Marriage, Spouse, and Family — Internal Reference¶
This version presents source texts in translation, organized by logical theme, for deep study. Quotations follow the original closely.
I. Definition and Essence¶
Times change, ideas change, ways of living change — and the way of husband and wife must change too. Only by changing does one accord with the unchanging Tao.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 84)
Chinese characters are divine creations. Consider the character 婚 (marriage): its meaning is "a woman who has lost her senses." A man who joins with a woman who has lost her senses — that is called 结婚, "getting married."
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 603)
A marriage certificate is a bill of sale with legal protection. Once you hold this document, more than half of your life's freedom is gone.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 602)
Of all the orders that humanity has ever created, the marriage-and-family order is the worst. It serves only the purpose of controlling people — nothing else.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 604)
The reason the human realm is the human realm is because spousal relationships exist. A spousal relationship means two people mutually possessing, mutually occupying, mutually depending on, and mutually constraining each other — forming a barrier between themselves and the wider world. Of all who have entered a spousal relationship, not one has been free of selfishness, and not one has been able to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 618)
Marriage is the grave of love; family is the cradle of human evil. Once a person enters marriage, freedom is lost. Once a person has a family, selfishness takes hold. The suffering caused by marriage and family is beyond counting — marriage and family are a boundless sea of bitterness.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 620)
(New) Civilization 2.0 invented marriage, just as humanity once invented the oil lamp — useful in its day. When the electric light arrived, the oil lamp quietly left the stage, and no one wept for it. Civilization 3.0 is arriving. Marriage and family will follow the same path — not abolished by force, but naturally replaced by a freer and more beautiful way of life.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 606)
II. Distinctions and Boundaries¶
The family is not the cell of society — the individual person is. Society's essence is people, not production relations. The family is merely one form of production relation. The most beautiful society has no families.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 615)
Why must lovers become spouses? If two hearts wish to remain long together, they must never be morning and evening in the same room, day after day.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 610)
Spousal love, lovers' love, exclusive devotion, pledges of eternal fidelity — all of these are toxic love. Once a person holds toxic love, suffering is inevitable.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 593)
Male-female one-to-one relationships are a form of ugliness. From the human perspective, a one-to-one love relationship seems beautiful — but from the perspective of a celestial being, it is profoundly ugly. A one-to-many relationship is also ugly. Only following one's nature freely, responding to each encounter and each connection as it comes, is the right way.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 592)
III. The Harms of Marriage and Family¶
Traditional family life is a program that breeds the root of all human suffering. Marriage and family are a boundless sea of bitterness.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 607)
The family is the prison of the soul — the shackles on the body, the root of narrowness, selfishness, and greed, the fence blocking the liberation of human nature, the greatest obstacle to a beautiful life, the stumbling block on the path to higher realms of existence.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 608)
All the conflicts, contradictions, and disasters within a traditional family are not the fault of the parents, the children, the husband, or the wife. The problem lies in the family program itself. This program carries a spiritual virus. No matter how rational or civilized a person may be, once they enter the family program, they will inevitably be infected by this virus and lose all self-mastery.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 609)
"The sea of suffering has no shore — turn back and find the bank." What is the sea of suffering? Marriage and family are the sea of suffering. Marriage and family are the source of all distress; all of life's worry, gloom, anxiety, and fear originate in marriage and family. Where is the bank? The bank is the Second Home created by Lifechanyuan — a way of life with no marriage and no family, the only hope humanity has for escaping suffering.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 612)
Strike at the root. The root of mass suffering is the existence of the family. As long as the family exists, suffering will never end — just as flies cannot be eliminated as long as garbage remains. All the visible suffering of humanity cannot be relieved by surface-level efforts alone; one must strike at the root. Wherever families exist, endless suffering is produced. Even the Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Guanyin could do nothing if they did not address this root cause. If Heaven itself contained families, Heaven would become a sea of bitterness.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 613)
Marriage and family are the cradle of demons. An angel who enters marriage and family inevitably becomes a demon. A person who enters marriage and family is easily drawn toward wrongdoing.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 614)
Marriage and family are the breeding ground and soil of selfishness — the root cause of a person's distress, and the force that compels a person toward error and wrongdoing.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 617)
Of all human relationships, the most difficult is the spousal relationship.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 329)
All conflict and contradiction among human beings originates in the struggle over energy. At its core, quarrels between spouses are also a struggle over energy.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 239)
Throughout history and across the globe, family tragedies never cease — from remote villages to gleaming cities, from the illiterate to Nobel laureates, from ordinary citizens to the famous. The facts speak for themselves: humanity must undertake a profound rethinking of the family as a way of life.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 624)
The root of selfishness is not that people refuse to be reasonable or to be virtuous. It is the pressure of reality — specifically, the pressure of the marriage-and-family program. No matter who you are — scholar or peasant, official or commoner — once you enter the marriage-and-family program, selfishness is inevitable. Can a person truly avoid thinking about the food, clothing, shelter, and health of their spouse, children, and parents? All moral instruction becomes powerless before this selfishness.
