Why did the ancient Chinese kill more children, but the Greeks mostly committed patricide?

01

Patricide? vs? child-killing culture?

There is a huge difference between Chinese and Western culture.

A common theme in Greek mythology is? patricide? , one of the most famous of which is the story of Oedipus.

There was a king who was given an oracle that said he? would be killed by his son? This king was so afraid that he did not even dare to share his bed with the queen. One day, he couldn't help but have a little sex after drinking and ended up having a son named Oedipus. The king was so scared that he threw the baby into the mountains. The baby was found and raised by a shepherd. When he grew up, he and the king met in the city. Not knowing each other, the king ordered Oedipus to get out of his way, and Oedipus, who had a violent temper, killed the king, his own father, in a fit of rage. He was then elected king by the people because of his ability and married the former queen, his mother, according to custom, thus fulfilling the promise that he would? kill his father and marry his mother? s oracle.

Oedipus Rex, the source of Western family tragedy

The story was later cited by Sigmund Freud, who formed a famous term in psychology: the Oedipus complex. Oedipus complex?

Besides this story, in Greek mythology, ? patricide? there are actually many more examples. Father-son conflicts were frequent in the Greek god world, and fathers were usually wary of their sons. Uranus, the god of the sky, imprisoned his children underground, only to have his son, Cronus, take over his father's dominance by castrating him with a great scythe.

Kronos was not at ease when he became master of the gods, for his father said to him before he died: ? You too will be overthrown by your own son as I was.? So Cronus made a cruel decision: to eat all the children he gave birth to. So his first five children, all of them, he swallowed in one gulp when they were just born. The sixth child, Zeus, the greatest god in Greek mythology, was born and survived after being switched by his mother with a stone. When he grew up, Zeus threw his father out of the palace and became king of the gods himself.

Greek mythology? patricide? s story so much is not a chance coincidence, but reflects a certain reality of Greek society at that time.

Throughout the ancient Chinese myths, we can never see this kind of? The first is that the man who kills his son is a man who kills his son.

For example, Shun in Yao, Shun, and Yu was very talented, but his father, Goze, didn't like him and often beat him severely for no reason. What did Shun do? He never resisted. When the beatings were light, he endured them obediently. When the beatings were heavy, he fled to the wilderness and cried bitterly alone. When Yao heard about these things, he thought Shun was of high moral character and was ready to reuse him. As a result, goze was even more unhappy, and he joined forces with his concubine's son, Xiang, to murder Shun. Once, goze asked Shun to repair the roof of a house. As soon as Shun climbed up, goze and elephant immediately took away the ladder and set fire to the house. Luckily, Shun used the hat he was wearing on his head as a parachute and jumped down, escaping death. As a result, two days later, goze asked Shun to dig a well, and Shun honestly went there again. When Shun went down to the bottom of the well, his father and brother hurriedly dug and filled up the well, trying to bury him alive. Fortunately, Shun was very alert and knew that they did not have good intentions, and as soon as he got down to the well, he cut out a secret passage in the side wall of the well, which saved his life again.

Because of this ? A hundred patience into a family? The spirit of building a harmonious family at all costs? s spirit, it made Shun the greatest sage of his time, celebrated by millions and later a leader. This legend, which reads a little weird today, was used as one of the most classic stories to educate Chinese people until 1911, listed as one of the ? The Twenty-Four Filial Piety Stories? The first of the twenty-four filial piety.

The Twenty-Four Filial Piety? There is another famous story: in a year of great disaster, a filial son named Guo Ju intended to bury his son alive in order to save a mouthful of grain to ensure that his mother would not starve. His theory was that a dead son could be born again, but a dead mother could not be born again. This is the famous one of the Twenty-Four Filial Piety Traditions? Guo Ju buried his son?

These two stories did not come about by chance either; there are many stories in traditional Chinese culture that emphasize filial piety in such an extreme way. So in this sense, we might be able to interpret Chinese culture as a ? the culture of killing sons?

02

Myths are metaphors for the real world

So why is it that the theme of Western myths is patricide and ours is sonicide?

The reason is complex, and ultimately goes back to the differences in geography between China and Greece.

We have already mentioned that China's geography is characterized by two things. First, it is semi-enclosed, enclosed by the Tibetan Plateau, grasslands, deserts, and the Great Wall. Second, this large enclosed hinterland is very fertile and ideal for agriculture and settlement.

Greece, on the other hand, had a geography that was almost the exact opposite of China's. The first characteristic of Greece's geography was its openness. The first characteristic of Greek geography is openness. Greece is a peninsula, and the first thing that strikes one when looking at a map of Greece is the length of its coastline. In addition to the north, any other part of the peninsula is not more than fifty kilometers from the sea, the coast is densely populated with natural harbors, and the seafaring conditions are unique. In the words of Gu Jun, ? such conditions are unlike almost any other region in the world?

