Title: What Can We Learn From Ancient Chinese Views of Marriage?
Headings: What Can We Learn From Ancient Chinese Views of Marriage?
Berkley Forum
What Can We Learn From Ancient Chinese Views of Marriage?
By: Erin Cline
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Content: Several Chinese philosophers suggest that being loved and cared for within the context of a marriage helps couples and their children to lead happier, more satisfying lives. Ancient wisdom has a lot to tell us about what it takes to maintain a meaningful commitment over a lifetime. What might we learn from these millennia-old philosophies that could be helpful to married couples today? To start, Chinese philosophy appreciates the role of the individual in the relationship. Early Confucian texts such as the Book of Rites prescribed identical or analogous but distinct activities for wives and husbands, and to some degree, separate spaces for each. Traditional Chinese views of marriage also maintain that the roles of husbands and wives should be complementary, like the correlate pairs of yin and yang. Unfortunately, over time, Chinese thinkers began to associate husbands with yang and wives with yin and privileged yang over yin. Such views contributed to practices that limited women’s potential and degraded them severely. However, originally, yin-yang polarities were not tied to gender at all, and when Chinese thinkers first began to draw analogies between yin and yang and male and female, these analogies were used loosely and did not disparage the female, as later texts did. Indeed, early Confucian views of marriage are more favorable to wives than later ones.