The Shih King, or, Book of Poetry Part 1

The Shih King.

by James Legge.

CHAPTER I.

THE NAME AND CONTENTS OF THE CLa.s.sIC.

1. Among the Chinese cla.s.sical books next after the Shu in point of antiquity comes the Shih or Book of Poetry.

The meaning of the character Shih.

The character Shu, as formed by the combination of two others, one of which signified 'a pencil,' and the other 'to speak,' supplied, we saw in its structure, an indication of its primary significance, and furnished a clue to its different applications. The character Shih was made on a different principle, that of phonetical formation, in the peculiar sense of these words when applied to a large cla.s.s of Chinese terms. The significative portion of it is the character for 'speech,'

but the other half is merely phonetical, enabling us to approximate to its p.r.o.nunciation or name. The meaning of the compound has to be learned from its usage. Its most common significations are 'poetry,' a poem, or poems,' and a collection of poems! This last is its meaning when we speak of the Shih or the Shih King.

The earliest Chinese utterance that we have on the subject of poetry is that in the Shu by the ancient Shun, when he said to his Minister of Music, 'Poetry is the Expression of earnest thought, and singing, is the prolonged utterance of that expression.' To the same effect is the language of a Preface to the Shih, sometimes ascribed to Confucius and certainly older than our Christian era: 'Poetry is the product of earnest thought. Thought cherished in the mind becomes earnest; then expressed in words, it becomes poetry. The feelings move inwardly, and are embodied in words. When words are insufficient for them, recourse is had to sighs and exclamations. When sighs and exclamations are insufficient for them, recourse is had to the prolonged utterance of song. When this again is insufficient, unconsciously the hands begin to move and the feet to dance..... To set forth correctly the successes and failures (of government), to affect Heaven and Earth, and to move spiritual beings, there is no readier instrument than poetry.'

Rhyme, it may be added here, is a necessary accompaniment of poetry in the estimation of the Chinese. Only in a very few pieces of the Shih is it neglected.

The contents of the Shih.

2. The Shih King contains 305 Pieces and the t.i.tles of six others. The most recent of them are a.s.signed to the reign of king Ting of the Kau dynasty, B.C. 606 to 586, and the oldest, forming a group of only five, to the period of the Shang dynasty which preceded that of Kau, B.C. 1766 to 1123. Of those five, the latest piece should be referred to the twelfth century B.C., and the most ancient may have been composed five centuries earlier. All the other pieces in the Shih have to be distributed over the time between Ting and king Wan, the founder of the line of Kau. The distribution, however, is not equal nor continuous.

There were some reigns of which we do not have a single Poetical fragment.

The whole collection is divided into four parts, called the Kwo Fang, the Hsiao Ya, the Ta Ya, and the Sung.

The Kwo Fang, in fifteen Books, contains 160 pieces, nearly all of them short, and descriptive of manners and events in several of the feudal states of Kau. The t.i.tle has been translated by The Manners of the Different States, 'Les M?urs des Royaumes,' and, which I prefer, by Lessons from the States.

The Hsiao Ya, or Lesser Ya, in eight Books, contains seventy-four pieces and the t.i.tles of six others, sung at gatherings of the feudal princes, and their appearances at the royal court. They were produced in the royal territory, and are descriptive of the manners and ways of the government in successive reigns. It is difficult to find an English word that shall fitly represent the Chinese Ya as here used. In his Latin translation of the Shih, p. Lacharme translated Hsiao Ya by 'Quod r.e.c.t.u.m est, sed inferiore ordine,' adding in a note:--'Siao Ya, latine Parvum r.e.c.t.u.m, quia in hac Parte mores describuntur, recti illi quidem, qui tamen nonnihil a recto deflectunt.' But the manners described are not less correct or incorrect, as the case may be, than those of the states in the former Part or of the kingdom in the next. I prefer to call this Part 'Minor Odes of the Kingdom,' without attempting to translate the term Ya.

The Ta Ya or Greater Ya, in three Books, contains thirty-one pieces, sung on great occasions at the royal court and in the presence of the king. p. Lacharme called it 'Magnum r.e.c.t.u.m (Quod r.e.c.t.u.m est superiore ordine).' But there is the same objection here to the use of the word 'correct' as in the case of the pieces of the previous Part. I use the name 'Major Odes of the Kingdom.' The greater length and dignity of most of the pieces justify the distinction of the two Parts into Minor and Major.

