关键词: 四郎探母, 情理, 人伦, 忠孝, 家国

Abstract: 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.

Key words: Silang Visits His Mother, sentiment and reason, human relations, loyalty and filiality, family and country