King Wen’s Example

Inspired by the stories of the founding of China in the Zhou Dynasty, the people of peaceful dynasties set themselves to the serious work of imitating King Wen’s lifestyle in the minutest detail. Zhou Wen’s reproductive prowess was legendary, fathering 100 sons in his long lifetime. Even after the Chinese forgot to worship Wen as an emperor, they continued to venerate him as the “God of Sons” or “Bed God”. The Chinese were inspired by the idea of the “Round Family” that Wen presented in the Book of Changes, and aspired through his lifestyle and theory of life to the ideal of the “Big House” and the “Full Gate”, where the maxim “the more the merrier” was literally the only rule.

King Zhou’s Trigram

The idea of the Chinese family was first canonized in the Book of Changes. Here it is clear that the first principle, Qian (☰), is that which “embodies hardness, strength, and initiation”. The phallic meaning of this first trigram is apparent from both ancient commentary and traditional Taoist understanding. It represents a trinity of male members, often interpreted as “three male generations”. The Chinese view of the cosmos and the family, then, starts with the male initiation of reproduction. This phallic symbol of change in turn creates its opposite through the “wheel of change”, Kun (☷), the trinity of broken lines that represents a trinity of “receptive wombs”. When the Qian and Kun are unified, they produce three “son” trigrams and three “daughter” trigrams. This is where the ideal family originates: a father, a mother, and six children, all representing the cycle of change in the universe, embodying the natural course of the Heaven’s Mandate from beginning to end.

The fact that Chinese society glories in the functions of male reproduction is no new revelation. Traditional art abounds with depictions of naked male children, and male nudity appears in literature without prohibition. This stands in stark contrast to the reverence with which the female form was treated in art and literature, where female nudity was almost unthinkable (accept for a brief period during the Ming Dynasty). While males could be diagnosed directly by a doctor, the Chinese women kept an ivory doll to tell the acupuncturist or herbalist where it hurt. This is because men were understood to be “Yang Guang”, (阳光 active and bright, a manifestation of Qian), while women were understood to be “Yin Liang” (阴凉 passive and cold, as Kun is within Zhou Wen’s theory). To expose the female principle would be to harm it, as the white-skinned ideal of Chinese feminine beauty proves. The leather-tanned bodies of generations of male farmers who worked rice fields and pulled barges in the nude attest to a very different view of the male body. This attitude can still be seen in the contemporary practice, where men urinate in public with no stigma, and commercials in which boys are brazenly bathed or in cartoons where male characters urinate in the style of the “mannequin piss” on one another (but where it would be unthinkable to see a girl engaging in the same activity). These all have their roots in the Chinese concept of gender in the Yin Yang cosmology.

The Three Gods

According to the aesthetics of the Zhou cosmology, all villages were built with a gate, called a “Men”, which declared the name of the village, and at the center of the village was a communal hall, called a “Tang” (堂)[1], where village members could discuss business, settle disputes, enter clan alliances, arrange marriages, and allot shared labor. These were central terms in the Chinese terminology for the nation, the village, and the family.  In the central hall, there would be a table behind the south-facing seats of the headmen against the back wall, and on this table stood three Taoist Deities, called “Village Guardians”. These three gods were a direct reflection of King Wen’s explanation of the foundations of the family. They were personifications of the Qian trigram, three men in three different stages of life, representing in concrete form what Chinese desired most from life in their villages.

The first God, normally on the left, was named “Fu”, which is the Chinese character for “Blessing”. Much like the character for “Good” in Chinese, showing a woman with a child on her knee, Fu is pictured as a bearded young man will children riding on his back or crowding around his feet. This is the first stage of the Chinese ideal life, and is also the foundation of the village – sons and daughters. Chinese would pray that this god would deliver healthy sons to them, thus “blessing” them.