The Sung, also in three Books, contains forty pieces, thirty-one of which belong to the sacrificial services at the royal court of Kau; four, to those of the marquises of Lu; and five to the corresponding sacrifices of the kings of Shang. p. Lacharme denominated them correctly 'Parentales Cantus.' In the Preface to the Shih, to which I have made reference above, it is said, 'The Sung are pieces in admiration of the embodied manifestation of complete virtue, announcing to the spiritual Intelligences their achievement thereof.' Ku Hsi's account of the Sung was--'Songs for the Music of the Ancestral Temple;' and that of Kiang Yung of the present dynasty--'Songs for the Music at Sacrifices.' I have united these two definitions, and call the Part--'Odes of the Temple and the Altar.' There 'is a difference between the pieces of Lu and the other two collections in this Part, to which I will call attention in giving the translation of them.

Only the pieces of the fourth Part have professedly a religious character.

From the above account of the contents of the Shih, it will be seen that only the pieces in the last of its four Parts are professedly of a religious character. Many of those, however, in the other Parts, especially the second and third, describe religious services, and give expression to religious ideas in the minds of their authors.

Cla.s.sification of the pieces from their form and style.

3. Some of the pieces in the Shih are ballads, some are songs, some are hymns, and of others the nature can hardly be indicated by any English denomination They have often been spoken of by the general name of odes, understanding by that term lyric poems that were set to music.

My reason for touching here on this point is the earliest account of the Shih, as a collection either already formed or in the process of formation, that we find in Chinese literature. In the Official Book of Kau, generally supposed to be a work of the twelfth or eleventh century B.C., among the duties of the Grand Music-Master there is 'the teaching,' (that is, to the musical performers,) 'the, six cla.s.ses of poems:--the Fang; the Fu; the Pi; the Hsing; the Ya; and the Sung.' That the collection of the Shih, as it now is, existed so early as the date a.s.signed to the Official Book could not be; but we find the same account of it given in the so-called Confucian Preface. The Fang, the Ya, and the Sung are the four Parts of the cla.s.sic described in the preceding paragraph, the Ya embracing both the Minor and Major Odes of the Kingdom. But what were the Fu, the Pi, and the Hsing? We might suppose that they were the names of three other distinct Parts or Books. But they were not so. Pieces so discriminated are found in all the four Parts, though there are more of them in the first two than in the others.

The Fu may be described as Narrative pieces, in which the writers tell what they have to say in a simple, straightforward manner, without any hidden meaning reserved in the mind. The metaphor and other figures of speech enter into their composition as freely as in descriptive poems in any other language.

The Pi are Metaphorical pieces, in which the poet has under his language a different meaning from what it expresses,--a meaning which there should be nothing in that language to indicate. Such a piece may be compared to the aesopic fable; but, while it is the object of the fable to inculcate the virtues of morality and prudence, an historical interpretation has to be sought for the metaphorical pieces of the Shih.

Generally, moreover, the moral of the fable is subjoined to it, which is never done. in the case of these pieces.

The Hsing have been called Allusive pieces. They are very remarkable, and more numerous than the metaphorical. They often commence with a couple of lines which are repeated without change, or with slight rhythmical changes, in all the stanzas. In other pieces different stanzas have allusive lines peculiar to themselves. Those lines are descriptive, for the most part, of some object or circ.u.mstance in the animal or vegetable world, and after them the poet proceeds to his proper subject. Generally, the allusive lines convey a meaning harmonizing with those which follow, where an English poet would begin the verses with Like or As. They are really metaphorical, but the difference between an allusive and a metaphorical piece is this,--that in the former the writer proceeds to state the theme which his mind is occupied with, while no such intimation is given in the latter.

Occasionally, it is difficult,. not to say impossible, to discover the metaphorical idea in the allusive lines, and then we can only deal with them as a sort of refrain.

In leaving this subject, it is only necessary to say further that the allusive, the metaphorical, and the narrative elements sometimes all occur in the same piece.

CHAPTER II.

THE SHIH BEFORE CONFUCIUS, AND WHAT, IF ANY, WERE HIS LABOURS UPON IT.

Statement of Sze-ma Khien.

1. Sze-ma Khien, in his memoir of Confucius, says: 'The old poems amounted to more than 3000. Confucius removed those which were only repet.i.tions of others, and selected those which would be serviceable for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness. Ascending as high as Hsieh and Hau-ki, and descending through the prosperous eras of Yin and Kau to the times of decadence under kings Yu and Li, he selected in all 305 pieces, which he' sang over to his lute, to bring them into accordance with the musical style of the Shao, the Wu, the Ya, and the Fang.'

The writer of the Records of the Sui Dynasty.

In the History of the Cla.s.sical Books in the Records of the Sui Dynasty (A.D.589 to 618), it is said:--'When royal benign rule ceased, and poems were no more collected, Kih, the Grand Music-Master of Lu, arranged in order those that were existing, and made a copy of them. Then Confucius expurgated them; and going up to the Shang dynasty, and coming down to the state of Lu, he compiled altogether 300 Pieces.'

Opinion of Ku Hsi.

