Daily
Study as devotion.
The Analects begin with the joy of learning; the examination hall was a temple of its own.
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Reciting before understanding.
Children chant the Analects or the Three Character Classic aloud, in unison, years before anyone explains it, on the theory that a text in memory can be understood later while a text understood once cannot be recalled. Denounced as feudal for most of the twentieth century and revived from the 1990s, now with weekend academies and phone apps.
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The morning greeting.
Greet your parents when you rise, settle them at night, ask after their health, and do not go far without telling them where. Filial piety in the classical texts is overwhelmingly about living parents rather than dead ones, and this is what it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday — which is also what urban work and migration have made hardest to keep.
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Monthly
Three years of mourning.
Undyed hemp, no meat, no wine, no music, no marriage, no office — and officials were required to resign and go home for it. Confucius grounds it in the three years a child is carried before it can leave its parents' arms. Asked whether one year would do, he told the disciple to do that if he would be comfortable with it, and remarked afterwards that the man was not humane.
⚖ contested within
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The community compact.
The village assembles, the compact is read aloud, and two ledgers are kept — one of good deeds and one of bad — before everyone eats together in order of age. The Lü family wrote the first in 1076 and Zhu Xi revised it. Korea and Japan both adopted the mechanism, which is local government by mutual moral bookkeeping.
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Yearly
The sacrifice to Confucius.
Three offerings of wine, a burnt written prayer, an eight-by-eight dance with feathered wands, and orchestral music descended from the Tang court that survives nowhere else. Korea performs it at Sungkyunkwan and at 231 local Confucian schools; Qufu holds its version on 28 September. Both are on national heritage registers.
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Jesa — the night the ancestor eats.
Held on the death anniversary, late. The table is laid to a fixed geography that every family argues about, the door is closed while the ancestor eats, and then the family eats the same food. It is performed by households that describe themselves as Buddhist, Christian or non-religious, which tells you what Confucianism actually is in East Asia.
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Charye, and the journey.
A daytime rite at New Year and at the autumn festival for several generations at once, followed by grave-clearing. The rite takes twenty minutes. Getting there produces the largest annual movements of human beings on the planet, and that is the part that costs something.
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The genealogy.
Every male descendant entered by generation, each generation sharing a name character so that a stranger's name tells you where he stands relative to you. It is compiled by subscription, revised every generation or two, and functions as constitution, census and property register at once. Women appeared as a surname, if at all.
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Once in a life
The capping.
Three changes of cap and gown with a charge spoken over each, and then a courtesy name that replaces the childhood one — after which the person is addressed as an adult. Zhu Xi wrote the manual in the twelfth century. China and Korea have both revived it recently, frequently as a municipal ceremony for eighteen-year-olds.
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The wedding, in six stages.
Proposal, exchange of birth data, divination, gifts, date-setting, and fetching the bride — then bows to heaven and earth, to the ancestors, and to each other. The classical texts state plainly that the point is to serve the ancestral temple and continue the line, and that the couple's feelings are not what is being joined.
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The examination cell.
Three days and two nights in a brick cubicle roughly a metre square containing two boards, one to sit on and one to write on, producing essays in a prescribed eight-part form on set passages. Candidates died in there and the bodies were passed out over the wall. It ran for thirteen centuries and was abolished in 1905; its descendants still decide lives in three days.
⚖ contested within
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Ongoing
Ancestor veneration.
Tablets, offerings, and swept graves — the dead remain members of the household.
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The lineage hall.
Offerings to the founding ancestor, the rules read aloud, disputes settled, and the income of the clan land distributed. In late imperial south China this was where most governing actually happened — schools funded, poor relatives relieved, quarrels arbitrated — and the magistrate a day's ride away was glad not to be involved.
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