The second characteristic is that the land is very poor. Greece is mountainous, and the soil is full of rocks and gravel, which is not conducive to agricultural cultivation. That is why Herodotus, the ancient Greek writer and historian, said that Greece? was fed by poverty all its life?

This difference in geography determines the difference between Chinese and Greek civilizations.

Our ancestors settled on both sides of the Yellow River for generations at a very early stage, and soon developed a large-scale, purely sedentary agricultural model. Chinese civilization is at root an agricultural and sedentary civilization. In a sedentary civilization, people's way of life is nothing more than a repetition of the previous generation, and the experience and wisdom of the older people is crucial because they know when to flood and when to sow. That is why we say: ? If you don't listen to the old people, you will suffer.?

In agricultural societies, the elderly are the permanent authority, all social resources are in the hands of the elderly, and the elderly have dominion over the family for life; the older they are, and the higher their seniority, the more say they have. So Chinese society is a ? old people's society? The old people are not the same as the old people, but the old people are the same as the old people. Old? All words related to old age are good: "honest", "old", "old", "old", "old", "old", "old". Honest? Sophisticated? Young and old? Boss? boss all mean mature, stable, and virtuous.

This was not the case with the Greeks.

Greece's barren land is not suitable for growing rice and wheat, though those rocky hillsides can be used for vines and olive trees, and for sheep. So Greece is not self-sufficient in food, but it can produce olive oil, wine and wool.

What can you do with olive oil, wine and wool if you can't eat them? They could be sold for food. So the Greeks went to the sea to do business, selling the olive oil, wine and wool they produced to other countries, and bringing back food from other countries.

The two ways of life, sea trade and sedentary agriculture, were quite different. The sea was clearly a young man's world. Because the sea is full of dangers, a voyage can take months, fighting the winds and waves, which older people can not do. So in early Greek society, the richest were often the young. In Greek legends, we read more about the praise of youth and vigor. Greek sculpture celebrates mostly youthful, fit human bodies, because the Greeks revered sports that displayed youth and strength.

One of the more important effects of this seafaring commerce was to break up blood ties. Large-scale seafaring activities, it is not possible to be a family of men and women on a boat, but only the young people of each family on a boat, in which the relationship between people are equal, rather than the relationship of seniority and inferiority. So generally speaking, in ancient Greece, when a son came of age, his father recognized his equality. This tradition later evolved into a law: ? Athenian males were completely freed from the control of their fathers when they reached the age of majority (17 and 18 years old), and after passing a civic qualification examination presided over by the father or guardian of the family and the legislative assembly, they could be registered with independent rights.?

With that said, let's turn back to Greek mythology. Myths are metaphors for real society. Freud, in his book Civilization and Its Discontents, attributed the emergence of Western democracy directly to the rebellion of the son against his father. He argued that civilization evolved from the ? primitive father? s tyranny to ? fraternal alliance. s democracy. During the development of Greek society, blood ties were loosened and patriarchal authority was weakened. Adults formed society as equals, thus creating the democratic city-states of Greece.

Patricide? was a fundamental spiritual engine that drove the continuous development of Greek Western society. People's attitude toward the authority of the family determined their attitude toward the authority of society when they grew up. A prominent feature of Western culture is the courage to rebel against authority, and to accomplish metabolism and self-renewal in the midst of intergenerational conflicts.

In the Chinese spiritual world, ghosts often interfere in human life and need human offerings. This was not the case in Greece after the blood ties were broken.? In the ancient Greco-Roman conception, souls were like fluttering images, disembodied, not even capable of thinking or speaking, and incapable of interfering in the world of the living. Moreover, once the dead get buried or cremated, their souls can cross the Yin River, into the countryside of no return, and from then on cut off the way back to the sun. As a result, the ancient Greeks had no fear of the souls of the dead who had been buried, especially those who had been cremated, and there were few stories of ghosts visiting their homes.?

03

Bloodlines were never broken, the gods had blasted away

Blood ties were also severed early in other different ways among the world's other major civilizations. The Sumerian civilization of the Two River Valley, for example, also moved from the era of blood sheikhdoms into stratified societies very early on, and one of the main factors driving this change was commerce. And commerce was important in the Two Rivers Valley also because the geography of the Two Rivers Valley was quite different from that of China.

Ancient Sumer was located between the two rivers? Each city and its satellite towns were separated from the others by the desert.? Sumer had almost no stone or metal, and almost no wood, except for palms, tamarisks, willows, and poplars, which were not very good building materials. Copper, stone and building timber, if needed at all, could only be obtained through trade with the upper reaches of the north.?

