The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems and the beginning of China's ancient poems. Collected poems from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (pre-1 1 century to the 6th century), with a total of * * * 31/,among which 6 poems are full, that is, there are only titles but no contents, which is called full 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. The Book of Songs is divided into three parts: 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 music song used for sacrificial rites in Zhou and aristocratic ancestral temples, which is divided into, and Shang songs.
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.
The origin of the name
The Book of Songs was written in the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period. Originally called The Book of Songs. Confucius mentioned this name many times, for example, The Book of Songs 300. In a word, it says' thinking without evil' ". "Reciting 300 Poems, teaching them as politics, is unattainable; Make it comprehensive, not exclusive. " Even if there are many, what do you think? "
Sima Qian recorded the same name, such as: "Three hundred poems, probably written by sages when they were angry."
Because there are 3 1 1 in the handed down version, it is called "300 poems" for the convenience of narration. It was renamed The Book of Songs because Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty took The Book of Songs, Li, Yi and Chunqiu as five classics.
Generation age
The Book of Songs is China's first collection of poems. The earliest record is the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the latest work is the Spring and Autumn Period, which spans about five or six hundred years. The origin is centered on the Yellow River basin, south to the north bank of the Yangtze River, and distributed in Shaanxi, Gansu, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Hubei and other places.
Textual research by experts in literature and history shows that The Book of Songs was written after Zhou Wuwang's downfall of Shang Dynasty (BC 1066).
"Song of Zhou" is the earliest work in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and it is the work of noble literati. It is mainly composed of ancestral temple music songs and ode to the gods, and some of them describe agricultural production.
Daya is the product of the prosperous period of the Zhou Dynasty and the only remaining epic in ancient China. There are always different opinions about the creation time of Eighteen Poems of Daya: Zheng Xuan thinks that Poems of King Wen are poems in the era of King Wen and King Wu, and eight poems, such as Poems of Sheng Min to Juan, are poems of Duke Zhou and Wang Cheng. Zhu thought: "it's' elegance' ... this was decided when Duke Zhou made it." But they all think that "Chaya" is a poem in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Xiaoya was born in the late Western Zhou Dynasty and moved eastward.
Truffles and Ode to Shang Dynasty were both produced after Zhou Shi moved eastward (770 BC).
initiator
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.
Creation 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. The implication is to abolish the old system, advocate the new system, abolish the old culture and advocate the new culture ... "
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.
Inherit history
It is said that there are as many as 3,000 poems handed down in the Spring and Autumn Period, and now only 3 1 1 is left (six of them are poems without eyes). After Confucius compiled The Book of Songs, the earliest recorded inheritor was Xia Zi, one of the "Ten Philosophers of Confucius" and one of the 72 sages. He has the deepest understanding of poetry, so he passed it on.
There were three poets in the early Han Dynasty, namely Shen Peigong of Lu, Gu Sheng of Qi and Han Ying of Yan. Qi's poems died in Wei, Lu's poems died in the Western Jin Dynasty, and Han's poems still spread in the Tang Dynasty, with only 10 volume left. The Book of Songs circulated today is a poem by Mao Gong.
brief Introduction of the content
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. It is often repeated by 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.
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".