Shijing (Shījīng 诗经)|Shījīng 诗经 (Shijing)

Tyler C. PIKE

The Shijing, roughly translated as “classic songs,” are a collection of folk songs, hymns, and narratives that date back to at least the fourth or fifth century BCE and are considered the foundation of literary and cultural tradition in China. Scholarship on the Shijing involves studying the songs as guides to character enhancement, records of political history, and reinterpretations of the language.

The Shijing (also translated as “Classic of Songs, “Book of Songs,” “Canon of Odes,” or “Classic of Poetry”) stands at the fountainhead of the Chinese literary and cultural tradition. In the earliest stratum of the Confucian canon the Shijing is referred to simply as the Shi (Songs); not until the second century BCE do texts begin to call it a jing (classic). Recorded in the historian Sima Qian’s (c. 145–86 BCE) Records of the Grand Historian is a much-debated legend that the Shijing was drawn from a large body of Western Zhou dynasty (1045–771 BCE) songs and was refined and edited by Confucius (551–479 BCE) into a fixed canon of 305 songs. Modern research substantiates at least two aspects of this account: First, the Shijing had indeed evolved into its final form by the fifth or fourth century BCE; second, many songs in the anthology are genuine artifacts of Western Zhou performances regularly held as part of state ritual apparatus.

By the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) the original music, dance, and other elements of the songs’ performance had been lost and were no longer centerpieces of state rites. This loss of ritual context around the Shijing, however, did not end transmission of the songs. During the politically chaotic fifth and fourth centuries BCE the Shijing was widely chanted, quoted, and alluded to during diplomatic exchanges. It was also firmly established among the elite classes as a source of didactic, morally suasive power and was considered privileged access to the morally enlightened times of antiquity. Transmission of the Shijing as a didactic social and literary force was to continue throughout imperial times.

Mao Songs

The only complete version of the Shijing still extant is the Mao Shi (Mao Songs), containing 305 songs together with a strain of commentary dating to Han dynasty times (206 BCE–220 CE). This version was named after its senior compiler, Mao Heng, a scholar in the employ of Prince Xian of Hejian (d. c. 130 BCE). The discrepancies we observe between the Mao Shi and fragments of other Shijing versions datable to the Han dynasty or earlier seem to stem from scribal variations of one single orally stable prototext. These discrepancies among written versions of the Shijing were the impetus for the polemics of the “Three Schools,” namely, Qi, Lu, and Han. These state-sanctioned traditions of Shijing scholarship produced different strains of commentary, which are now lost except for fragments scattered in quotations in other early texts. The Mao Shi assumed orthodoxy sometime after the Confucian scholar Zheng Xuan (127–200 CE) wrote his commentary to this edition.

The Mao Shi is divided into four sections, with narrative content as the organizing principle. The largest section is called the “Airs of the States” (Guo feng). It contains mainly gentrified folk songs from fifteen feudal states. The second section is the “Minor Elegantia” (Xiao ya), with content similar to the “Airs” but with more emphasis on articulated political grievance. The third section, called the “Greater Elegantia” (Da ya), contains songs of grandiose texture, many of which are now understood to be third-person scripts of ritual performances. The last section is called the “Hymns” (Song). It contains solemn lyrics to collectively performed liturgy from the states of Lu, Zhou, and Shang. Scholars have construed some of the hymns of Zhou intertextually, with transmitted texts and bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty, to reconstruct the kingdom’s important multimedia ritual performance that commemorated the conquest of the Shang dynasty (1766–1045 BCE).

The language and literary devices of the Shijing deeply influenced Chinese poetics throughout the ages. The “Airs” in particular were cited by later poets as a literary ideal of elegant simplicity and directness. Furthermore, the Mao Shi carried on an earlier tradition that associated one of three literary devices with each song. These are the fu, bi, and xing, terms originally understood as something akin to “narrative,” “analogical,” and “evocative stimulus.” These terms evolved during the next millennia and played a central role in Chinese poetics.

Scholarship and Interpretation

From the Warring States period through Republican China (1912–1949) there were roughly four distinct phases of Shijing scholarship and interpretation. The earliest, dating from the fourth and third centuries BCE, is focused on studying the Shijing for character enhancement and career advancement. In the Analects, for example, competency with the Shijing is typically promoted as a means to improving an individual’s ceremonial conduct and rhetorical capabilities. The prevalence of this perspective in the fourth century BCE is supported by a cache of bamboo strips dated from this period that were recently recovered by the Shanghai Museum from tomb thieves. One of these texts is retrospectively entitled the Kongzi Shi lun (Confucius Discusses the Songs). No consensus exists on many paleographic (relating to writings of former times) and other basic questions regarding this important monument in Shijing history.

The second phase of Shijing scholarship focuses on the role of the songs as records of political history. Fully mature in the Han dynasty, this kind of scholarship produced synoptic (affording a general view of a whole) prefaces and glosses recorded, for instance, in the Mao Shi. Han scholars read the Shijing by reconstructing for each song a geopolitical context. This contextualization allowed scholars to find in the Shijing politically oriented praise or blame allegories.

The third phase is represented by the Shijing zheng yi, a centerpiece of the monumental Zheng yi (Correct Significance) project of the seventh century. Chief editor Kong Yingda (574–648) followed the Mao Shi text, including the Mao-Zheng commentaries, and appended important glosses by Lu Deming (556–627). Kong and his editorial committee added extensive new commentaries that laboriously expand on, rather than question, the interpretations reflected by the Mao-Zheng commentaries. This new hermeneutic is one of synthesizing a definitive orthodox reading of the Shijing.

The most recent phase of scholarship is marked by a renewed attention to the language of the Shijing as it may be understood by painstaking philological research rather than by the normative interpretations of the Han dynasty and later periods. Qing dynasty (1644–1912) scholars such as Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), Chen Huan (1786–1863), and Ma Ruichen (d. 1853) are the most representative.

Today the Shijing continues to intrigue scholars, particularly as new intertextual methods are applied to understand the ritual context surrounding the songs. Arc
haeological findings also continue to invigorate the field of Shijing studies, which remains as lively as it ever was.

Further Reading

Chen Huan.. (1986). Shi Maoshi zhuan shu [Explanation of the Mao commentaries to the Songs]. Taipei, Taiwan: Xuesheng shuju. (Original work published 1847)

Granet, M. (1929). Fêtes et Chansons anciennes de la Chine [Ancient festivals and songs of China]. Paris: Leroux.

Karlgren, B. (1950). The book of odes. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.

Karlgren, B. (1964). Glosses on the book of odes. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.

Lewis, M. E. (1999). Writing and authority in early China. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nylan, M. (2001). The five “Confucian” classics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ruan, Y. (Ed.). (1979). Shisan jing zhushu [Explications and annotations to the thirteen classics]. Beijing: Zhonghua. (Original work published 1815)

Shaughnessy, E. L. (1997). Before Confucius: Studies in the creation of the Chinese classics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Van Zoeren, S. (1991). Poetry and personality: Reading, exegesis, and hermeneutics in traditional China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Waley, A. (1996). In J. R. Allen (Ed.), The book of songs. New York: Grove Press.

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