A Study On The Creation View And Creation Mentality Of People In Song Dynasty On Epitaphs

The Song Dynasty was a peak in the creation of Chinese epitaphs,with Ouyang Xiu and Wang Anshi as the leading writers who began to write epitaphs,and the quantity and quality of monumental texts were considerable.The Song people also had many insights and reflections on the creation of epitaphs,and new creative concepts emerged.These concepts have a significant role in understanding the actual creation of Song dynasty epitaphs and the aesthetic preferences of the Song people.Therefore,this paper focuses on cleaning up the various concepts and attitudes of Song people when evaluating epitaphs and discovering the special mentality of Song people when composing epitaphs.The paper is divided into three chapters:The first chapter focuses on a change in the Song people’s conception of epitaphs as a work that could express the writer’s personal feelings and thoughts,which was "instead of writing" and was intended to satisfy the wishes of the mourners.Epitaphs were a form of applied writing in which the author initially wrote for others,thus giving them a "substitutionary" character.However,in the Song Dynasty,the authors sometimes placed special importance on the expression of their will and did not want to act as mere spokesmen,so they continued the Tang practice of creating several epitaphs for themselves.When writing epitaphs for bereaved families,the Song would sometimes insist on their views and not allow the bereaved family to modify the text if there was a conflict of opinion between the author and the other party.Based on treating epitaphs as personal works,Zeng Gong proposed the theory of creating epitaphs with "discernment" as the core,requiring moral and literate writers to be able to distinguish good from evil,choose the right subject to write the epitaph and make a reasonable evaluation of it.In this way,the problem of the Song people’s tendency to be argumentative in their epitaphs may be related to the change in the Song concept of epitaph creation.Chapter 2 examines the Song notion of Han Yu’s epitaphs as a creative formula,focusing on the emergence of this notion,the various interpretations of Han Yu’s epitaphs by the Song,and the impact of this notion.Since Tianshing,antiquarianism had become more prevalent,and most Song scholars praised Han Yu’s and Liu Zongyuan’s writings as the standard of ancient writing.Han Yu was good at making epitaphs,so it made sense that Song people would learn to write Han Yu’s epitaphs.To find the original meaning of Han Yu’s epitaphs,the Song people,represented by Ouyang Xiu,searched for stone copies of Han Yu’s epitaphs to make up for the existing collection of Han texts.After much analysis,it was discovered that Han Yu was a good writer of epitaphs using pre-Qin grammar and customary use of classical texts,and the Song people also admired Han Yu’s style of writing "simple and realistic" epitaphs and the purpose of writing to teach customs.The emulation of Han Yu’s epitaphs prompted the Song to pay attention to the value of jinshi texts and to give new thought to the institution of epitaphs.This chapter connects with the first chapter in that the change in the Song’s conception of epitaph creation is related to both the analogy between epitaphs and historical biographies and the Song’s perception of epitaphs as a literary genre for learning to write ancient texts,both of which strengthened the "personal work" attribute of epitaphs.Chapter 3 examines the particular mentality of the Song people when evaluating and creating epitaphs,and reviews the merits and demerits of Song epitaphs.From ancient times to the present,authors have often accepted honoraria for writing epitaphs for bereaved families,and since epitaphs themselves serve the function of celebrating beauty and describing virtue and often contain false beauty,many people associate the creation of false beauty with the acceptance of honoraria,thus giving rise to the cynicism of"flattering the tomb.Before the Song Dynasty,Han Yu,the representative of the writers,was often criticized for accepting honoraria,and the Song people respected Han Yu’s epitaphs,so they avoided flattering the tomb and were under moral pressure to write epitaphs.Therefore,although the Song people actively wrote epitaphs,they did not dare to explicitly state that they liked to write epitaphs.Compared with the previous generation,the Song people expanded the breadth and depth of their evaluation of epitaphs,honoring Han Yu’s epitaphs while discussing the shortcomings of Han Yu’s epitaphs,and praising the value of stone inscriptions while not neglecting the set of books,although there were mistakes and omissions in the Song people’s evaluation of specific epitaphs,so they need to be viewed dialectically.