On the Characteristics & Significance of Rites and Music Culture in the West-Zhou Dynasty

After the age of witchcraft and religion, Rites and Music Culture in the West-Zhou Dynasty reached a humanistic reasonable stage of Chinese culture, which was the necessary result of Chinese culture developed from lower stage to higher stage. The Culture was composed of Rites, which was the code of conduct, and Music, which was the assistance to the Rites' performance. It was the characteristics of the Culture that Rites assisted by Music gave security to social roles' self-discipline in the society. It was the patriarch system and the rural commune system as social environment that the cullture was formed , and conversely, the Culture supported those systems. The main significance of the Culture is: (1) with its obviously stable characteristics, the Culture represents the first concrete reasonable form of Chinese culture; (2) inherited by the Various Schools of Thought in the pre-Qin Dynasty, the Culture laid a foundation for all the Chinese culture with its fundamentally distinctive characteristics among the world cultures.