Book of Songs (Chinese)

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The Book of Songs (), translated variously as the Classic of Poetry, the Book of Odes, and often known simply as its original name The Odes, is the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs. It comprises 305 poems and songs, some possibly from as early as 1000 BC. It forms part of the Five Classics.

Over half of the poems are said to have originally been popular songs. They concern basic human problems such as love, marriage, work, and war. Others include court poems, and legendary accounts praising the founders of the Zhou dynasty. Included are also hymns used in sacrificial rites, and songs used by the aristocracy in their sacrificial ceremonies or at banquets. The Odes first became known as a "canon" () after the Han Dynasty officially adopted Confucianism as the guiding principles of Chinese society around the 1st century AD. As with all great literary works of ancient China, the Shi have been annotated and commented on numerous times throughout history. The annotations by Han Dynasty scholar Mao Heng () and his nephew Mao Chang () are most well-known and are considered authoritative.

The poems of Book of Songs have strict patterns in both rhyme and rhythm, make much use of imagery, and tend to be short; they set the pattern for later Chinese poetry. The Book of Songs is regarded as a revered Confucian classic, and has been studied and memorized by centuries of scholars in China. The popular songs were seen as good keys to understanding the troubles of the common people, and were often read as allegories; complaints against lovers were seen as complaints against faithless rulers, for example.

Confucius was supposed to have selected and edited the poems from a much larger body of material.

Compilation

The earliest items in the Odes are believed to date to the Western Zhou period. The Book of Documents says that the poem "Owl" () in the Odes of Bin () was written by the Duke of Zhou. The latest material in the Shi Jing (said by scholar Zheng Xuan to be the song "Tree-stump Grove" () in the Odes of Chen) dates to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period. If these dates are accurate, then the Book of Odes would contain pieces from approximately 600 years of Chinese history.

There are two traditional stories regarding the gathering and compilation of the songs that make up the Odes: the "Royal Officials' Collecting Songs" () and "Master Confucius Deletes Songs" (). The former is recorded in the Book of Han, where the Zhou Dynasty court was said to have dispatched officials to each area of what was then Han Chinese territory (roughly the Yellow River Plain, Shandong, southwestern Hebei, eastern Gansu, and the Han River region) during the harvest to record local songs. After the project was completed, the Emperor was said to have read them in an effort to understand the hearts and minds of the common people.

The second story involves Confucius, and is mentioned in the Records of the Grand Historian. It says that there were originally 3,000 songs and poems in the Odes, and that Confucius selected the 300 that he felt best conformed to traditional ritual propriety, producing what would become the classic Shi Jing. However, the Zuo Zhuan records that the Shi Jing already existed in a definitive form when Confucius was just a young child. Although this story has been popular in many Confucian traditions, the first story is believed to be much closer to historical fact.

The collection

The collection is divided into three parts according to their genre, namely feng, ya and song, with the ya genre further divided into "small" and "large": {| class = "wikitable" |----- ! Chinese character(s) ! Pinyin ! Number and Meaning |----- | 風 || fēng|| 160 folk songs (or airs) |----- | 小雅 || xiǎoyǎ|| 74 minor festal songs (or odes traditionally sung at court festivities) |----- | 大雅 || dàyǎ|| 31 major festal songs, sung at more solemn court ceremonies |----- | 頌 || sòng ||40 hymns and eulogies , sung at sacrifices to gods and ancestral spirits of the royal house |}

The Confucian tradition holds that the collection, one of the Wu Jing, or Five Classics, came to what we have today after the editing of Confucius. The collection was officially acknowledged as one of "Five Classics" during the Han Dynasty, and previously in Zhou Dynasty Shi (詩) was one of "Six Classics". Four schools of commentary existed then, namely the Qi (齊), the Lu (魯), the Han (韓), and the Mao (毛) schools. The first two schools did not survive. The Han school only survived partly. The Mao school became the canonical school of Book of Songs commentary after the Han Dynasty. As a result, the collection is also sometimes referred to as "Mao Shi" (毛詩).

Zheng Xuan's elucidation on the Mao commentary is also canonical. The 305 poems had to be reconstructed from memory by scholars since the previous Qin Dynasty had burned the collection along with other classical texts. (There are, in fact, a total of 308 poem titles that were reconstructed, but the remaining three poems only have titles without any extant text). The earliest surviving edition of Book of Songs is a fragmentary one of the Han Dynasty, written on bamboo strips, unearthed at Fuyang.

The poems are written in four-character lines. The airs are in the style of folk songs, although the extent to which they are real folk songs or literary imitations is debated. The odes deal with matters of court and historical subjects, while the hymns blend history, myth and religious material.

