The Tang Concept of Yijing and the Tang Regulated Verse
By Xiaodong Bai
Abstract of the Ph. D Thesis
Yijing, Regulated Verse and Chinese Characters consist of three major aspects of the ancient cultural heritage in the history of Chinese literature, which manifest themselves correspondingly in the areas of classical Chinese aesthetics, Tang poetic genre and Chinese language (ideographs to be exact). These three aspects meet in Wang, Changling’s book The Poetic Construct and provides an excellent vantage for us to look at the inner relationship of the three and the deep structure of Chinese culture as reflected in them. Historically, the aesthetic concept of Yijing first appeared in the book The Poetic Construct, which, as a detailed discussion of the construction of poetry, especially that of the regulated verse, also connected Chinese characters to the “King’s Way”, the Confucian Dao in the ancient times, thus, for the first time, systematically combined the three elements together into one theoretical framework.
In The Single-and-Double-Bodied Characters by Xu, Shen, an Eastern Han scholar, the Chinese character one （“一”）is explained as follows: “In the Grand Beginning, Dao manifested itself as one, which created and demarcated the world at one stroke, as well as captivated the myriad. ” In the chapter of “The Structure of Writing” in The Literary Mind and Carved Dragon, Liu, Xie stated: “The way people structure speech is to accumulate characters into sentences, and sentences into chapters which in turn into a complete writing. The essence of the sentence is in the essence of the characters. Tracing the source as such, we know the multitude from one.” Wang, Changling also says in the chapter “On the Literary Idea” in the The Poetic Construct that “Characters were originated from the King’s Way, which came into being when the ancient sages drew the character one.”
The Chinese characters are the foundation of the cultural expression and thinking mode of ancient China. They are where the subtlety of the Dao abodes, which finds its best expression in the statement of “The Dao that can be Daoed is not the usual Dao” by Lao Zi, the founder of Daoism. The expressive principle of “Juxtaposed Interaction” achieves its iconistic relation to the world through the “Temporal-Space” construct of meaning in the characters and the expressive model of “Not Not This” as an outcome of such a structure of meaning, which is the natural outcome of the philosophical stance of interactive polarity (binary-complementation) in ancient Chinese philosophy.
The expressive prinsciple of “Juxtaposed Interaction” is most obviously embodied in the structure of “Hui Yi” characters, which could be exemplified by the character Wu (army, war) and Xin (trust, credibility) that are respectively composed of Zhi (stop, foot or walk), Ge (Spear), and Ren (human), Yan (speech), the juxtaposition of which gives rise to the resonance of meaning between these single-bodied-characters that form a juxtaposed composition of a new double-bodied -characters. The new combination has more than one suggestions of meanings. Wu for instance, can mean “to stop the spear”, which suggests that the best war-faire is one that is never carried out in the battle field. Another explanation of Wu that can be drawn from the composite is “to walk with a spear”, which is a symbolic description of an army marching to war and proposes an opposite explanation from the first. Such is the example of the expressive principle of “Juxtaposed Interaction”.
“Xing Sheng” characters such as Jiang (Yangzi River) and He (Yellow River) are also composite-structures of “Juxtaposed Interaction”, except that in the previous case, the juxtaposition is between two ideographs while in the present case, it is between an ideograph and a phonograph. Either way, the characters, even the single-bodied ones that form the new complex composites, are both ideographs that bear own pronunciations, thus containing a natural structure of “Temporal Space” (sound-image).
Even the simplest ideographic elements that form more complicated ideographs, such as the horizontal stroke in a character which is also the character one (一) and the symbols of Yin (--) and Yang (—), are a result of “Juxtaposed Interaction” as well. In this case, the “Juxtaposed Interaction” is between the subject (human) and the object (nature). The subject sees the image of an object in nature and grasps the ideographic meaning through mental interaction with the objective world and when the interaction between the subject and the object reaches a state of equilibrium, an ideograph (象：originally meaning an elephant) is born, which bears both the traces of the subject (the abstraction of the direct image) and the object (the shadowy contour of the object), the expressive mode of which is thus an embodiment of meaning in the following way: A becomes A for not being A and A is not A for being A. Thus A is not not A: it is the coming together of the subject and the object in the middle terrain, which both confirms and negates the subject and the object. Such is the expressive state of being “Not Not This”. In other words, the image of the elephant （象） is always present as a character, yet the elephant （象） as an animal never shows up its real presence. It is not-not here.