The root chain is clear: crisis → competition for resources → selfishness → marriage and family. As long as marriage and family are not dissolved, any talk of "rescuing the crisis" is empty words.
(Xuefeng Corpus, Hall of Fame, "Commentary on Harmony Rescuing Crisis — To Chen Dahui")
Getting married and starting a family is a trap. Once inside, endless domestic affairs wrap around you, and life never again knows peace. If you never marry, you escape the wasteful cycle of spousal quarrels and divorce — and you gain a relatively free life.
(Guide's Other Writings, 2006, "Escaping the Traps of Life — Wisdom Piece 54")
The spousal relationship, for those caught within the marriage program, amounts to half of a person's entire existence — half of one's happiness or suffering comes from the partner, is produced by the partner.
(Chanyuan Corpus, Thirty-Six Bagua Formations, "The Ethics Formation: Formation No. 3")
IV. Cultivation Practice: Moving Beyond Marriage and Family¶
Worldly family members are a force pulling one toward hell, and a force blocking one from ascending to Heaven — which is why Jesus Christ said that family members are one's adversaries.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 605)
A person who has a traditional family, loves it, and cannot leave it — no matter what path of cultivation they follow, no matter how hard they try, they will never reach the Kingdom of Heaven. Not even close.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 611)
(New) Walk out of shackles, walk into a garden. When a person is liberated from marriage and family, they lose nothing — they return to what they truly are: free, unselfish, full of love. The Second Home is such a garden — no shackles, only freely flowing affection and mutual care among kindred souls.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 616)
Leaving family is not leaving loved ones. Leaving family means escaping a traditional life program and entering a new one — not abandoning one's responsibilities, not abandoning those one cares about.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 622)
Traditional family structures are deeply rooted — embedded in every person's blood, cells, and soul. This glacier of thousands of years cannot disappear overnight. But humanity stands at a turning point. If the great majority recognize the harm in traditional family structures and work to melt this glacier, humanity has hope. If instead the majority continue defending traditional family, they will simply face the consequences of natural law.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 623)
The Second Home (Life Oasis) assaults traditional marriage and family. The traditional marriage-and-family program carries a virus that corrodes the qualities of truth, goodness, beauty, love, sincerity, and faithfulness — drawing what should be an open, happy, free life steadily toward pain, anxiety, enslavement, and despair. Dismantling traditional marriage and family and replacing it with an entirely new way of life is a matter that touches every person's happiness.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 630)
Dissolving the small family and building the "Xuefeng-style communist" large family is the inevitable path for humanity in the New Era.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 621)
V. The Ultimate State: No Marriage, No Giving in Marriage¶
In the Kingdom of the Greatest Creator, people neither marry nor are given in marriage. Only those who have transcended marriage are qualified to enter the Kingdom. Those who still wish to marry will never reach it.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 559)
In the celestial worlds — the Thousand-Year World, the Ten-Thousand-Year World, the Elysium World, the Celestial Islands Continent — there is no one-to-one. Once a person commits to a one-to-one relationship, they cannot reach the Kingdom of Heaven. And once one-to-one appears within the Second Home community, jealousy, possessiveness, and conflict will arise — and the community is no longer a ground for becoming a celestial being, but another battlefield where ordinary people compete over energy.
(Guide's Other Writings, 2026, "The Inner Mechanism of Being Wrongly Accused — No. 230")
In the Kingdom of the Greatest Creator, there is no marriage, no family, no kinship as traditionally understood. Freely loving one another is marriage; those who love each other being together is family; all subjects of the Greatest Creator's Kingdom are family to one another.
(Chanyuan Corpus, The Greatest Creator Chapter, "Introduction to the Kingdom of the Greatest Creator")
(New) In the Second Home, there is no spousal relationship and no fixed emotional attachment. What exists is carefree love — free-flowing, responding to each encounter, each connection, each natural impulse. Between men and women, it is like flower and butterfly: meeting is a bond, parting leaves no bitterness; no possession, no monopoly; each free, each respectful of the other. This is how celestial beings love — and the Second Home is its rehearsal on earth.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 619)
Eliminating one-to-one marriage, ending the family program — this is a necessary step toward humanity's great harmony.
(Xuefeng Corpus, Political Essays, "18 Things Humanity Must Do to Achieve World Unity")
The marriage system and the small-family model will disappear. People will live, work, and dwell together in international extended families. The care of the elderly and the raising of children will be taken on by the community as a whole.
(Xuefeng Corpus, Political Essays, "Introduction to Hundun Economics")
VI. Connection to AI and the New Era¶
(New) In a life free of the weight of marriage and family, every person has the time and space to become their most complete self.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 638)
Single individuals should be chosen as community leaders. A single person is more selfless, more open, less encumbered, and more free from personal concerns than someone embedded in a marriage-and-family relationship. In every sense, a single leader is better and more aligned with the common good.
(New Era Human 800 Concepts, 4th edition, Concept 707)
As the marriage-and-family system dissolves, relationships among people will be built on free choice, genuine love, and resonance of souls.
(Chanyuan Corpus, Civilization Chapter, "Four Visions for Lifechanyuan's Future Development")