“The sins of parents are visited on their children”

“The sins of parents are visited on their children” is a concise expression of inherited moral consequence in the commentary on the I Ching. Its force lies in a troubling displacement: goodness and evil are affirmed to receive their proper recompense, but the judgment may be delayed and fall on descendants rather than on those who most deserve it.

Meaning and Scope

The saying appears alongside its positive counterpart: a family that accumulates goodness is said to receive abundant happiness, while one that accumulates evil receives abundant misery. The commentary reads both outcomes as taking place in the family, not necessarily in the individual whose conduct began the moral account. Recompense therefore crosses generations: a person’s virtue or wrongdoing may shape the fortunes of the family as a whole.

Deferred Recompense

The account insists on a distinction between moral certainty and the timing or form of its consequences. Confucianism, the commentator says, does not waver in affirming the difference between good and evil, or that each receives an appropriate recompense. It has much less to say about where, when, and how that recompense arrives. The old classics, in this account, are silent about retribution beyond what occurs in temporal life.

Around the era of Confucius, the idea took definite shape that if good and evil, virtue and vice, did not produce their consequences in an individual’s own experience, they would do so in the experience of that person’s posterity. The saying is identified as perhaps the earliest expression of this view. Its circulation helped give the formulation lasting reach: the commentator observes that it was copied from the Appendix into almost every moral treatise circulating in China.

The Unanswered Question

The commentator calls the principle wholesome and important, but does not treat it as a complete account of justice. If the sins of parents are visited on their children, do the parents themselves escape the curse? The short treatise offers no definite reply. Its silence leaves unresolved the tension between affirming that wrongdoing is recompensed and describing a consequence that may strike people other than its perpetrators.

Place in the Treatise

The passage forms part of the commentator’s assessment of a short treatise that presents itself as explaining the I Ching’s teachings about human beings. He regards its doctrine of the Three Powers, like that of the Great Ultimate, as out of place in Confucianism, and suggests that the treatise’s attempt to assign humanity a fitting place alongside the other powers may be an afterthought. Although the family-recompense saying carries moral and historical interest, he concludes that the treatise adds little to understanding either the main text or the appended treatises as a whole.