| Xiao Ziyun is one of the members of the Qi royal family.After entering the Liang dynasty,he was valued by emperor Liangwu and great achievements had been made by him in the area of literature,history,calligraphy and Confucianism.However,on the one hand,there were many talented scholars and influential people in the Qi and Liang royal families.And on the other hand,Xiao Ziyun lived a long time ago and his works were lost seriously.Therefore,there has been no comprehensive study on Xiao Ziyun in the academic circles for a long time.Based on the perspective of the subject of classical philology,this paper collects related materials of Xiao Ziyun,tries to sort out Xiao Ziyun’s life,legends after his death as well as his works,and makes discrimination on some questionable information in order to have a more comprehensive and indepth understanding of Xiao Ziyun.In addition to the part of introduction,the main content can be roughly divided into three parts.The first chapter mainly researches Xiao Ziyun’s life,including the discrimination of Xiao Ziyun’s birth and death years and the sorting of his political career.By means of mutual verification of historical materials and comparison of text details,this chapter corrects the error of Xiao Ziyun’s birth and death years in The Book of Liang,and makes it clear that Xiao Ziyun was born in the fifth year of Qi Yongming(487)and died in the third year of Liang Taiqing(549).At the same time,Xiao Ziyun’s political experience forms a coherent clue.This chapter is the focus of the whole paper.The textual research and discrimination of the following three chapters are based on the time clues provided by this chapter.The second chapter is about the legend of Xiao Ziyun after his death.Through the analysis of the related legends and literature in the past dynasties,it is clear that the story of Xiao Ziyun lived and studied Taoism in the Yusi mountain of Jiangxi province at his old age was made up by the Tang people.There were two different versions: avoiding the war caused by Hou Jing or abandoning the official position to live in seclusion.No matter how the content of later related legends changed,these two categories are basically the same.The reason why the Tang people wrote the stories is related to Xiao Ziyun’s experience as an officer in Jiangxi province,his influence on the Tang Dynasty and his free and uninhibited character.The third and the forth chapters focus on Xiao Ziyun’s works,including literature,history and calligraphy.This part mainly analyzes the historical doubts in Xiao Ziyun’s works,and also does some work of collecting the lost materials.Through the analysis of these two chapters,we can have a basic understanding of Xiao Ziyun’s creation and get a glimpse of his circle of friends. |
