{"id":8877,"date":"2019-11-12T15:17:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T15:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/chinese-reading\/shijing-shi-jing-the-book-of-songs\/"},"modified":"2019-11-12T15:17:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T15:17:23","slug":"shijing-shi-jing-the-book-of-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/shijing-shi-jing-the-book-of-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Shijing \u8bd7\u7ecf The Book of Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"
 The Shijing \u8bd7\u7ecf or "Book of Songs" is one of the traditio<\/em>nal Co<\/em>nfucian classics. It is a collection of three different types of so<\/em>ngs originating in the Shang \u5546 (17th to 11th cent. BC) and the early and middle Zhou period \u5468 (11th. cent.-221 BC), in 305 chapters. Of 6 chapters o<\/em>nly the names are preserved (Nangai \u5357\u9654, Baihua \u767d\u534e, Huashu \u534e\u9ecd, Yougeng \u7531\u5e9a, Cho<\/em>ngqiu \u5d07\u4e18, and Youyi \u7531\u4eea).<\/p>\n

The three types of so<\/em>ngs are feng \u98ce "airs", ya \u96c5 "odes", and song \u9882 "hymns". The 160 Airs are arranged according to the state wher they originate from (hence called guofeng \u56fd\u98ce "airs from the states"). The Odes are divided into Major (daya \u5927\u96c5) and Minor Odes (xiaoya \u5c0f\u96c5) and arranged in decades (shi \u4ec0). The Hymns are religious chants sung in the ancestral temples of the states of Zhou \u5468, which was the royal house, as well as Lu \u9c81, the home state of Confucius, and the house of Shang \u5546 whose descendants lived in the state of Song \u5b8b. The Airs of the states are folksongs, often co<\/em>ncered with a love theme. The Odes are said to come from the aristocratic class, the Major Odes being sung at the royal court, the Minor Odes at the court of the feudal lords. The so<\/em>ngs collected in the Shijing are not o<\/em>nly of a high literary value as the oldest so<\/em>ngs in China but they also reveal a lot of the actvities of different social strata in early China.<\/p>\n

The oldest sources say that o<\/em>nce the court of the Zhou dynasty ordered the collection of folkso<\/em>ngs from among the empire, quite similar to what the Han dynasty \u6c49 (206 BC-220 AD) did later with the establishment of the Music Bureau (yuefu \u4e50\u5e9c). This is how the Airs came into being. The Odes were instead are said to have been submitted by their composers to the throne directly. It is said that an original collection of so<\/em>ngs included 300 chapters, a corpus which was compiled by Co<\/em>nfucius \u5b54\u5b50 who chose the best from more than 3,000 songs. In reality the compilation of the Shi corpus, as it was called in earliest times, began in the 6th century BCE. It might be that the compilation took place in Lu, the home state of Confucius, which was famous for its musical tradition. That the "songs" were music and not recited poems is revealed by numerous sources. The oldest parts are said to be the hymns from Zhou and the Major Odes, written in the early decades of the Zhou period. The Minor Odes and a part of the Major Odes were probably written in the late Western Zhou period. The largest part of the Airs and the Hymns of Lu and Shang were o<\/em>nly written during the Spring and Autumn period.<\/p>\n

There must have been other types of so<\/em>ngs (altogher six, the liushi \u516d\u8bd7) of which no examples are preserved, namely the types of fu \u8d4b "straightforward" (which during the Han period reappears as the genre of prose rhapsody), bi \u6bd4 "simile, parable", and xing \u5174 "with introduction". The great Tang period \u5510 (618-907) commentator Kong Yingda \u5b54\u9896\u8fbe interpretes those terms in the following way: feng, ya and song are designations for certain external compositio<\/em>nal forms, while fu, bi and xing were designations for certain methods how the co<\/em>ntent of the poem was approached (together the liuyi \u516d\u4e49 "six meanings"). During the Han period, when o<\/em>nly the four designations of feng, daya, xiaoya and song were used, they were interpreted as the four beginnings (sishi \u56db\u59cb) describing the flourishing and decline of the royal house of Zhou. A very good example for the xing type is the air Guanju \u5173\u96ce, an example for the bi type is the air Shuoshu \u7855\u9f20, an example for the fu type is the air Qiyue \u4e03\u6708.<\/p>\n

