Frugality to cultivate virtue and quietness to cultivate one's own character

Silence to Cultivate the Body, Frugality to Nourish Virtue means tranquility to cultivate the good in oneself, and frugality to cultivate the character in simplicity.

Quiet to cultivate oneself, thrift to nourish virtue is the "Book of Commandments" in the poem, "Book of Commandments" is the Three Kingdoms period statesman Zhuge Liang before his death wrote to his son Zhuge Zhan's letter, the article elaborates on the cultivation of the body and temperament, the rule of the profound reasoning of the people, from the text can be seen that Zhuge Liang is a character of high purity and erudition of his father, his son's ardent teachings and unlimited expectations are in this book.

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The language of the whole text is fresh and elegant, the reasoning is easy to understand, the author uses wisdom and rationality, concise and rigorous words, will be a universal father's love for his son's feelings expressed very y, so that this letter of the family has become the generations of students to cultivate themselves and build up their aspirations, and was selected as the language teaching materials for compulsory education in China.

Commandment to the son of the book of the background:

This article as in Shu Han after the Lord Jianxing twelve years, is Zhuge Liang in his later years to his eight-year-old son Zhuge Zhan's letter of home, Zhuge Liang life for the country, bowing to exhaustion, death, he is for the cause of Shu Han country day and night, can not care about the education of the son, so wrote this Epistle admonishing Zhuge Zhan.

The Book of Commandments belongs to the book of family education and training, which is a kind of family education and teaching as a kind of unique canonical books in ancient China. It is a carrier for the ancients to disseminate the ideas and culture of establishing oneself and governing the family, dealing with the world, and teaching the children for the sake of learning, on the top of the traditional ethics and with the help of the authority of the elders.

The generation of family education has a long history. Ancient Chinese society flourished in a semi-enclosed warm-temperate continent with an agricultural economy as the basic means of survival, and retained the patriarchal system inherited from the clan society, which made the Chinese culture patriarchal and the patriarchal culture is characterized by the importance of the blood relationship and the emphasis on the order of ethics.

The importance of tutelage is an inevitable product of this patriarchal society, and the importance of tutelage is emphasized in the "University", which states that those who want to rule their country should first unify their families, and those who want to unify their families should first cultivate their own bodies, and that this kind of logical thinking, from the inside out, of cultivating oneself, unifying one's family, ruling the country, and leveling the world, makes unifying one's family a very important part of this process.

A family, the rise and fall of the family's success or failure of a major relationship, so the ancients attached great importance to tutelage, Zhou Duke of the Zhou Dynasty, his son does not require preparation for a person, Confucius told his son to learn poetry and study etiquette, these are still only verbal form of tutelage, there is a great deal of arbitrariness, and in the form of literature in the form of a large number of tutelage in the period of the two Han.

The two Han periods, the emerging great families through close family ties to expand social influence, have developed family or family rules and regulations, Zhuge Liang's "Book of Commandments" is precisely in such a cultural context.