The second god, in the center, was named “Lu”, the Chinese character for “High Position” or “Wealth”. He is a middle-aged scholar with an official bearing. He often holds the cap of an official in one hand, and a staff of imperial authority in his other hand.  Sometimes he will hold bars of gold instead, or carry a book under his arm. Lu shows that the way to a well-respected and successful life is through the acquiring of knowledge, and village boys and men alike would pray for his grace in passing the imperial examinations.

The last of the trinity of village guardians is a stooped old man with a huge forehead. His name is “Shou”, and is the god of old age and longevity. Some say that he is the guardian of Kunlun’s Peach Tree, but regardless of where he is depicted, he carries a giant peach in his left hand, promising long life and perhaps immortality to those who seek it from him. He represents the third and final stage of the Chinese lifestyle, and his is arguably the most loved of all three, for regardless if one had many children, was a famous scholar, or attained great wealth, the traditional Chinese mind valued age above all else.

These three gods are universal symbols of Chinese village life. While the average villager worshiped them, they were at a complete loss to explain the long evolution that created these gods after the original religion of the Zhou Dynasty was lost to the common man over time. What was important to these farmers was not where these gods come from, or the fact that their stories are the compound tales of a myriad of famous men from the Han to Tang Dynasties, but the completeness and abundance of what these three deities represented. These three stages of life were and are the essential lifecycle of the Chinese villager, and reaching the likeness of these mythic models has always been the goal.

The influence of these three gods can be seen around East Asia. Their forms inspire not only the “Year Pictures” that villagers paste on their doors and in family halls at Chinese New Year, but furnish the motif for most Asian animation, inspire interior design, and convey the basic tenants of the Taoist faith. Their names are attached in Korea to the village credit union that turned into a nationally protected electronics company, Samsung. These three deities are still seen in Shinto shrines throughout Japan as local variations, comfortably mixed with indigenous gods, as always, representing Children, Wealth, and Longevity to their Japanese worshippers.

“Bringing Honor”

Chinese villager used their sexual function to “serve the ancestors”, and as a result, sexuality was not considered a taboo, a personal right, or a private pleasure. The elders of the family managed it squarely in the same way that they bred hogs and chickens. They believed the Mencian adage; “Of the three greatest sins against filial piety, the greatest is to leave no posterity.”[2] Sexuality functioned as an extension of the reason for community’s existence, the survival of the family and the society. This continuation was “submission to the mandate”, and can be seen in the association of the word “Ming” (命), which translates as the “life that was given” and the “command from above”. They were interchangeable categories in the traditional Chinese way of thinking. The natural patterns of human life and the changes of the seasons were all an expression of the emanating Mandate of Heaven.

“We inherit our bodies from our ancestors, so we must honor them through our bodies” – The Three Character Classic

Because it was a function of the community, the Chinese did not associate love with the act of reproduction directly. The act of intercourse assumed no special meaning outside of its uses in procreation, with the fulfillment of the obligation to have children an expression of love and thanks to the family ancestors. And, so, while being intensely sexual, Western observers have been tempted to see in it a non-sexual apparition, because the attitudes that we assume in our Greco-Roman cultural associations are absent in the consciousness of the traditional Chinese farmer.

The Life of the Family Stud

The Chinese villager saw no need for repressing the sexual drive of village sons, with marriage happily occurring, ideally, just as sexual function was reached by a teenage boy, between the ages of 14 and 18. This event made a boy into a man, and the young man was traditionally crowned with the black, horsehair cap at this right of passage that he would wear for the rest of his life (this was later changed to a silk cap under the Manchu). If the situation allowed, more than one girl could be sought as a wife to increase childbearing and domestic work, but there could only be one “official wife”. Financial considerations were the only limitation to how many concubines a Chinese man could take throughout his life. While the sexual drive of the male was embraced as a means to serve the end purpose of enlarging the family, it was considered fragile and limited, while the sexual drive of the women was pictured as the inexhaustible spring of life (often figuratively referred to as the “peach blossom spring” in the Ming Dynasty), requiring conscious “cultivation and satiation”. A woman’s satisfaction was the husband’s responsibility, and its procurement was thought to end in a harmonious home.[3] An appetite for greater sexual activity was not faulted as evil or unhealthy, and it was supported as a natural physical necessity for many wives and the obligation of the husband to “keep his wife” every five days. Chinese women were clearly more liberated in their expectations than their Western counterparts in these regards for thousands of years.

