I. Summary:
The Book of Songs is a collection of poems produced at the end of slave society in China. It is the beginning of China's ancient poetry and the earliest collection of poems. We collected 305 ancient poems from 1 1 century BC to the 6th century BC. In addition, there are six poems with titles and no content, which are called sheng poems. No content is Nanchang, Bai Hua, Shu Hua, Youkang, Chongwu and You Yi. It reflects the social outlook of about 500 years from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period.
The author of The Book of Songs is unknown. It was collected by Yin Jifu and edited by Confucius. At first, it was just called "Poetry" or "Poetry 300". By the Western Han Dynasty, it was honored as a Confucian classic before it was called The Book of Songs. There are three kinds of editors in The Book of Songs: style, elegance and ode. "Wind" is a ballad of Zhou Dynasty. Elegant music is the official music of Zhou people, which is divided into harmony and elegance. Ode is a musical song used for sacrificial rites in Zhou and noble ancestral temples, which is divided into ode to, and ode to Shang.
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 main content:
There are 305 existing books in The Book of Songs, which are divided into three parts: Feng, Ya and Ode.
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 the regret and anger of homesickness and anti-oppression and anti-bullying. Repeated chanting is often used, and each chapter in a poem is often only a few words different, which shows the characteristics of folk songs. [6]
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.
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. Later, The Book of Songs was regarded as a classic by Confucianism and became one of the Six Classics and Five Classics.
In the above three parts, 40 articles were assigned, including Ya 105 (6 articles without poems, not counting), with the largest number, * * * 160, totaling 305 articles. The ancients took its integer and often said "poetry is 300".
Third, the historical evaluation:
The Book of Songs is one of the important Confucian classics, a treasure of Chinese culture, a masterpiece of ancient civilization in China and an important cultural heritage of all mankind. In the eyes of western sinologists, the Book of Songs, together with Homer's epic and Shakespeare's plays, has immeasurable value in the history of world culture.
As the source of ancient culture in China, The Book of Songs is an all-encompassing encyclopedia, including legends, myths, witchcraft, rituals, sacrifices, beliefs, artistic prototypes, language representations, name system, life customs, social and family organizational forms, etc.