I. The Book of Songs
The Book of Songs is the beginning of China's ancient poetry. This is the earliest collection of poems. Collected poems from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period (1 1 century to the 6th century), * * * 31,among which 6 poems are Sheng poems, that is, there are only titles but no contents, which are called Six Sheng Poems (.
The author of The Book of Songs is anonymous, and most of them cannot be verified. They were collected by Yin Jifu and edited by Confucius. In the pre-Qin period, the Book of Songs was called "The Book of Songs", or it was called "The Book of Songs 300" by integers. In the Western Han Dynasty, it was honored as a Confucian classic, formerly known as The Book of Songs, which has been in use ever since.
Confucius once summarized the purpose of the Book of Songs as "innocence" and educated his disciples to read the Book of Songs as their standard of speech and action. Among the pre-Qin philosophers, many people quoted The Book of Songs, such as Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Zhuangzi and Han Feizi. Quote the sentences in the Book of Songs to enhance your persuasiveness. By the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, The Book of Songs was regarded as a classic by Confucianism and became one of the six classics and five classics.
The Book of Songs is rich in content, reflecting labor and love, war and corvee, oppression and resistance, customs and marriage, ancestor worship and feasting, and even astronomical phenomena, landforms, animals and plants. It is a mirror of the social life of the Zhou Dynasty.
Second, the creator
According to legend, there was an official who collected poems in the Zhou Dynasty. Every spring, he shakes Muduo and goes deep into the folk to collect folk songs. After sorting out the works that can reflect the people's joys and sorrows, he gave them to the Taishi (the official in charge of music) to compose music and sing them to the Zhou Emperor as a reference for administration. The works of these unknown folk authors occupy most of the space in The Book of Songs, such as The Wind of Fifteen Countries.
The works of aristocratic literati in Zhou Dynasty constitute another part of The Book of Songs. According to the history books, Zhou Gongdan wrote The Wind and the Owl. In a batch of bamboo slips of the Warring States Period (Tsinghua bamboo slips) in Tsinghua University in 2008, it was described that people celebrated their victory in drinking, during which they improvised a poem "Cricket", the content of which is closely related to the existing "Cricket" in The Book of Songs tang style.
Third, the creative background
Joo Won?, the birthplace of the Zhou Dynasty, was suitable for agriculture. Poems such as Gong Liu and Mianmian Guaju in The Scholars all show that Zhou prospered the country with agriculture, and the development of agriculture promoted social progress. After the conquest, the Zhou clan became the master of the world, and the patriarchal clan system, land, slave private ownership and the rule of aristocratic lords became the social and political characteristics of this historical period.
Apart from the tyranny of Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the replacement of Shang and Zhou Dynasties by Western Zhou Dynasty was mainly related to its slavery economic system. After the establishment of the Western Zhou Dynasty, in order to ease the sharp contradiction between production relations and productivity, and ease the class struggle, slavery was turned into serfdom. As Wang Guowei said in On the System of Shang Dynasty: "The political and cultural changes in China were not drastic during the Yin and Zhou Dynasties ... On the surface, the three major changes during the Yin and Zhou Dynasties were nothing more than the rise and fall of a surname and the transfer of the capital. Judging from the implication, the old system is abolished and the new system is promoted, and the old culture is abolished and the new culture is promoted ... "
Compared with Shang Dynasty, the Western Zhou Dynasty promoted the rapid development of social spiritual civilization due to the great changes in the economic system. As a representative of literature, the appearance of The Book of Songs is an inevitable product of the progress of the times, which in turn promotes the progress of social civilization.
Four. Content introduction
The Book of Songs as a whole is an image reflection of China's social life during the 500-year rise and fall of the Zhou Dynasty, including the ancestor's entrepreneurial ode and the movement of offering sacrifices to ghosts and gods; There are also banquet exchanges between nobles and resentment against uneven work and rest; There are also touching chapters reflecting labor, hunting and a lot of love, marriage and social customs.
There are 305 existing poems in The Book of Songs (except 6 Kubinashi orders, ***3 1 1), which are divided into three parts: abundance, elegance and fu.
Wind, a folk song all over the country, is the essence of the Book of Songs. It sang beautiful things such as love and labor, and also sang regret and anger at homesickness and anti-oppression and anti-bullying. Often repeated chanting through repeated superposition. Each chapter in a poem is often only a few words different, which shows the characteristics of folk songs.
Elegance and vulgarity are divided into elegance and vulgarity and Xiaoya, and most of them are poems that offer sacrifices to noble people, pray for a good harvest and praise their ancestors. The author of Daya is an aristocratic scholar, but he is dissatisfied with the real politics. In addition to banquet songs, sacrificial songs and epics, he also wrote some satirical poems reflecting people's wishes. Xiaoya also has some folk songs.
Ode is a poem dedicated to the ancestral temple. The poems in Ya and Ode are of great value to the study of early history, religion and society.