Historians have noted that the Chinese word that is often translated as “prostitute” in English actually means “concubine”; for sexual relations outside of this family responsibility, while certainly occurring, had no theoretical expression or validation. Illegitimate sexual contact was seen as debasing because it did not carry out the natural course, honor the ancestors, and form the village basis for society. At times where prostitution was a tolerated vice within large cities, the major element was the “cultured women”, who could entrance an educated man with her poetry and skill with an instrument (which was copied in Japan as the Geisha). Regardless, there was a two thousand year prohibition on the children of prostitutes being involved with the Imperial Examination (the only way to be involved with society at large), and so procreation was best left to the enormous households of the men they served through wine and song. If a man liked a singing girl well enough, he could arrange to buy her from her master to become his concubine, at which time everything would be completely legitimate. This is a reoccurring theme in Chinese literature and opera, and one that Pearl S. Buck made immortal in the West through the novel, “The Good Earth.” This practice is seen today in the practice of taking a “Xiao Lao Po” (小老婆), where a man takes a mistress and provides for all her needs, often raising a separate family away from his “official family”. While illegal under the “New Marriage Law” of Chairman Mao, the “same father different mother” ideal is still widely accepted by businessmen and corrupt officials, and is legitimized in the village tradition by “bring honor to the ancestors through many children”, and thus it is not uncommon to hear of such arrangements.

The Ideal Family

The most powerful concept in Chinese life and philosophy was the idea of family. It is the basis of every function of society and government. David K. Jordan expresses it aptly in his study of Taiwanese tribal culture…

“[Chinese] have a clear and rather absolute notion of what a family ought to be. It is said that a family ought to be “round” 圓, or complete. The imagery of roundness occurs in artistic motifs and in verses pasted to the door of the central room at New Year. It occurs in food, when festival foods made for familial occasions such as New Year are made in round shapes. These would excite no comment perhaps at other times. In the context of New Year festivity their roundness becomes one of their most important features. In conversation, too, [Chinese] speak of the family ideal as roundness.

And what is roundness? …A round family is one in which the descent line is being carried on. Roundness means all men find wives, and all women have husbands to whom they bear sons. It means that children do not die, and that old people remain alive and healthy to a hoary old age. Roundness suggests a unity of the family circle, but it seems to imply as well that the family is successful in fitting to a structural ideal of flawless Chinese patriliny.[4]”

The Zhou social cosmology was passed down through the Book of Changes, and the meaning of the family was seen through its clear concept of spontaneous and necessary evolution. “Round” became one word to represent the vision of all the best ideals of Chinese society and family, and to this day, round objects and foods (particularly dumplings, eaten on the “Round Day”, Yuan Xiao (元宵), of Chinese New Year) are esteemed for bringing “blessing” into the home because of their connection with this principle.

It was this idealized family that defined a good deal of the historical variations between the development of culture in the East and West.

“The fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts (when I say East Asians, I mean Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, as distinct from Southeast Asia which is a mix between the Sinic and the Indian, though Indian culture also emphasizes similar values) is that Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. He is not pristine and separate. The family is part of the extended family, and then friends and the wider society. The ruler or the government does not try to provide for a person what the family best provides.”[5]

The Real Family

The philosophical undoing of the Chinese family came in the form of its strength. Unlike Zhou, who is reported to have had only one wife, the Chinese had many wives in their desire to be like their hero in the birthing of many sons and daughters. This lead to a natural predicament: How does one maintain his personal virtue in the face of monstrously large, needy families? The real family would have been a stressful place to be the patriarch, as literature shows, regardless of new theories that focus on their crimes of oppressing others. In order for a man to live up to the ideal of fatherhood, the patriarch had to be kind and just to all, and make everyone happy. He, in short, had to be a sage, which is no small task in itself.

