From Cultural to Political ──An Overview of the Changes in Confucius and Xunzi's Concepts of Ritual and Music

Ritual and is the nucleus of traditional culture. The nobility's code of conduct and political ruling order established in Zhou Gong's ritual setting and music making created unbounded nostalgia and persistent pursuit for Confucius hundreds of years after. It is doubtless that Confucius wanted to use the systems of rituals and music of the Zhou Dynasty as a model to revive the benevolent government order of rituals and music and to become the planner of this revival. His political intentions cannot be denied, yet Confucius' practice and sayings explicitly demonstrated a kind of tendency of cultural solicitude. The influence of this cultural solicitude on later studies cannot be ignored. Approximately 200 years afterwards, a follower of the Confucian school, Xunzi, brought up the nuclear significance of rituals and music, but obviously weakened the tendency of the cultural solicitude and thus constituted a unadorned power politics theory of social control.