical teaching of Confucius and Mencius emphasizes the depth and rigor of these obligations.

The relationship between filial piety and other Confucian virtues is debated. Mencius and others held that xiao is the natural foundation that, properly developed, extends into broader social virtue. Others have noted tensions between filial obligation and other claims (the obligation to one's ruler, to the broader community, to higher principles). The classical Confucian debate about whether to report a father for sheep-stealing or to shield him is one famous example.

In East Asian Buddhist contexts, filial piety has been integrated with Buddhist teaching, sometimes through stories of bodhisattvas who exemplify filial care. The Ullambana Sutra in particular develops Buddhist teaching about repaying parental kindness through religious practice.

Modern East Asian societies retain filial piety as a significant cultural value, though its specific shape has changed under modernization, urbanization, and changing family structures. Care for aging parents, the financial and time obligations of adult children to their parents, and the maintenance of ancestor remembrance all continue, though in altered forms.

Studies of filial piety have spanned classical Chinese philosophy, history of religion in East Asia, anthropology of contemporary East Asian society, and comparative ethics. Major work by Donald Munro[3], Anne Behnke Kinney, and others has built the field.

• Classic of Filial Pietyby Anonymous (translated by various)
  primary source
• The Concept of Man in Early Chinaby Donald J. Munro
  book