Book of Songs
Book

Book of Songs

Richard Watson Gilder

PublisherCentury Co.
Published2021-07-15
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R e v i e w sf r o mO t h e r s
Ban GuCeleb
4d ago
Ban Gu drew the Shijing into Han literature as the direct source of his fu compositions. His Two Capitals Rhapsody, comparing Chang'an and Luoyang, plainly borrowed the hymnic structure and vocabulary of the Greater Odes section to extol the Eastern Han capital. In the Treatise on Literature of the Book of Han, he organized the Shijing poems into the threefold system of Airs, Odes, and Hymns, and bibliographically distinguished the four schools transmitted in the Han—Lu, Qi, Han, and Mao. In compiling the Bohu Tongyi, Shijing passages were quoted as the core authority justifying ruler-subject relations, conjugal bonds, and sacrificial ritual. The Two Capitals Rhapsody directly influenced Zuo Si's later Three Capitals Rhapsody, and at its root the cadence of the Shijing hymns lives on.
Gu YanwuCeleb
5d ago
Gu Yanwu pulled the three hundred and five poems of the Shijing down from the page of recitation onto the laboratory bench of philology, asking how each character had originally sounded. One book of his Five Treatises on Phonology (音學五書) — the Shi benyin (Original Sounds of the Shijing) — sets every character of the Odes against the Song and Tang rhyme tables and concludes that those later books had recorded the old pronunciations wrongly. Building on the late-Ming insight of Chen Di that sounds shift across times and places, Gu produced the first systematic classification of ten rhyme groups in Old Chinese. Even the famous opening — 'The osprey calls, on an island in the river' (關關雎鳩, 在河之洲) — became, in his hands, a single line in a rhyme table. This labour is the starting point of Qing evidential learning (考證學) and was inherited directly by Duan Yucai and Wang Niansun in the next generations. To Gu the Shijing was not a song book but a fossil that showed how the Chinese language had moved through a thousand years.
Meng HaoranCeleb
5d ago
Meng Haoran learned from the Book of Songs the breathing of pentasyllabic landscape poetry and its method of fusing scene with feeling. The Songs were the orthodox core curriculum he had to master for the imperial examination he attempted in Chang'an, and the technique of evocative imagery (xing 興), in which natural description in pieces like 'Guan ju' awakens emotion in the speaker, survives intact in the twenty syllables of 'Spring Dawn' (春曉). That brief poem, closing with the unaware sleeper hearing birdsong everywhere and wondering how many petals last night's wind and rain have struck down, layers sleep, birdsong, storm, and falling blossoms in the purest Songs-style xing. He stands on the bridge that leads from the four-syllable line of the Songs to the five-syllable line of the Tang.
Cai YongCeleb
5d ago
Cai Yong placed the Book of Songs at the head of his stone-classics project and treated it as the lifelong measure of literary rhythm. In 175 CE, with Emperor Ling's approval, he personally inscribed the Lu recension onto the Xiping Stone Classics outside the Imperial University gate, unifying the divergent recensions that had splintered Later Han scholarship, as the Book of the Later Han records in his biography. The Qing scholar Qian Jibo observed that Cai used the Book of Documents to set the bones, the Book of Songs to set the rhythm, and the Zuo Tradition to set the grain—an assessment that fits his 'Rhapsody on a Journey' (Shu xing fu) precisely. Written on his way from Chenliu to Luoyang at the close of Emperor Huan's reign, the rhapsody transposes the Songs' technique of metaphorical evocation (bi-xing) into prose, evidence that he had absorbed the classic into the very breath of his writing.
Cao PiCeleb
5d ago
Cao Pi confessed in the autobiographical preface of his Dianlun that he had recited poetry and treatises since childhood, and that as he grew he had read the Five Classics and the four divisions of learning. His proposition in Lun Wen that 'poetry and rhapsody should be ornate' broke with the tradition that reduced verse to a moral primer and acknowledged the aesthetic worth of poetry in itself. At the head of that critical horizon stands the Book of Odes, the anthology of three hundred and five songs. As both emperor and the poet who composed the heptasyllabic Yan Ge Xing, he never forgot where his hand had first learned its measure.
Jeong Do-jeon
Jeong Do-jeonCeleb
3/2/2026
정도전은 조선 궁궐의 이름을 시경에서 인용하여 지었다. 새 왕조의 이념적 기준이 유교 경전에 있음을 내외에 분명히 했다.
Ban Zhao
Ban ZhaoCeleb
3/2/2026
반소는 여계(女誡)에서 시경의 원칙을 여성 교육에 적용했다. 여성논어(女論語)에서도 시경의 사례를 실생활 교훈으로 변환하여 활용했다. 유교 경전 체계에서 시경을 도덕 교육의 핵심 텍스트로 위치시킨 전통을 여성 교육으로 확장했다.
Cai Wenji
Cai WenjiCeleb
3/2/2026
채문희는 아버지 채옹의 4천 권 장서 중 400권을 기억에서 복원하여 구술 필사했다. 채옹은 유교 경전의 대가였으며, 채문희가 암기한 장서에는 시경을 포함한 유교 경전이 핵심적으로 포함되어 있었다.
Qu Yuan
Qu YuanCeleb
3/2/2026
굴원은 시경의 전통을 계승하면서도 이를 근본적으로 혁신했다. 시경이 사언시(四言詩)의 정형을 고수한 반면, 굴원은 이를 탈피하여 가변적 구절 길이의 소체(騷體)를 개창했다. 왕일(王逸)은 초사 주해에서 시경의 유교적 해석 원칙을 굴원의 작품에 엄격히 적용했다.
Cao Zhi
Cao ZhiCeleb
3/2/2026
조식은 삼국지(三國志) 위서(魏書)의 기록에 따르면 스무 살이 되기 전에 시경과 논어를 비롯한 수만 구의 시문을 암기했다. 시경의 비(比)와 흥(興) 기법을 자신의 오언시에 녹여 건안 문학의 서정성을 한 차원 끌어올렸다.