传统中国社会的情理与人伦--以京剧《四郎探母》为例

Sentiment, Reason and Human Relations in Traditional Chinese Society: Take Peking Opera Silang Visits His Mother as an Example

京剧《四郎探母》讲述的是宋辽两国交战,主人公杨四郎身处两个家和两个国的伦理困境中,而铁镜公主、佘太君、萧太后等人对情义的认同和坚守最终成全了杨四郎探母乃至回令的故事。晚清至民国,京剧《四郎探母》在民众当中十分流行,广受欢迎,但1949年之后这部剧却经历了四次大讨论,并屡次被禁演,而在解禁后又长演不衰。对四郎的同情和理解与对四郎“不忠不孝”“叛国投敌”的批评和斥责,形成了鲜明的对比。本文认为,京剧《四郎探母》所表达的传统中国社会是情理社会,而人们也正是通过以情理为基本取向的社会行动最终铸就了一个以情理为基本精神的社会结构。情理的根本是人伦,人伦精神贯穿于家国社会之中。

The story of Silang Visits His Mother took place during the war between Song and Liao.The hero Yang Silang(a Song warrior)was caught in an ethical dilemma between two families and two countries during the conflict.Through the love and virtue of his wife Princess Tiejing(Liao princess),his mother She Taijun,and his mother-in-law Dowager Xiao,Silang was able to escape death from a capital crime of visiting his enemy mother in secrecy.Silang Visits His Mother had been an extremely popular opera until the founding of the People’s Republic of China.Since then the opera had endured four major public criticisms and was banned for a long time.Its performance was resumed in the 1980s and has remained as the most popular Peking opera in China ever since.The sympathy and understanding of Silang contrasts sharply with the criticism and rebuke of his“disloyalty”,“unfilial”,and“treason”.By comparing the different views of the opera between the traditional and the modern audience,the paper explores the contextual changes in the understanding of Chinese social sentiment and reason over the time.To gain any comprehension of the sentiment and reason in the traditional society requires us to return to the cultural context of the time.As pointed out by existing studies,traditional Chinese society was a rational society,and Silang Visits His Mother depicted such a society precisely.By looking into the historical development of the opera and its various adaptations,as well as the script content,the paper shows how the general sense of reason expresses itself in people’s daily life through certain specific social structure and specific cognition of the society,and then becomes the guidance for people’s behaviors.Through Silang Visits His Mother we can see that in traditional China,people behaved with sentiment and rationality,this basic orientation of behaviors helped to form a social structure with the same spirit of sentiment and rationality.This explains why the Chinese traditional society is a rational society.It can also be said that from the perspective of concrete social behaviors,the essence of Chinese traditional rationality lies in human relations,the things that connect families,communities and countries.