Consequently, the Sumerian civilization did not have a self-sufficient small-farming economy such as that of China, and the products of different regions had to be exchanged in large quantities; big commerce, especially long-distance long-distance trafficking, had a very important place in Sumerian society and decisively influenced the formation of social organization.? In Sumerian? the existence of big commerce was indispensable in the division of production, or the division of social labor, and was the glue that held the whole of social life together.?

Consequently, Sumerian blood ties were also broken early on, and one manifestation of the broken blood ties was the rise of the temple. Because the people were no longer linked by blood, they could no longer be united by the **** same ancestors. They had to find new ****ing beliefs, which led to the emergence of huge temples in the Middle East. The various Sumerian city-states did everything they could to build fine temples to the main gods worshipped throughout the city, gods that had no relation to their ancestors. ***The same gods? were the powerful social glue that held the inhabitants together and rallied them around the king in obedience to his role as part of the cosmic order.? People's social status was determined by property rather than blood, and the poor became slaves to the rich in large numbers, thus entering a slave society.

In China, on the other hand, commerce has been underdeveloped since the beginning, and the natural economy of self-sufficiency has been the mainstay.? Gidwick points out that the geographic features of ancient China help explain the form of its cultural development. Early Chinese culture was rooted in farming, so the role of the market seems to have been very unimportant. In addition, the major rivers in China flowed from west to east, a natural environment that made it difficult to stimulate the development of inter-regional trade because they flowed through the same latitude and therefore had largely similar natural resources. The lack of a wide-ranging trade network can also be explained by the wide distribution of natural resources, as each region was self-sufficient in its daily life, and there was no need for trade. The natural environment of ancient Mesopotamia was quite different, with a scarcity of metal ores, hard stones and high-quality timber needed for social development, all of which depended on long-distance trade networks.

This is the reason for the lack of a large-scale trade network.

As a result, Chinese history developed differently from other major civilizations. While other civilizations saw a break in the bloodline, China saw a steady expansion of blood groups, expanding from families and clans to tribes, tribal confederations, and eventually states.

Shanghai China appears to have some similarities to the Sumerian city-states that preceded it by more than a thousand years, such as cities, palaces, writing and bronzes. But this is only a superficial similarity; at heart, early Chinese civilization was very different from Sumerian and later Mesopotamian civilizations in a number of very different ways: in the Two Rivers Valley, bronzes appeared and developed mainly because of the practical factors of farming and warfare. In early China, on the other hand, bronzes were made primarily as ceremonial objects for political purposes. Although the bronze culture in China was so advanced, the farmers had always used rudimentary stone tools. The Sumerians created writing to keep accounts, or to serve the economy. In contrast, Chinese oracle bones record almost all divination, which was how Shang politics operated. In Sumer, cities developed from economic centers, or centers of commodity exchange, whereas in China, the earliest cities were political centers, not economic centers. As a result, archaeologist Zhang Guangzhi emphasizes that it was politics rather than technology and trade that were the main drivers of social change that shaped Chinese civilization. In many other parts of the world, such as Greece and Sumer, it was the opposite.

Zhang Guangzhi also argues, therefore, that early Chinese and Mayan cultures have one **** in common, which is ? The important feature is continuity, that is, the continuation of many cultural and social components from barbaric society to civilized society? And Sumerian culture? was a breakthrough, that is, in the relationship between man and the natural environment, through the creation of new factors such as technology and trade that caused a breakthrough in the bondage of the natural ecosystem??. The kinship system is destroyed and kinship is replaced by geography.?

However, although it is a continuously developing culture like China, the Mayan culture has no ancestor worship, only deity worship. So, we see that Mayan culture, like Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations, had huge temple buildings. China does not have this type of temple architecture which is completely different from the dwellings, and the temple architecture in China is nothing like the palace architecture used by living people.

The bond of blood, therefore, bound the Chinese firmly from the Neolithic period to the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period. The principle of Confucian political doctrine is, in fact, the amplification of the principle of blood to the state. It has been said that the religion of the Chinese is Confucianism, and the core of Confucianism is filial piety, the ? Being prudent in one's life and pursuing one's ancestors? No posterity is a great thing? Linguists have studied statistics that there are about 25 words in the languages of the world's major ethnic groups for titles of kinship, but how many are in Chinese?350. For males of the same generation as the father, English dispenses with only one uncle, while Chinese has five titles for uncle, uncles, aunts, uncles, and aunts. The word cousin in English can only be expressed in Chinese with 8 words: cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin. This just shows the importance of blood relations in Chinese life.

Until the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Imperial Temple was still built closest to the Imperial Palace. In southern China, the finest buildings in the center of a village are basically clan temples. And if you travel around the world, you'll find that whether it's India, the Middle East or Europe, the churches and temples in the centers of their cities are dedicated to gods, and none of them are dedicated to ancestors.

Chinese temples are dedicated to ancestors, other civilizations' temples are dedicated to gods. This is a fundamental difference between Chinese civilization and other civilizations