Chinese Mood Verses, And The Tang Dynasty

Yijing, Regulated Verse and Chinese Characters consist of three major aspects of the ancient cultural heritage in the history of Chinese literature, which manifest themselves correspondingly in the areas of classical Chinese aesthetics, Tang poetic genre and Chinese language. These three aspects meet in Wang, Changling's book The Poetic Construct and provides an excellent vantage for us to look at the inner relationship of the three and the deep structure of Chinese culture as reflected in them. Historically, the aesthetic concept of Yijing first appeared in the book The Poetic Construct, which, as a detailed discussion of the construction of poetry, especially that of the regulated verse, also connected Chinese characters to the "King's Way", the Confucian Dao in the ancient times, thus, for the first time, systematically combined the three elements together into one theoretical framework.In The Single-and-Double-Bodied Characters by Xu, Shen, an Eastern Han scholar, the Chinese character one ("—") is explained as follows: "In the Grand Beginning, Dao manifested itself as one, which created and demarkated the world at one stroke, as well as captivated the myriad. " In the chapter of "The Structure of Writing" in The Literary Mind and Carved Dragon, Liu, Xie stated: "The way people structure speech is to accumulate characters into sentences, and sentences into chapters which in turn into a complete writing. The essence of the sentence is in the essence of the characters. Tracing the source as such, we know the multitude from one." Wang, Changling also says in the chapter "On the Literary Idea" in the The Poetic Construct that "Characters were originated from the King's Way, which came into being when the ancient sages drew the character one."The Chinese characters are the foundation of the cultural expression and thinking mode of ancient China. They are where the sutulty of the Dao abodes, which finds its best expression in the statement of "The Dao that can be Daoed is not the usual Dao." The expressive prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interaction" achieves its iconistic relation to the world through the "Temporal-Space" construct of meaning in the characters and the expressive model of "Not Not This" as an outcome of such a structure of meaning, which is the natural outcome of the philosophical stance of interactive polarity in ancient Chinese philosophy.The expressive prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interaction" is most obviously embodied in the structure of "Hui Yi" characters, which could be exemplified by the character Wu (army, war) and Xin (trust, credibility) that are respectively composed of Zhi (stop, foot or walk), Ge (Spear), and Ren (human), Yan (speech), the juxtaposition of which gives rise to the resonance of meaning between these single-bodied-characters that form a juxtaposed composition of a new double-bodied -characters. The new combination has more than one suggestions of meanings. Wu for instance, can mean "to stop the spear", which suggetsts that the best warfaire is one that is never carried out in the battle field. Another explanation of Wu that can be drawn from the composite is "to walk with a spear", which is a symbolic description of an army marhing to war and proposes an opposite explanation from the first. Such is the example of the expressive prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interaction". "Xing Sheng" characters such as Jiang (Yangzi River) and He (Yellow River) are also the composite structures of "Juxtaposed Interaction", except that in the previous case, the juxtaposition is between two pictographs while in the present case, it is between an ideograph and a phonograph. Either way, the characters, even the sigle-bodied ones that form the new complex composites, are both ideographs that bear own pronunciations, thus containing a natural structure of "Temporal Space".Even the simplest ideographic elements that form more complicated ideographs, such as the horizontal stroke in a character which is also the character one (—) and the symbols of Yin (--) and Yang (—), are a result of "Juxtaposed Interaction" as well. In this case, the "Juxtaposed Interaction" is between the subject (human) and the object (nature). The subject sees the image of an object in nature and grasps the ideographic meaning through interaction with the objective world and when the interaction between the subject and the object reaches a state of equilibrium, an ideograph (象: originally meaning an elephant) is born, which bears both the traces of the subject (the abstraction of the direct image) and the object (the shadowy contour of the object), the esxpressive mode of which is thus an embodiment of meaning in the following way: A becomes A for not being A and A is not A for being A. Thus A is not not A: the model of being "Not Not This". In other words, the image of the elephant (象) is always present, yet the elephant (象) never shows up its presence. It is not not here.The formal features of the Regulated Verse, such as rhiming, Ping Ze (even-slant alternation of tones), Man Dui (matching variations of the even-slant alternation of tones) and antithesis (more accurately the antithesized interaction of characters) are all, too, a manifestation of the expressive prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interation" found in the Chinese characters. The juxtaposed formal elements (rhiming, Ping Ze, Nian Dui and antithesis) of the Regulated Verse produce an abstract poetic format that serve as a genral fusion of a "Temporal Space", which is a germination of the prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interaction" that gives birth ultimately to the expressive model of "Not Not This". The Yi Jing (ideographic terrain) of such poetry results from the resonance of images and sounds rising above the "Juxtaposed Interaction" of the symmetrical and antithetical structure of the Regulated Verse, a mixture of dancing sounds and images.The present thesis also probes into the individual concepts embedded in the characters Xiang (ideograph, which originally means an elephant), Yi (the ideographic sound) and Jing (the ideographic terrain), as well as their relationship with each other. The finding is that on the lowest level of meaning construction are the ideographic symbols of the hexagrams and the characters. Then, there are the ideographic images that are the collective product of the symbolic icons. Still above them, is finally the ideographic terrain proposed by Wang, Changling as the ultimate poetic experience that, as a result of the working machenism of "Juxtaposed Interaction", proves the statement by a later Tang poet, Liu Yuxi, "The ideographic terrain rises beyond and without images." The authenticity of the "Ideographic Terrain" is the aunthenticity of "Dao" and the moment when "Heaven and human embody each other."The thesis starts with three different interpretations of Du Fu's famous poem Viewing Spring to investigate three aspects of the point in discussion: 1) the ideographic level, which is the level belonging to the study of the "Science of Chinese Characters" proposed by Tang, Lan that blends into the antithesized structure of the poetic lines; 2) the sound level, which gives expression to the linguistic dymamism in Chinese language subjugated by the formal format of the Regulated Verse as "Dancing Sounds"; 3) the authenticity of such expression via emotion and instinct or the heart-mind that is the result of "Juxtaposed Interaction" between heaven and human or the merging of the subject and the object in empathy: a natural outcome of the philosophical stance of complementary polarity in ancient China.The author also employs the Systemic Functional Grammar (first proposed by Halliday and now a popular methodology for discourse analysis in China) as an analytical instrument for the data analysis of 20 poems of 5-character-regulated-verse and 20 7-character-regulated-verse, totaling up to 160 antithesized couplets. The purpose is to investigate the structural function of the antithesized couplets and the tool is the theme-rheme progression patterns developed by practitioners of SFG both abroad and domestically. The result is satisfactory in that it proves quantitatively the thesis already discussed above.As almost the most representative aesthetic concept in China, the appearance of Yijing in Wang, Changling's The Poetic Construct, which detailed the poetic construct of Regulated Verse and discussed the relationship between literature, the Dao and the Chinese characters, is never an accident. It shows that the deep-level construct of Chinese characters and the their iconistic expressive prinsciple of "Juxtaposed Interaction" create the expressive structure of "Temporal Space" and the expressive model of "Not Not This", which are the raison d'etre of the Regulated Verse and the aesthetic comcept of Yijing.