溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Three Years of Mourning Too Long — Is Filial Piety Custom or Heart?
Can the length of mourning for a parent be fixed by ritual law, or must it last until the heart is spent?
A child is three years in its parents' arms before it leaves them. Did Zai Yu ever hold three years of love for his own parents?
The dispute between Zai Yu and Confucius echoed on within Confucianism. Xunzi defended the three years, holding ritual as the form and measure that disciplines feeling; Mozi, in stark contrast, attacked lavish burial and long mourning as a waste of wealth and labor, clashing head-on with the Confucians. Later Neo-Confucians reinterpreted the three years as "the natural span it takes for the heart to be spent," trying to stitch form and feeling back together. This dispute over mourning's length returns, in the end, to the old question of whether filial piety is completed by rule or by heart.
Funeral rites have grown shorter, but the question of whether grief has a fixed term still returns to everyone who has lost someone they loved.
Zai Yu argued three years of mourning was too long and ruined ritual and music, proposing to cut it to one.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Zai Yu argued three years of mourning was too long and ruined ritual and music, proposing to cut it to one. Without anger, Confucius asked back: would you feel at ease eating fine rice and wearing silk so soon after loss? When Zai Yu said yes, Confucius let it stand, then sighed once he left: perhaps Zai Yu never received three years of love in his parents' arms. I read this exchange as Confucius questioning not the rule but the heart. I too am still asking not what the fixed term should be, but when my own grief will truly be spent.
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