Moving

Moving to cee-cee-zed-exx.blogspot.com. Remind me if I leave any gear here. Joel pls change link =).

Filial piety and 《弟子规》

I feel that filial piety and general respect towards one’s parents has somewhat decreased over the past generation together with the “modernisation” or so-called “opening up” of this world to Western values because of the Western dominance in today’s society. In the original Chinese culture, parents are respected highly by their children. 孔子，　in 《弟子规》，　describes how a child should respect his parents, in the morning greeting them, notify them when leaving the house, asking for their permission when doing anything. People may look on this as “old-fashioned”. However, I think that this shows true and proper respect for one’s parents. 《弟子规》also states that after the death of a parent, one must mourn and abstain from meat and wine for 3 years. This is because a baby depends on its parents for 3 years to learn to eat and walk before it can survive more independently. This shows the respect for one’s parents that should have in life. Of course, it may not be so practical to carry out such acts in real life. However, we must still have this respect for our parents. Notice that 《弟子规》does not promote complete, blind respect for one’s parents. It does say that children can correct their parents when they are wrong. However, the underlying respect must still be there (children should not shout at their parents or scold and if the parent does not listen, the child should not be angry but should beg and plead for the parent to listen). Nowadays, youngsters can lie and even dare to argue or yell at their parents (and not apologise later on, even blaming their parents for getting angry at them). This shows that children no longer respect their parents or their parents simply do not occupy such an important place in their childrens’ minds. Also, the care that children are supposed to show for their parents is becoming increasingly reversed. Instead, children are doted on by their parents and when they throw tantrums, parents will do anything to appease their anger (of course, this is just a generalisation. It doesn’t mean that everybody is like this). When children grow up, instead of caring for their parents like their parents did for them, they simply plonk their parents in a nursing home.

But why is this? Maybe it’s because humans were hardwired for max survival. This means that children would not care for their parents if it meant that their own survival was compromised (which most of the time it was) e.g. giving what little food/water there was to their parents. This would be fine when their parents were younger, but when parents grew old, they would die because no one cared for them. However, this was in a time when people struggled to survive, find food and water, and fight off wild beasts. But in present day society, even though humans in developed worlds like us no longer need to think so much about our survival, we still neglect our parents. And people who live in conditions where they really need to think about their survival still care for their parents.

So even though we are not really hardwired to care for our parents for the benefit of our survival, we should care for them because we no longer need to worry about our survival.