The formal features of the Regulated Verse, such as rhyming, Ping Ze (even-slant alternation of tones), Nian Dui (matching variations of the even-slant alternation of tones) and antithesis (more accurately the antithesised interaction of characters) are all, too, a manifestation of the expressive prinsciple of “Juxtaposed Interaction” found in the Chinese characters. The juxtaposed formal elements (rhyming, Ping Ze, Nian Dui and antithesis) of the Regulated Verse produce an abstract poetic format that forms a fusion of a genre with a “Temporal Space” structure, which is germinated from the principle of “Juxtaposed Interaction” that in turn gives rise to the expressive model of “Not Not This”. The Yi Jing (ideal terrain of poetry) of such poetry (regulated verse, to be exact) results from the resonance of images and sounds rising above the “Juxtaposed Interaction” of the symmetrical and antithetical structure of the Regulated Verse, a mixture and combination of dancing sounds and images.
The present thesis also probes into the individual concepts embedded in the characters Xiang (ideograph, which originally means an elephant), Yi (the ideographic sound, or the emotional content expressed in such sounds) and Jing (the ideal terrain of poetry), as well as their relationship with each other. The finding is that on the lowest level of meaning construction are the ideographic symbols of the characters. Then, there are the ideographic images, or “words” as we may call them more commonly, that are the collective product of poetic meaning from the symbolic icons, which, as part of the emotional participation of the poet who makes his/her particular poetic choices of combining characters into an ideographic imagery, or “word”, give rise to poetic meaning in the ideographic images (or poetic imagery as commonly defined) that are so vital to any kind of poetry. Still above them, is finally the ideal terrain of poetry proposed by Wang, Changling as the ultimate poetic experience that, as a result of the working mechanism of “Juxtaposed Interaction”, proves the statement by a later Tang poet, Liu Yuxi, “The ideal terrain of poetry rises beyond and without images.” The authenticity of the “the ideal terrain of poetry” is the authenticity of human “juxtaposed interaction” with Nature, or “Dao” and the moment when “Heaven and human embody each other.”
The thesis starts with three different interpretations of Du Fu’s famous poem Viewing Spring to investigate three aspects of the point in discussion: 1) on the ideographic level, which is the level belonging to the study of the “Science of Chinese Characters” proposed by Tang, Lan that blends into the antithesised structure of the poetic lines; 2) on the sound level, which gives expression to the linguistic dynamism in Chinese language subjugated by the formal format of the Regulated Verse as “Dancing Sounds”; 3) the authenticity of such expression via emotion and instinct or the heart-mind that is the result of “Juxtaposed Interaction” between heaven and human or the merging of the subject and the object in empathy in the poetic theme: a natural outcome of the philosophical stance of complementary polarity in ancient China.
The author also employs the Systemic Functional Grammar (first proposed by Halliday and now a popular methodology for discourse analysis in China) as an analytical instrument for the data analysis of 20 poems of 5-character-regulated-verse and 20 7-character-regulated-verse, totaling up to 160 antithesised couplets. The purpose is to investigate the structural function of the antithesised couplets in general and the tool is the theme-rheme progression patterns developed by practitioners of SFG both abroad and domestically. The result is satisfactory in that it proves quantitatively what the thesis has already discussed above.
As almost the most representative aesthetic concept in China, the appearance of Yijing (the ideal terrain of poetry) in Wang, Changling’s The Poetic Construct, which detailed the poetic construct of Regulated Verse and discussed the relationship between literature, the Dao and the Chinese characters, is never an accident. It shows that the deep-level construct of Chinese characters and their iconistic expressive principle of “Juxtaposed Interaction” creates the expressive structure of “Temporal Space” and the expressive model of “Not Not This”, which are the raison d’etre of the generic format of Regulated Verse and the inner structure of the aesthetic concept of Yijing (the ideal terrain of poetry), the three most representative elements with long-lasting influence in the ancient Chinese literary tradition.
Key Words: Chinese Characters; Regulated Verse; Yijing; Juxtaposed-Interaction; Temporal-Space; Not-Not-This;
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