Wisdom is age and age is wisdom. Confucius, summing up his life, said, "At 70 I followed my heart's desire without overstepping the line." It's as good a definition of wisdom as any.
The reverence children owed their parents was boundless but not burdensome — joyously given. Not in Confucius' own day (551-479 B.C.) — by then this was already once-upon-a-time stuff. "Nowadays," he lamented, "for a man to be filial means no more than that he is able to provide his parents with food. Even hounds and horses are, in some way, provided with food. If a man shows no reverence, where is the difference?"
Confucius sought his ideals in a remote, semimythical past. It must have been nice to grow old then, basking in the reverence your gray hairs and bent back proved you had earned. "When your parents are alive," Confucius taught, "comply with the rites in serving them; when they die, comply with the rites in burying them; comply with the rites in sacrificing to them." And "if, for three years, a man makes no change to his father's ways, he can be said to be a good son."
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