Zhou Xingsi was born in Chenjun Township (now Henan Province) and lived in Gushuji (now Shangqiu City). His date of birth is unknown. He died in two years (52 1) and was a famous civil servant in Liang Wudi period. Liang Shu's Biography of Zhou Xingsi (Volume 49) said: Liang Wudi transformed the old houses of Moling County (now Moling Town, Xiangcheng City, Henan Province) where he lived when he was born and Li Xia Sanqiao into a temple called Guangzhai Temple, which enabled Zhou Xingsi and another literary master Lu Shu to write their own inscriptions, while Liang Wudi took it as a good thing to promote future generations. Since then, Zhou Xingsi has become an important writer in the Liang Wudi era. Whenever there are important cultural activities in the country, Liang Wudi asks Zhou Xingsi to write lyrics and perform, such as "Tongque Tai Ming", "Mentang", "Northern Expedition" and "Thousand Words of Wang Xizhi", all written by Zhou Xingsi. Among them, the second rhyme "Thousand Words" by Wang Xizhi is this work called "Thousand Words".
However, Zhou Xingsi was not the only one who wrote thousands of words at that time. Liang Shu Volume 35 Biography of Xiao Zifan said that Xiao Zifan was appointed as the King of Fu Nanping (half-brother, whose real name is Wen Da). When Cao was engaged in Zhongyu, he wrote money, and because of the beauty of words, Nanping Wang ordered him to collect Cai? Take notes. According to the records in the Fifty-seventh Volume of Southern History, Shen Chongzhuan, Liang Wudi wrote Poems of a Thousand Families, including Shen Zhong's notes. However, Liang Wudi's so-called "Thousand Words Poetry" is actually Zhou Xingsi's "Thousand Words in Wang Xizhi's Book". The Biography of Zhou Xingsi clearly stipulates: "Naturally, there are Jin Ming, Mentang, the Northern Expedition, and the Book of Wang Xizhi with a Thousand Words and Rhymes, and it is necessary for Gaozu to call it good and give it gold and silk every time he plays it." It can be seen that although these articles belong to Liang Wudi, the real author is Zhou Xingsi. Although before Liang Wudi's Longxing, Wang Xiao, the king of Jingling in the Southern Qi Dynasty, "opened the Western Mansion and recruited literature", and traveled to the Western Mansion with literary masters such as Xie Tiao, Fan Yun, Lu Shu, etc., and was known as the "Eight Friends of Jingling", his poems must have done well. However, after "Longxing", talents in the world use it, and of course there is no need to practice calligraphy and hard work. Zhou Xingsi's Thousand Characters was written at the instigation of Liang Wudi, but it can also be attached to Liang Wudi. In this case, it is not wrong to say that "Liang Wudi wrote thousands of poems" in Shen Chongzhuan. It's just that Shen Zhong's literature was unlucky, and he hoped to become famous through the emperor's potential, but unfortunately he failed to do so. Anyway, it's good to say that Qian had at least two different authors and two different versions at the time, and his works also existed in the world when Tang Shu was compiled in the Five Dynasties. Therefore, Ji Zhi of Old Tang Shu Shu Jing records: "A volume of Qian was written by Xiao Zifan; Another volume, written by Zhou Xingsi. " Gu's Record of the Day said that "there are two volumes of thousand-character writing", which is probably based on this.
However, how can we be sure that what we see today is Zhou Xingsi's Thousand Characters of Wang Xizhi, not Xiao Zifan's work of the same name? The relevant records in Li Chuo's Shangshu Jiu Shi in the Tang Dynasty not only answered this question, but also gave a reasonable explanation for the reasons why it was handed down from generation to generation. Li said:
Thousands of words, edited by Zhou Liangxing and written by Wang Youjun, is unknown. It was the teaching of Kings that made Yin add a thousand words to Kings. Every word is a piece of paper, and the chop suey is all messed up. Emperor Wu summoned Xing Si and said, "You are talented and thoughtful. You rhyme for me." Xing Si knitted into the bed overnight, with all white sideburns and a very thick reward. Sun Zhiyong, the Zen master of the right army, has 800 copies since he came, and one copy is kept in each temple on earth. I went to live in yongfu temple, Xing Wu and studied books for many years. I wrote ten jars of Logger Vick, and each jar counted stones. People who come to ask for a book title are like the city where they live, piercing holes for them. They are wrapped in iron leaves and people call them iron gates. After taking the pen, it is called returning the pen to the tomb.
In order to teach his sons to learn calligraphy, Liang Wudi asked Yin to select from Wang Xizhi's calligraphy works and developed 1000 non-repetitive examples for him to copy. Because the examples used are all chosen by looking for places in the east and west, when rubbing, "every piece of paper is messy." So Liang Wudi called Zhou Xingsi and said, "You are great, rhyme for me." Zhou Xingsi stayed up all night, putting these messy pieces of paper together into a good article with complete beginning and end and sonorous rhyme. Due to excessive brain use, Zhou Xingsi became "white" overnight. This is the origin and writing process of thousand-character writing.