The three major literary figures or styles employed in the poems are fu, bi and xing: {| class = "wikitable" |----- ! Chinese character ! Pinyin ! Meaning |----- | 賦 || fù|| straightforward narrative |----- | 比 || bǐ || explicit comparisons |----- | 興 || xìng|| implied comparisons |}

Contents

Summary of groupings of Book of Songs poems

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Guo Feng

Guo Feng ()
"Airs of the States" poems 001-160; 160 total folk songs (or airs)

group	char	group name	poem #s
01	周南	Odes of Zhou & South	001-011
02	召南	Odes of Shao & South	012-025
03	邶風	Odes of Bei	026-044
04	鄘風	Odes of Yong	045-054
05	衛風	Odes of Wei	055-064
06	王風	Odes of Wang	065-074
07	鄭風	Odes of Zheng	075-095
08	齊風	Odes of Qi	096-106
09	魏風	Odes of Wei	107-113
10	唐風	Odes of Tang	114-125
11	秦風	Odes of Qin	126-135
12	陳風	Odes of Chen	136-145
13	檜風	Odes of Kuai	146-149
14	曹風	Odes of Cao	150-153
15	豳風	Odes of Bin	154-160

Xiao Ya

Xiao Ya ()
"Minor Odes of the Kingdom" poems 161-234; 74 total minor festal songs (or odes) for court

group	char	group name	poem #s
01	鹿鳴 之什	Decade of Lu Ming	161-170
02	白華 之什	Decade of Baihua	170-175
03	彤弓 之什	Decade of Tong Gong	175-185
04	祈父 之什	Decade of Qi Fu	185-195
05	小旻 之什	Decade of Xiao Min	195-205
06	北山 之什	Decade of Bei Shan	205-215
07	桑扈 之什	Decade of Sang Hu	215-225
08	都人士 之什	Decade of Du Ren Shi	225-234

Da Ya

Da Ya ()
"Major Odes of the Kingdom" poems 235-265;
31 total major festal songs () for solemn court ceremonies

group	char	group name	poem #s
01	文王之什	Decade of Wen Wang	235-244
02	生民之什	Decade of Sheng Min	245-254
03	蕩之什	Decade of Dang	255-265

Song

Song ()
"Odes of the Temple & Altar" poems 266-305;
40 total praises, hymns, or eulogies sung at spirit sacrifices

group	char	group name	poem #s
01	周頌	Sacrificial Odes of Zhou1	266-296
01a	清廟之什	Decade of Qing Miao	266-275
01b	臣工之什	Decade of Chen Gong	276-285
01c	閔予小子之什	Decade of Min You Xiao Zi	286-296
02	魯頌	Praise Odes of Lu3	297-300
03	商頌	Sacrificial Odes of Shang1	301-305

note: alternative divisions may be topical or chronological (Legges): Song, DaYa, XiaoYa, GuoFeng

Influence and legacy

The Book of Songs is the oldest known purely literary work in Chinese history, providing the first extant examples of narrative and emotion-expressing verse and rhyme in Han Chinese history. The Odes provided founding principles in composition and rhyme that were patterned by Chinese writers for well over two thousand years. Additionally, the Odes preserve the earliest known descriptions of daily life among the ancient Han Chinese culture that occupied the Yellow River watershed, a culture that gradually spread out and assimilated or conquered non-Chinese tribes.

Confucius held the Book of Songs in highest esteem. The Analects records: "The Master said: The three hundred Odes, summarizing them in one phrase, say: 'Speak only of going straight.'" Another story in the Analects recounts that Confucius' son Kong Li told the story: "The Master once stood by himself, and I hurried to seek teaching from him. He asked me, 'You've studied the Odes?' I answered, 'Not yet.' He replied, 'If you study the Odes not, then I have nothing to speak.'"

The Odes even influenced political dealings in ancient China. When kingdoms or feudal leaders wished to express delicate or difficult positions, they would sometimes couch the message within a poem. This practice became common among educated Chinese in their personal correspondences and spread to Japan and Korea as well.

Modern scholarship on the Book of Songs often focuses on doing linguistic reconstruction and research in Old Chinese by analyzing the rhyme schemes in the Odes, which show vast differences when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. Even Cantonese and Min Nan, which preserve more Old Chinese syllable endings than Mandarin, are believed to be very different from the original language of the Odes.

Translations

, in The Sacred Books of China, translated by James Legge, 1879.

The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley, edited with additional translations by Joseph R. Allen, New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Book of Poetry, translated by Xu Yuanchong (許淵沖), edited by Jiang Shengzhang (姜勝章), Hunan, China: Hunan chubanshe, 1993.

The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954.

The Book of Odes, translated by Bernhard Karlgren, Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950.

'The Book of Songs 诗经', By Omnitoons, an iPhone application and done translation to English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese.

See also

Guan ju (The first ode of Guo Feng, Zhou Nan)

Notes

References

de Bary, William Theodore, Wing-Tsit Chan, Burton Watson, Yi-Pao Mei, Leon Hurvitz, T'ung-Tsu Ch'u and John Meskill (1960). Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume I. Columbia University Press.

Ebrey, Patricia (1993). Chinese Civilisation: A Sourcebook Second Edition. The Free Press.

External links

Bilingual Chinese-English searchable edition at Chinese Text Project

Legge's translation of the Book of Songs at Chinese text initiative

The Book of Odes in Chinese arrayed with James Legge translation.

Shiijing with Mao prefaces and Zhu Xi commentary by Harrison Huang

Legge's translation of the Book of Songs at the Internet Sacred Text Archive.

The Book of Songs 诗经 by Omnitoons Pte Ltd

Category:Chinese classic texts Category:Confucian texts Category:Chinese poetry collections Category:Epic poetry