The article is devoted to the study of cultural codes. It notes that despite the widespread use of this concept in modern intellectual discourse, in science this concept has not yet acquired a generally accepted meaning. A critical analysis of the existing definitions leads the authors to the need to clarify the existing definitions. Studies of monuments and scientific literature devoted to traditional Chinese culture and Confucianism in its historical development, supplemented by an analysis of the culture of everyday life and corrected by modern comparative studies, led the authors to understand that the cultural code is an established form of understanding cultural reality, and scenarios of behavior and speech emanating from this understanding accepted in a particular society. The article shows that the identified cultural codes, thanks to capacious aphoristic forms and laconic hieroglyphic imagery, were easily retained in memory. On the example of the code “getting along with the environment, but not identifying with it (和而不同)”, the effectiveness of this mechanism in various situations of cultural and social life is shown. Based on this kind of provisions, «absorbed with mother's milk», the Chinese people have carried out and continue to carry out the transmission of their original culture in the very difficult conditions of cultural unification characteristic of the globalization of our time.