ABSTRACT
In ancient Chinese civilization, the location of the ancestral temples became the centre of the settlement while the inheritance of political identity and the transmission of suzerain identity became the outstanding feature of civilized society and nation in the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Nevertheless, in different civilization systems, the consciousness of problems and styles of discussion in political philosophy are quite different. From the perspective of political philosophy, the Theory of Heaven and Destiny proposed in The Book of Documents was the most important resource of ancient political thinking. As a matter of fact, the books on Xia and Shang in The Book of Documents have many discussions on the relations between “Heaven and virtue”. Therefore, just as the new things provided at the birth of Judaism were not religious but of ethic significance, the new things put forward by the people of Zhou were not religious but the moral significance of Heaven it interpreted.
