A King's Filial Duty 孝經, 天子章第二
- Xing Shen
- Jul 14, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 5
Below is my humble attempt at the translation for Chapter 2 of Classic of Filiality. This rendition is based on Confucius' annotations, and the pdf at the bottom has both the English and Chinese texts.
Confucius said: “A ruler, who approaches people with love, sees the world as one family. For our Heaven-given nature is caring, it cherishes life and sees the common humanity in everyone. When it sees wrong, it guides with sincerity in hopes the transgressors will soon realize their mistakes. The innate nature dares not to use force or violence when its earnest requests are unheeded. A ruler, who approaches people with respect, admires the virtues of others. For our Heaven-given nature is sincere, respect arises directly from it. Such respect is neither forced nor phony. The innate nature dares not to discriminate who gets respect and who does not.
“A ruler with love and respect follows their conscience and strives to actualize their Heaven-given nature. Not seeing themselves as the only worthy one, they treat the world as one family and serve their people with warm guidance. Over time, the influence of their virtues spreads among the people and earns their respect and admiration. This is the result of establishing filiality as the law and setting this as the practice principle: everyone must cultivate it first in themselves and gradually they can influence their own families and society at large. Then, their governance by virtue will be widely known in the world and leaders of other nations will follow suit. This is a king’s filial duty.”
“The Classic of Poetry includes a citation from Book of Documents, Fu's Penalty: “When a ruler leads with virtue and is a living example of virtue, their governance will gain the respect and admiration of not only their people, but also people of other nations.”
My humble reflection: I may think that I am not a ruler; therefore, this is not relevant to me. But I could be a leader in a group, a team, a department, or in whatever sphere of influence, I could still make an impact within my own spheres of influence. I follow my conscience and everything else is a given in due time.
Read chapter 2 in English and Chinese in the file below.
