Ethos of the Rites-Music Tradition

The rites-music tradition emerged in ancient China, and contributed a great deal to the development of personal cultivation and qualified citizenship. It could be divided into two modes of education. The beauty of music and rites is chiefly based on such essential properties as harmoniousness, introspection, completeness, appropriateness, and so forth. Respectively, music as an art of trinity is assumed to have multiple functions or effects including the psychical, aesthetic, ethical and political. It is supposed to work from within to cultivate the inward aspects of personality. The rites as regulations, rituals, protocols, and codes of conduct are claimed to impose from without and build up the outward aspects of personality. With their teleological pursuits, the two modes of education turn out to be interactive and complementary in operation. Judging from pragmatic reasoning, the cosmological and quasi-religious implications of music and rites seem to underline the hidden paradigm of the ideal personality in Confucianism.