However, in the eyes of contemporary people whose thoughts have long been westernized, Qian is not a famous writer who created a "model" in the history of China literature, but he can remain immortal with his name; Moreover, judging from the current literary concept, this "Thousand Characters" has neither plot nor image. It is not an excellent literary work, but a game of dancing in chains. If it is because of Liang Wudi, it has been passed down through the ages, but Shen Zhong's Notes on Thousand Characters or Notes on Thousand Characters have not been passed down. It is neither "literature is handed down by people" nor "people are handed down by literature". There must be other reasons why the "thousand-character script" has been handed down.
Before the invention of printing, the spread of articles and books depended on oral recitation and copying. Therefore, articles before the Middle Ages are generally natural in sound and rhyme and catchy to read. It goes without saying that poetry and parallel prose are easy to flow because of their neat sentence patterns and dense rhymes. Even the so-called "pen without rhyme" in a single sentence is often mixed with rhyme in prose, in order to make the words fluent and facilitate oral recitation. Otherwise, "words without words are not far away" will inevitably lead to annihilation or even extinction. The manual copying of articles and books not only led to the historical evolution of Chinese characters and the artistic development of China's calligraphy, but its most direct achievement was to build a dam to intercept those shoddy timely words and cliches. The hard work of manual copying determines that it must be strictly compared and carefully selected in advance; Therefore, the historical operation of reproduction and distribution constitutes a clever mechanism to ensure the survival of the fittest between the author and the audience. Therefore, after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, there were so many collections of different languages and so many last-minute characters, which was unstoppable. However, since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it reached its peak, and beginners of literature and ink had collections that harmed jujube and pear, and the convenience of printing was really hard to blame. According to Wang Guowei's research, the invention of block printing was in the late Tang and Five Dynasties. In my opinion, is this the result of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan changing their writing style? Otherwise, why didn't block printing appear neither too early nor too late, but in an era not far from him? It is difficult to remember and inconvenient to copy, so naturally don't think of other methods. But if the printed cloth is too easy, it will inevitably lead to more people. This is an unchanging law from ancient times to modern times!
Zhou Xingsi and his thousand-character works are immortal. Between him and the thousand-character works, he consciously or unconsciously followed the ingenious mechanism of selection and elimination.
According to our records, this "Thousand Characters" was compiled by Yin Cong's second verse after he taught his scholars to learn calligraphy and ordered Yin Cong to select a collection of his calligraphy works. Therefore, the appearance of money is closely related to calligraphy copying, and it has adapted to the distribution mode of manual copying before its formation, which is destined to have great potential for dissemination and distribution. Xiao Zifan's "Thousand Characters" won Cai again, although it was "beautifully written". If you annotate in detail, you can't pass it on. Anyone with a discerning eye can see the mystery. Coincidentally, Zen master Sun Zhiyong, the seventh Wang Youjun, also loved calligraphy, and copied 800 copies of this Thousand-Character Book and distributed it to temples all over the world. Master Zhiyong and his brother, Master Zhijiang, were both famous cultural monks in Sui Chen at that time, and Master Zhiyong was a famous calligrapher at that time. He is very diligent in learning good books. He wrote dozens of stones with a brush alone and was sheltered by his ancestor Wang Xizhi. Therefore, when he lived in yongfu temple, Xing Wu, there were so many Taoists from Mo Bao that the threshold was trampled on and had to be wrapped in iron, so it was called "iron gate limit". With the family background and prestige of Zen Master Zhi Yong's calligraphy family, he spared no effort to copy and popularize Zhou Xingsi's thousand-character writings to major temples. The Southern and Northern Dynasties and even the Sui and Tang Dynasties were the heyday of the development of Buddhism in China, and the literati were immersed in it, which undoubtedly played an irreplaceable role in the wide spread and universal acceptance of thousands of words. Moreover, according to the postscript and postscript of "Yong's Two-body Thousand-character Writing" written by Yang Shoujing Guangxu in the seventh year of the late Qing Dynasty (188 1), as early as the early Tang Dynasty, the authentic version of Yong's Thousand-character Writing had spread to Japan. It can be seen that not only Xiao Zifan's Qian Wen Zi is not so lucky, but Shen Zhong's annotation Qian Wen Zi is also closely related to Wang Xizhi's calligraphy.