Especially the Hymns, but also the Odes, can also be used as historiographic sources for the late Shang and early Zhou periods. Informations a<\/em>bout institutio<\/em>nal history, leisuretime activities of the upper class, as well as the hardships of the life of ordinary people can be found. Many of the Airs are simple love songs, the most famous of which is the first song of the Shijing.<\/p>\n

Very typically for the airs, but also some of the minor odes, is the repetition of verses in each of the stanzas, a phenomenon which is known in the west in poems of the ro<\/em>ndo type, but also in many folksongs. Another phenomenon very common in the airs are double rhymes (dieyun \u8fed\u97f5, like in the verse yao tiao shu nü \u7a88\u7a95\u6dd1\u5973), multiple or special readings (shuangsheng \u53cc\u58f0, like in the verse cen ci [instead of cancha] xing cai \u53c2\u5dee\u8347\u83dc) and repeated words (diezi \u8fed\u5b57, like in the verses feng yu qi qi, ji ming jie jie \u98ce\u96e8\u51c4\u51c4\uff0c\u9e21\u9e23\u5588\u5588). A large part of the verses has four syllables, especially among the airs. The so<\/em>ngs in the Shijing are the oldest example for regular poems which later became so popular.<\/p>\n

From a linguistic viewpoint the rhymes of the so<\/em>ngs are an im<\/em>portant help for the reco<\/em>nstruction of the archaic Chinese language.<\/p>\n

The Shijing had always attracted the interest of all groups of persons. Co<\/em>nfucius o<\/em>nce said that without the Shijing there was nothing to talk a<\/em>bout. With many examples from the Shijing he even educated his disciples.<\/p>\n

During the so-called literary inquisition under the First Emperor of Qin \u79e6\u59cb\u7687 (r. 246\/221-210 BCE) the Shijing survived virtually without damage, certainly because most of its so<\/em>ngs were also transmitted orally, which is easier for so<\/em>ngs than for prose texts. During the early Han period there were four different versions available: the Qi \u9f50, Lu \u9c81, Han \u97e9, and Mao \u6bdb versions. The three former were written in the modern chancery s<\/em>cript style (lishu \u96b6\u4e66) and were thus co<\/em>nsidered so-called new texts, while the Shijing of Mao – the Maoshi \u6bdb\u8bd7 – was written in ancient characters and thus from the old text tradition. For the Qi, Lu and Han versions there were professors (boshi \u535a\u58eb "erudites") established at the Natio<\/em>nal University (taixue \u592a\u5b66), which means that those versions were the imperially acknowledged ones. The Lu version was already lost in the 4rd century CE, the Han version survived until the end of the Northern Song period \u5317\u5b8b (960-1126). A kind of commentary to the Han version has survived, the Hanshi waizhuan \u97e9\u6c0f\u5916\u4f20, which has been treated as a sub-classic writing since. The Qi version was lost during the 3rd century. The Mao version had been transmitted by descendants of Zixia \u5b50\u590f, a disciple of Confucius. Mao Heng \u6bdb\u4ea8 and Mao Chang \u6bdb\u82cc introduced this version of the Shijing to Han period scholars but it o<\/em>nly obtained official status during the Later Han period (25-220 AD) and was revised and commented by Zheng Zhong \u90d1\u4f17, Jia Kui \u8d3e\u9035, Ma Rong \u9a6c\u878d and Zheng Xuan \u90d1\u7384. The latter wrote a commentary called Maoshi zhuanjian \u6bdb\u8bd7\u4f20\u7b3a. After the Han period the Mao version was the o<\/em>nly surviving version.
During the Tang period \u5510 (618-907) Kong Yingda \u5b54\u9896\u8fbe wrote his famous commentary Maoshi zhengyi \u6bdb\u8bd7\u6b63\u4e49 "The true meaning of the Shijing". The great Neo-Co<\/em>nfucian scholar Zhu Xi \u6731\u71b9 assembled all Song period \u5b8b (960-1279) commentaries on the Maoshi and published them as Shijizhuan \u8bd7\u96c6\u4f20.<\/p>\n

All poems have a small preface (xiaoxu \u5c0f\u5e8f), the first poem has a Great Preface (Daxu \u5927\u5e8f).
 
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