Ku Hsi, whose own standard work on the Shih appeared in A.D. 1178, declined to express himself positively on the expurgation of the odes, but summed up his view of what Confucius did for them in the following words:--'Royal methods had ceased, and poems were no more collected.

Those which were extant were full of errors, and wanting in arrangement.

When Confucius returned from Wei to Lu, he brought with him the odes that he had gotten in other states, and digested them, along with those that were to be found in Lu, into a collection Of 300 pieces.'

View of the author.

I have not been able to find evidence sustaining these representations, and must adopt the view that, before the birth of Confucius, the Book of Poetry existed, substantially the same as it was at his death, and that while he may have somewhat altered the arrangement of its Books and pieces, the service which he rendered to it was not that of compilation, but the impulse to study it which he communicated to his disciples.

Groundlessness of Khien's statement.

2. If we place Khien's composition of the memoir of Confucius in B.C.

100, nearly four hundred years will have elapsed between the death of the sage and any statement to the effect that he expurgated previously existing poems, or compiled the. collection that we now have; and no writer in the interval affirmed or implied any such things. The further statement in the Sui Records about the Music-Master of Lu is also without any earlier confirmation. But independently of these considerations, there is ample evidence to prove, first, that the poems current before Confucius were not by any means so numerous as Khien says, and, secondly, that the collection of 300 pieces or thereabouts, digested under the same divisions as in the present cla.s.sic, existed before the sage's time.

3. i. It would not be surprising, if, floating about and current among the people of China in the sixth century before our era, there had been more than 3000 pieces of poetry. The marvel is that such was not the case. But in the Narratives of the States, a work of the Kau dynasty, and ascribed by many to Zo Khiu-ming, there occur quotations from thirty-one poems, made by statesmen and others, all anterior to Confucius; and of those poems there are not more than two which are not in the present cla.s.sic. Even of those two, one is an ode of it quoted under another name. Further, in the Zo Kwan, certainly the work of Khiu-ming, we have quotations from not fewer than 219 poems, of which only thirteen are not found in the cla.s.sic. Thus of 250 poems current in China before the supposed compilation of the Shih, 236 are found in it, and only fourteen are absent. To use the words of Kao Yi, a scholar of the present dynasty, 'If the poems existing in Confucius' time had been more than 3000, the quotations of poems now lost in these two works should have been ten times as numerous as the quotations from the 305 pieces said to have been preserved by him, whereas they are only between a twenty-first and twenty-second part of the existing pieces. This is sufficient to show that Khien's statement is not worthy of credit.'

ii. Of the existence of the Book of Poetry before Confucius, digested in four Parts, and much in the same order as at present, there may be advanced the following proofs:--

First. There is the pa.s.sage in the Official Book of Kau, quoted and discussed in the last paragraph of the preceding chapter. We have in it a distinct reference to poems, many centuries before the sage, arranged and cla.s.sified in the same way as those of the existing Shih. Our Shih, no doubt, was then in the process of formation.

Second. Li the ninth piece of the sixth decade of the Shih, Part II, an ode a.s.signed to the time of king Yu, B.C. 78, to 771, we. have the words,

'They sing the Ya and the Nan, Dancing to their flutes without error.'

So early, therefore, as the eighth century B.C. there was a collection of poems, of which some bore the name of the Nan, which there is much reason to suppose were the Kau Nan and the Shao Nan, forming the first two Books of the first Part of the present Shih; and of which others bore the name of the Ya, being, probably, the earlier pieces that now compose a large portion of the second and third Parts.

Third. In the narratives of Zo Khiu-ming, under the twenty-ninth year of duke Hsiang, B.C. 544, when Confucius was only seven or eight years old, we have an account of a visit to the court of Lu by an envoy from Wu, an eminent statesman of the time, and a man of great learning. We are told that as he wished to hear the music of Kau, which he could do better in Lu than in any other state, they sang to him the odes of the Kau Nan and the Shao Nan; those of Phei, Yung, and Wei; of the Royal Domain; of Kang; of Khi; of Pin; of Khin; of Wei; of Thang; of Khan; of Kwei; and of Zhao. They sang to, him also the odes of the Minor Ya and the Greater Ya; and they sang finally the pieces of the Sung. We have thus, existing in the boyhood of Confucius, what we may call the present Book of Poetry, with its Fang, its Ya, and its Sung. The only difference discernible is slight,-in the order in which the Books of the Fang followed one another.

Fourth. We may appeal in this matter to the words of Confucius himself.

Twice in the a.n.a.lects he speaks of the Shih as a collection consisting of 300 pieces[1]. That work not being made on any principle of chronological order, we cannot positively a.s.sign those sayings to any particular years of Confucius' life; but it is, I may say, the unanimous opinion of Chinese critics that they were spoken before the time to which Khien and Ku Hsi refer his special labour on the Book of Poetry.