Classic of Poetry
The Book of Songs (Chinese诗经/诗经, Pinyin Shijing ) is one of the Five Classics. It is the oldest collection of Chinese poetry and the largest pre-Christian times. Confucius is, according to tradition, the songs are selected from a pool of 3000 poems and brought to its present state, but this is more of a legend than a fact. Originated the Shijing between the 10th and the 7th century BC
Construction
The Book of Songs is a collection of 305 songs in 160 Folk Songs (风feng ); 74 smaller hard songs or odes (小雅xiaoya ); 31 larger hard songs (大雅daya ) and 40 hymns (颂song ) is divided. In Confucianism these poems are interpreted morally. Others, however, particularly Western sinologist highlight the Volksliedhaftigkeit of the songs.
The folk songs are ordered by vassal states, art songs ( xiaoya and daya ) are texts of ceremonial and sacrificial purposes. The Xiaoya act of the subjects, the Daya of the kings. The song, the oldest part of the songs are hard and prices of songs that boast the ancestors of the Shang Dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty and the State Lu.
As the oldest songs were probably sung in the ancestral temple and accompanied by music and dance, there is a religious background.
Marcel Granet sees the origin of folk songs in antiphonal singing between a man and a woman, which was most likely a ritual background, whose origin is to be found in the ritual dance. They were sung on the occasion of seasonal festivals, to, like fertile rain to solicited.
The songs consist mainly of text with four characters per line and three to four stanzas of six lines. The verse form and rhyme are designed by symmetry, juxtaposition, repetition and variation. A striking element of the songs are the so-called Formulae that are likely to go back to an oral tradition. A formula is a group of words as a semantic unit that is repeated in order to emphasize an important idea, either within a song or different songs. You may also nature motifs of growing and becoming lead with formelhaftem character in the Book of Songs back to fertility cults
Importance
The Shijing has a great significance as one of the oldest monuments of the ancient Chinese language. It has therefore in particular for the investigation of the grammar and semantics and to some extent also of the ancient Chinese phonetics of great importance.