• The Journal of Korean Philosophical History
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• no.29
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• pp.179-202
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• 2010

In addition to the emphasis on filial piety ethics in everyday life, filial piety obtained a further significance in Confucianism which had the strong sense of ancestor worship. This paper focuses on filial piety as a mechanism of continuity within Confucianism and points out that it owed its development to its connection to agricultural culture. The sedentary life with less mobility forged a relative intimacy among people and filial piety was the actual expression of that kind of intimate affection. Yet, filial piety in Confucianism created a unique culture in terms that it not only stipulated material and emotional support for parents but also expected one's piety to the further ancestors through a memorial service and made its connection to the infinite posterity through sons. From the perspective of Confucianism that established filial piety at the turning point from life to death, the self existing in present was not an isolated self anymore. Yet, one can see another characteristic of Confucianism from that filial piety, based on blood bonds, could move beyond paternalism to broaden itself. It could be expanded to the care for strangers. The aged experience and wisdom through agricultural life begot the insight that the nature made its infinite connections with everything through circulation. As a stone thrown in a pond would enlarge its boundary by drawing larger and larger concentric circles, this thought enabled people to enlarge their affection to their parents to universal humanity. In this enlarged network, though it was natural to make distinctions between the closer and the farther, Confucianism sought to overcome it by establishing oneself upright. Confucianism emphasized the moral cultivation with its filial piety concept that contained the diachronic thought penetrating life and death and the broadened perspective relating everything around. In Confucianism, filial piety provided an important medium in forming a moral subject that penetrated life and death and related self and others. Inherent in it is the Confucius thought of continuity that searched for a paragon of a moral human being regardless of time and space.