Deal with a man as he deals with you: the Chinese Double Ninth Festival to reward senior citizens
Double Ninth Festival
On Chinese lunar calendar, nine of September every year has been marked as the day to reward and appreciate the senior citizens. The senior Chinese people on Double Ninth Day normally would like to go outing and climb hills to enjoy the changing colors of season——the summer days are fading away and yet a magnificent autumn is on its way. The Chinese culture interprets the view as the embodiment of the best principle of growing old like Bertrand Russell stated that “an individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being”.
Rewarding theelderly including families like grandparents, parents and so on are legacy of thousand-year-old Chinese culture. Mencius, a well-known Chinese philosopherduring the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period famously articulated the importance of respecting the elderly both in the sense of one family, and of a country. He further called for people to extend the affection, love and consideration from families to the whole societysaying “deal with a man he deals with you”. His attitude was echoed by Confucius who illustrated in his Analytics that “All men are brothers”.