1)    The Responsibility to Ancestors

2)    The Responsibility to Physical Needs of the Wife (Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Sex – Women were seen as infinitely orgasmic, growing stronger with the service of their husbands, and they were traditionally encouraged to express this sexual energy while the men were taught to fear the depletion their “bright energy”)

3)    The Responsibility to Provide for the Family through Physical or Mental Labor

4)    The Responsibility to Raise “Righteous Children” (Children who would bring honor to their family through appropriate social behavior)

5)    The Responsibility to Find Wives for Sons at Puberty (This consideration led to many social ideals, such as adopting girls in their childhood to be married to sons)

The “Male Suffrage Movement”

King Wen’s social contract was an agrarian survival pact, which depended not only on the hard work of the man, but rested squarely on the “sage king” mentality of every farmhand. The Chinese worldview expected that every husband was to rule his family as protectively and lovingly as King Wen had ruled the nation. The village system was predicated on this kind of virtue, and the failings of the Chinese man to live up to his family obligations were already evident in the Tang Dynasty, when the family structure started to fall apart during the luxury and urbanization of the Chinese population. As the financial status of the gentry became more established, the families they raised became less manageable, and they started to look for a way to have both their large families and their own personal space. This resulted in the mass migration of wealthy Chinese families from the Confucian ethic to the doctrines of Buddhism. With this move, there came a greater support for temples and monasteries all across China, so that, while it was not the official religion, Buddhism became a major cultural phenomenon.

“Man’s nature is basically good, and those who follow Buddhism, abandoning their families and discarding their wives and husbands, are actually going against this basic nature.”[6]

Buddha’s message of “escape” was appealing to the Chinese gentleman because of the tightness with which society was woven, and the high expectations placed on them to be both “scholar and gentleman”. After one’s duty to have children for one’s parents had been fulfilled, it was easy for the Chinese man to turn to Buddha as a refuge from the troubles of further responsibility.

The cult of “Preserving Qi” in Song Taoism came from the fear of “wastage” from too much sexual activity, and led to the theory of “sexual vampirism”. It was believed by some Taoist that the ascension of some female immortals, such as Xi Mu Niang, was achieved by exploiting this principle of male Qi. Fabled women of “The Dark Tao” collected the energy of hundreds of young men through the art of seduction and sexual sorcery, and thus stole the fruit of immortality. This was the basic logic that fueled stories of “fox fairies” that began to appear in popular Ming Dynasty popular literature, where young men would lose their youth or life through a sexual act with a lady vampire, and have since become the standard fare of folk operas since.

From “Return” to “Retreat”

Zhu Xi needed to find another, more Chinese precedent for the desired lifestyle, thus return to the Zhou mandate was reinterpreted as an escape from the realities of its social contract… the condoning of a Buddhist-like pursuit of self-knowledge, engaged in maintaining national solidarity against a foreign religion, while not actively engaged in the Mandate as Zhou Wen had described it.

This resulted in a completely new, passive direction, where the home was no longer the “Vehicle of the Tao”, and the individual could retreat into solitude, just as Tao Yuanming had done… the only problem is that Tao had returned home to work as a farmer, while the scholarly class of the Song Dynasty retreated to their studies to practice calligraphy. While it was appealing, it trapped Chinese civilization in a stagnant idea that did not fully reveal its weaknesses until China’s contact with the West in the 1800’s.

Zhu Xi’s theories of individual sagely pursuit won the Chinese back to Confucianism by exchanging Buddha’s vision for that of Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossoms Spring.

The Social Context of Footbinding

The practice of footbinding originally began as the practice of binding the feet of court dancers in silk, and it quickly took on a new meaning as a poetic metaphor for beauty in the poetry of the Southern Tang’s first Emperor, who likened them to “fragrant lotuses”. Zhu Xi proposed the practice as a way to “settle” the non-Chinese Hakka tribes of Southern China into the ideals of the Confucian lifestyle, since Hakka women were upsetting Chinese settlers through their lack of submission and desire to continue their traditional hunting practices. He believed that the extra handicap of bound feet would make the minority live a lifestyle in accordance with the Chinese ideal. Ironically, the Hakka never adopted the practice, but that the Chinese quickly adopted it as a reflection of their cultural aesthetics and instituted perhaps one of the cruelest treatments of women in history.

