Quite a few feminist critics tend to resurrect the mother figure and to base their discussion on the assumption that gender is a universal category which can be described from an analytical, rather than cultural and textual, perspective. Here I use two poems to demonstrate that the mother, who is often the other, may be seen as a figure constantly reinvented and reinforced by discourses of mastery and control, be they factological, ideological, or mythological. My argument is that the mother-other figure always exists in a relation of conflict not only with other discourses but with the multiple and contradictory practices of everyday life, and that the relation of conflict constitutes the historical condition of human life, which is the condition of continuous change, a fact many feminists sometimes ignore.

The Chung Yung, though known to have “formed a bridge between Taoism and Buddhism and the Confucian school...thus ushering in the Neo-Confucian movement,” is traditionally seen, along with the Ta Hsüeh, as one of the “Confucian” classics, This essay takes a look at the Taoist side of this diffuse and loosely structured text, seeing it as the broader and deeper psychological-metaphysical ground of the Confucian ethical-political focus. But the psychological yin ( 隱 )-intension into subtle interiority is just the reversal of the metaphysical fei ( 費 )-extension into cosmic exteriority, and so is identified with it: this is the Taoist identity of self-cosmos or self-Tao. Here the chih ch’eng, 至誠 , “absolute sincerity” of the Way of Heaven and Taoist sage (as opposed to the “trying to be sincere” of the Confucian way of man) is viewed as self-completion in the sense of full self-expression, self-transparency that unconceals (inner/outer) truth of Tao. The chin ( 盡 ) of chin chih hsing, 盡之性 , “self-development” is interpreted, following Pound’s translation, as the paradoxical filling/emptying of self, an “aporia.’’ Absolute sincerity is compared with the self-disclosure and unconcealment of Heidegger’s eigentlich, authentic (“ownmost”) dasein in Being and Time. It may be that in the Chung Yung as in Plato, metaphysical understanding includes and “embodies” ethical action.

This study utilizes two ideas initially developed by Benjamin J. Schwartz (ancestor worship) and Andre G. Haudricourt (agricultural technology). In very early China, apparently agriculture combined with ancestor worship developing together a certain pattern of values that veered choices in favor of an immanent, distant, normative principle, Shang-ti or T’ien. Ancestor worship seems to have weakened the line dividing the living and the dead, through the normative and prescriptive quality of its kinship ties, the ancestors and their kinship paradigm affected the nature deities which in turn became enmeshed in a web of normative prescribed roles. Shang-ti became the paramount deity when the Shang claimed universal kingship in a bid for legitimization; the Chou also legitimized their takeover of the Shang by equating their deity T’ien with Shang-ti The area where agriculture and ancestor worship seem to reinforce each other lies in the nature of the relationship between the agriculturalist and his crop and between relatives in a kinship system. Both are somewhat prescriptive and normative. The agriculturalist cannot cross nature only augment or assist, or he is likely to fail. The same applies in the kinship ties. The social fabric remains unrent when kin behave according to prescribed patterns. Success unfolds in the form of following the prescribed rules of nature or kinship. Extended by cultural and historical events, success becomes defined as following the prescribed rules of Shang ti or T'ien.

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