Lust In The Airs Of The States

As the most important part of Shijing, The Airs of the States is composed of 160 poems, which is more than half of the total number of Shijing itself.During the last two thousand years,the reading of The Airs of the States has been very controversial about whether there is lust in the poems of The Airs of the States, and how should we see this expression of lust.The root of the controversial is lack of right understanding about the profound relationship among Shijing, sexual lust and Confucian rites.Confucians of the Han Dynasty interpret the poems as hymns or satires,so they thoroughly deny the existence of lust poems in Shijing, on the contrary,Confucians of the Song Dynasty,such as Zhu Xi,admit that some of the poems involve lust,but at the meantime they awfully decry these poems; scholars of modern times,especially Wen Yiduo,recognize the lust in the poems and approve it,however they don't think these poems have anything to do with Confucian Rites and attempt to see Shijing as simple literature. This thesis studies on the proposition of lust in The Airs of the States, and is designed to build the inner relationship among Shijing, sexual lust and Confucian Rites, thereby it can reveal how the early Confucians see the lust in The Airs of the States. The conclusion of this thesis is:the early Confucians see sexual lust as natural instincts which don't involve any moral judgment;the natural instincts are the very roots of Confucian Rites;therefore the poems of lust can become the textbook of Confucian Rites.In the final part,the thesis takes evidences in exeavated documents such as the bamboo slips of Guodian and Shanghai Museum, the Mawangdui silk texts.