Comparison 'And The Canon Of Shun'

693 Words2 Pages

I found “The Canon of Yao” and “The Canon of Shun” to be an interesting for a number of reasons specifically in how they portrayed the role of the king in their society. The part of the story that I found to be most interesting for me was the downplaying and essentially exclusion of a king’s executive power over his kingdom. Based on what the story depicts, their is an inherent lack of administrative power in the hands of the king nor does there seem to be a need for the king to have any sort of experience in ruling a country. When She was promoted to the throne, his powers seemed to be set in rituals like making the “lei sacrifices to the Lord-on-high” ( “The Canon of Yao” and “The Canon of Shun” ). While in the society, the conducting of …show more content…

Rather, the authority of the king all comes back to being a moral exemplar who is able to make “bright [their] virtue” (“The Canon of Yao” and “The Canon of Shun” ). Even more so as mentioned earlier, the need for experience, knowledge or desire for ruling and statesmanship that typically aids a king in the ruling of his nation appears to not be necessary. For Yao before he retires wants to ensure that whoever comes next has the necessary virtue to be a king and goes so far to say that if needed that “someone who is humble and of low status” should be raised up to the position of king (“The Canon of Yao” and “The Canon of Shun”). This eventually leads to Shun being promoted to the position of king even though the only basis for his appointment is the fact that he remained virtuous in an unvirtuous …show more content…

As a result, it has to be wondered what filled the vacuum that was left by the lack of central authority. I would speculate given a few factors that the power would localized to families in locales and other sorts of localized forms of governments. I feel confident that based on this reading, this would be the assumed system that would govern society as it is the one of the only ways given the nature of the king’s authority to run a kingdom with such a weak king. Even more so, based on what I have previously learned about Confucius who collected the Canon’s, I know that he was a strong advocate for a hands-off central government that gave a lot of authority to powerfuls families. These Canon’s interestingly seem to suggest a type of government very similar to the one Confucius advocates given the fact that a weak central government exists which normally gives way to a localization of power into families and

Open Document