The Book of Songs: from its origin to confucian concept

Abstract

This panel aims to explore a few respects of the shaping of the Shi jing (Book of Songs), the earliest anthology of Chinese poems. Dr. Chen Zhi's paper attempts to trace the etymology of the character song and to reconstruct the reality of ritual music of Shang by resorting to archaeological evidence and paleographic analysis. Dr. Jia Jinhua's paper explores the origin of the character fu, one of the six terms -- feng, fu, bi, xing, ya, and song recorded in the Zhou li, and proposes that the original char- acter for fu might have been wu (martialness), the term used to designate Da-Wu, an early Zhou music-dance suite. Dr. Yan Shoucheng analyzes the Confucian Way of moral transformation through the Poems (Shi jing) and music and proposes that the virtue of shu (empathizing reciprocity) is best nurtured by the Poems together with music. Dr. Xiao Chi's paper examines Wang Fuzhi's reinterpretation of the Confucian concept for function of poetry, and suggests that Wang's poetics stands as a great theoretical summary of Chinese lyricism from the stance of the tradition itself and meanwhile a revision of its "ontologi- cal consciousness".