The Root and the Stem
The Teaching
Now filial piety is the root of all virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching. Our bodies — to every hair and bit of skin — are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them. This is the beginning of filial piety. When we have established our character by the practice of the filial course, so as to make our name famous in future ages and thereby glorify our parents, this is the end of filial piety. It commences with the service of parents; it proceeds to the service of the ruler; it is completed by the establishment of character.
— Classic of Filial Piety, ch. 1
Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites to parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice; — then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence.
— Analects I.9
He sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present. He sacrificed to the spirits, as if the spirits were present.
— Analects III.12, trans. James Legge
Commentary
Filial piety here is not sentiment about one's parents. It is a description of the mechanism by which anything at all survives a generation, and the Xiaojing says so in a single breath: the root of virtue, and the stem out of which grows all moral teaching. Ethics and pedagogy are not two subjects. They are one plant.
The body is the first inheritance. Received from one's parents, and therefore not one's own to damage — which places the obligation before any choice the person could have made about it. And Analects I.9 makes the civilizational claim outright. Careful attention to the funeral rites, sustained long after the death, and then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence. A whole society's moral condition, made a function of how it treats what it received.
The rites themselves are described with a striking restraint. He sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present. The clause is doing careful work: not asserting that the dead are present, not denying it, but specifying the quality of attention the rite requires. The practice is the point.
The chapter's own last move is its demonstration. It closes by quoting the older Book of Odes — ever think of your ancestor, cultivating your virtue. A text about transmission ends by transmitting an older text.
One editorial note for anyone checking the passage. Legge's own Sacred Books of the East printing supplies bracketing parentheses around several words in the opening sentence, and the digital transcriptions in general circulation have silently stripped them. The wording above follows those transcriptions.