A Noble Deed in the Mandarin Banquet: The Moral Cultivation of Filial Piety in Eastern Han Dynasty

The story of Lu Ji’s noble deed, Hiding Mandarins for His Mother, is one of the most widely spread filial piety tales in Chinese history. Scholars have focused on interpretating his virtue with Confucianism axiology while neglecting the political significance embedded in the story. To study the historical impact that moral exhortation had through the up and fall of empires, this article investigates the general social environment of late Eastern Han Dynasty, mainly focusing on the social backgrounds of two great noble clans. Aligning with current mainstream Sinology and historiography, this study draws heavily on historical textual interpretation methods and employs comparative methods, focusing on specific cases of the two noble clans as a starting point. In the core event of the banquet, Lu Ji’s behavior was coined into a virtue standard by descendants while Yuan Shu’s turned out to be a failure. The contrast between the two is argued, to be an appropriate way of how moral cultivation was constructed during East Han dynasty, which is far earlier than the time scholars accomplished moral paragons according to historical or virtual events. Through background, contextual and behavioral analysis, it can be concluded that the so-called noble deed was not only a performance of Chinese traditional emphasis on filial piety but also of great political significance to the two clans at that time. The prominence of political virtue surpassed ethical value to a greater extent, if a certain dichotomy has to be drawn for these two intertwined categories.