Laolaizi entertaining brick

[Laolaizi entertainment brick]

Laolaizi entertainment brick, Northern Song Dynasty, 19.2 cm long, 26 cm wide, and 3 cm thick
The portrait brick is rectangular, the concave inside of the brick is in the shape of a pot door, and the three words “Lao Laizi” are carved on the center. Laolaizi’s parents sat behind a rectangular table with branches dancing behind them. At the lower left corner is Laolaizi, facing his parents, kneeling on both legs, holding a toy in both hands, four puppets on the ground, a drum under the tree, and two sticks on the drum
Lao Laizi’s entertaining relatives is one of the stories of the twenty-four filial piety. It is said that Laolaizi was originally a hermit of the State of Chu during the Spring and Autumn Period. Later, it was somehow said that he was over 70 years old and dressed in colorful clothes, making a bird around his parents to make them happy. The earliest existing images of Laolaizi are the stone room portraits of Wuliang Temple in Jiaxiang, Shandong Province, in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Song and Jin Dynasties, most of them were found in the tombs in the northern region. Most of them showed Laolaizi holding a drum (that is, a rattle drum). Later, there was also a description of Laolaizi dropping a bucket on the ground, which was intended to show Laolaizi pretending to be an innocent child, in order to make parents feel that they are not old. The story of Laolaizi’s filial piety changed later. Later generations described it as taking water from the hall, deliberately falling down and sprinkling water on the ground, pretending to be a child crying
Lu Xun was most disgusted to use the “cheat” method to describe filial piety and let children learn to follow it. He said in “The Painting of Twenty-four Filial Pieties in the Morning and the Evening”: “Just like taking ‘meat hemp as fun’, taking unkindness as an ethical discipline, insulting the ancients and teaching the posterity. Laolaizi is an example. When the Taoist thought he was immaculate, he died in the children’s hearts.”