If we say that Wang Xizhi's exquisite calligraphy and the free gift from the wise Zen master saved Zhou Xingsi's thousand-character writing from destruction and extinction before the invention of printing, thus successfully breaking through the historical bottleneck of the circulation of books and articles; Then, the amazing technical difficulty of "Thousand Characters" satisfies the appreciation expectation of entertainment literature to the greatest extent, and its profound and elegant text content also meets the academic requirements of children's education impeccably; Therefore, it is logical to transform the entertainment literature of the upper-class literati into the enlightenment reading of the masses, and its unique text advantage is the real reason why Thousand-Character Works can be spread from generation to generation.
There are four words and one sentence, two sentences and one rhyme in a thousand-character text. There are 250 sentences in the whole text, only eight rhymes have been changed. Qian Zi Wen uses a large number of flat and even rhymes, mostly Yang and Tang rhymes. This is a rhyme with a big opening, which is loud and long to read, so the tone is euphemistic and melodious. Next, the level and level tones turn to each other, during which three paragraphs are rhymed, two paragraphs are de-tuned, and one paragraph is tuned. Pronunciation has no rhyme to promote sound, and pronunciation has rhyme urgency. Using the flat toilet to rhyme without rhyme and enter the sound rhyme respectively will inevitably produce the melody beauty of clear and clear, melodious and sonorous intercropping. However, the two words "to respect the strength" and "to sound flat" are actually homophonic but different from "to sound flat"; Even Mix's voice and Mix's voice are homonyms. The two echo back and forth between flat sounds, forming a circuitous symphony effect. Moreover, the rhyme of the whole article is particularly particular: it begins with the rhyme of Tang poetry, and the cymbals are dull, just like the loud noise and golden sound of Hong Zhong. If you end up with a whistling rhyme, you will submit to humiliation in order to suddenly hit the ball and make the jade shake. Jin Shengyu Zhen, always coherent, Zhou Xingsi can be described as ingenious!
Zhou Xingsi lived in the historical turning point from the rise to the peak of entertainment literature since Wei and Jin Dynasties, which can be described as a trendsetter of the times. With his skillful temperament skills and his knowledge of astronomy and geography, he weaves unrelated and chaotic established figures into wonderful chapters with gorgeous literature and elegant content. The chain dance is so superb that it is unique in ancient and modern times!
Zhou Xingsi's Qian Zi Wen is a textbook of enlightenment, which can never be compared with the Six Classics or even the Book of Filial Piety in terms of moral education of China people. Song Taizong personally presented the cursive script "Thousand Characters" to the secretary of the Secret Pavilion, but thought that "being educated with capital" was "unfilial". Therefore, if you want to carve it into a stone tablet, Emperor Taizong will use the Book of Filial Piety instead of the Thousand Pieces, which is an example (see Zhi Zhuan). However, the historical contribution of writers and literary works lies in creating a writing paradigm for later writers and providing expressive daily vocabulary for the future society. Once the "Thousand-Character Text" came out, it attracted many excellent people to imitate, copy and copy in various languages. Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, many national historians and public and private bibliographers have discovered it. In particular, it is worth noting that "Qian Zi Wen" is a daily compulsory course for children to learn Chinese characters and cultivate their morality, and the idioms in it are gradually transformed into spoken vocabulary of people's daily habits. "Old Tang Book" contains: Yan was a famous painter in the early Tang Dynasty, and once served as the right prime minister, which was closely related to the left prime minister Jiang Ke. Jiang Ke served as a general and made contributions to the Great Wall. Yan is only good at painting, not a tool for killing people. Therefore, people at that time used the idiom "thousand-character writing" to evaluate them: "The left phase is Xuanwei desert, and the right phase is Danqing name." After the Song and Yuan Dynasties, due to the "thousand-character text" being memorized by everyone, the titles of books or bibliographies are all "thousand-character text", and even the official titles since the Ming and Qing Dynasties are numbered in the order of "thousand-character text", which is too numerous to mention. The old dormitory of Ding Ying Student Apartment 16 in Luojiashan, Wuhan University, engraved in the order of "mysterious heaven and earth, vast universe, prosperous sun and moon, and Chen Sulie", is also a legacy.
It has created a writing paradigm for later writers and provided language vocabulary for the public. Zhou Xingsi's thousand-character writings have made such great influence and contribution in the cultural history of China and the literary history of China, which is immortal! However, the current history of China literature talks about the literature of the Six Dynasties, and says nothing about Zhou Xingsi and his thousand-character writings, let alone entertaining guests, a common and unique literary phenomenon in the history of China literature. Writing here, the author suddenly thought of Lao Si's comments on Hu Shi and Feng Youlan's History of China's Philosophy: "Hu Shi's History of China's Philosophy has no philosophy; Although Feng's History of China's Philosophy has philosophy, it is not China's philosophy. " At the beginning of the spread of western learning to the east, this phenomenon is not surprising and understandable. However, nowadays, what are "literature" and "China literature"? Is it necessary to think about it?