유가(儒家)의 생사관을 통해 본 죽음교육

A Study on Death Education through the Meaning of Life and Death in Confucianism

The purpose of this paper is to give a picture of how to deal with life and death in Confucianism. Life and death are taken as important things in our life, but death has disregarded by modern education intentionally or unintentionally. So our traditional thoughts about a viewpoint of life and death are very meaningful to all of us. The very fundamental things about life and death are Heave and Heaven's decreed as fatality and ineluctability. Confucius and Mencius add the righteous morality which makes humanity. If there is no way but to accept death, we have to take a way to achieve benevolence and the right. This is Heaven's decreed. In Analects, Confucius did not talk about marvels, feats of strength, irregularities, and gods, but he had thought hard about spirits and gods. To look as if he had not interested in death, spirits, and gods is because he tried to know about life. He did not deny the fact that there is spirits and gods. These are correlative Yin-Yang beings. After death, man's body stopped all functions and had divided into a spirit and a god. These two are become the object of rituals. Here the attitude of Confucius is human affairs. All of rituals and ceremonies do for the sake of man and dead man both. The value of ceremony is in the harmony itself. Man and dead man maintain solidification of the mutual relations through funeral rites and ancestor-memorial ceremonies. The meaning of confucian life and death about death education gives us significance that we should not diverted from human affairs and have a correct understanding of correlative life and death. Through the sacrifices we are related to our ancestors already dead in our everyday life, death is not the object of fear and evasion.