Historically, the flatfooted Chinese women, while living rather contentedly in polygamous households, could demand her rights as a wife, and could go after her man if he fled to the mountains or went to war. History is replete with women who faithfully followed their husbands to the battlefield, instead of staying home where their husbands left them. A woman with bound feet could not follow her man into the woods, and thus the Chinese male fetish for small feet became the literary fascination with the woman “confined to her house.” This radically altered the “equal footing” that Chinese women had previously enjoyed with their men-folk. This was an incredible loss of power for women, who were praised for running as fast as their lovers, having strong arms, and “meeting in the field” in the Book of Songs. But this new vision of pig-hoofed beauty quickly moved through all levels of society, as farmers bound their daughters’ feet in expectation of social mobility. If a wife was troublesome, the Chinese scholar-gentleman could always move to his Orchid Pavilion, away from all the noise, and the woman would stay home and take care of the children.[7]

Chinese Perceptions of Sexual Morality

Sex was something that could only be enjoyed fully if finances did not allow a family to procure more than one wife for their son, which is why a passionately sexual married life, while not uncommon in the Chinese village and in poetry from the Zhou Dynasty, was scorned as “low-class”, because it did not make pretenses to the vexation of the Chinese ideal of a wealthy family. This made public displays of affection, which were common in the time of the Book of Songs, less and less common in society. In the Qing Dynasty, what little joy that was left in married life was smothered by a puritanical mood amongst the Manchu aristocracy.

While sexual, the Chinese family, village, and society at large were never “erotic”, because of the connection of sexual impulses with a larger social duty, rather than an exclusive connection with personal identity or entertainment. Sexual literature was created for the instruction of married men on the art of pleasuring their wives without exhausting their own Qi, and the small numbers of explicit illustrations that survive are directly connected to this educational use. This is also, conversely, why the Chinese never reacted strongly to homosexuality, even while there were documented cases of it throughout Chinese history. It was not considered an issue of identity, because the normal function was still required to honor the ancestors, and any expression of sexuality outside of this pattern was assumed to lead to sickness and death.

The obvious incorporation of phallic themes, male fertility worship, the adoration of male gods, and the desire for sons, while maintaining the tight family orientation of the traditional Chinese system proves the theories of the cultural origin of traditional morality that are popular in western academia to be flawed. This ideal does not unavoidably lead to a widespread acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle, prostitution, abuse of children, or unrestrained sexual expression – a fact that is obvious in a study of Chinese literature, history, and culture.

[1] The Cantonese pronunciation of this character, “Tong”, would later become the term used by Chinese in Western countries in the 19th and 20th centuries for the system created to substitute for the village amongst men in unfavorable work conditions, the Chinese Mafia.

[2] Legge’s Mencius 7:26:1

[3] This is clearly outlined in the “Hidden Chapter” of the “Internal Classic of the Yellow Emperor” and implied by Robert Van Gulik’s classic, but now controversial, “Sexual Life in Ancient China”

[4] From “God’s, Ghosts, and Ancestors”, Chapter 5, by David K. Jordan

[5] Lee Kuan Yew, “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew”, an Interview with Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

[6] William Theodore De Bary’s Translation of the “Tract Against Buddhism” by Ou-Yang Xiu in “Sources of the Chinese Tradition”, Vol. I, Columbia University Press, pp 390

[7] While the West now accepts that the practice of footbinding was a sexual fetish, pleasuring the males through “two extra play-places”, there could be nothing further than the truth as Chinese medical books treated anything other than natural intercourse as “wasting essential energy” and dangerous to male health. This idea is popular among foreign Sinologists but it is firmly rejected by Chinese scholars.