The Three Years, and the Argument About Them

The three year mourning for a parent was contested from the beginning, and the tradition preserved the objection rather than burying it. In the Analects a disciple, Zai Wo, puts it to Confucius that a year would be long enough, since in a year the crops turn and the seasons come round. Confucius asks him whether he could eat fine rice and wear brocade within the year and feel at ease. The disciple says he could. Confucius tells him to do as he pleases, and after he has gone remarks that a child does not leave its parents' arms until it is three years old, and that the three years are a return of that. The argument in the passage is not that the rule is ancient. It is that the rule is an answer to something the objector has not felt.

The practice outlasted the argument. Under the imperial bureaucracy an official whose parent died was required to resign his post and return home for the mourning period, a rule known as dingyou, and the exceptions granted to indispensable officials were controversial precisely because everyone understood what was being waived.

Two things reduced the scheme to something a household could actually do. The classical ritual compendia set out the grades in detail but assumed a world of aristocratic households. Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, compiled in the twelfth century, cut the ceremonies down to a scale a modest family could manage and became the standard manual across China, Korea and Vietnam, carrying the mourning grades with it into ordinary practice for the next seven hundred years.