- 著者
-
小寺 敦
- 出版者
- 公益財団法人 史学会
- 雑誌
- 史学雑誌 (ISSN:00182478)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.114, no.9, pp.1532-1555, 2005
The Shijing 詩経, the ancient Chinese classic dealing with poetry, contains many verses ranging from popular songs to those sung by aristocrats at their feasts, indicating at what stage poetry was in at the time, what functions it performed, as well as how the Shijing itself came into existence and was compiled. Consequently, the actual places where the verses of the Shijing were recited as related in the historical accounts of the Zuozhuan 左伝 and the Guoyu 国語 were mainly confined to gatherings in the broad sense, including banquets, alliance negotiations, swearing in rituals, conversation, joint military action, etc. It is also clear that very important venues for poetry were communal ceremonies of both a religious and formal nature. According to the fables about how poetry was composed, the place where the Shijing itself was compiled was one of these ceremonial venues, closely related to where the kings of the Western Zhou would bestow bronze implements on their retainers as a symbol of their superordinate-subordinate relationship. During the Western Zhou period, marked by an era of city-states, the Shijing was composed of the oral tradition of musicians, when the Zhou kings dominated the rest of China in both knowledge and technology. However, after the move east by the Zhou, its intellectual monopoly ended as the knowledge and technology was disseminated far and wide by those same musicians to the other states, which soon adopted the ruling methods of the Western Zhou kings. From the last decades of the Spring and Autumn Period, regional rule progressed to the extent of governments with literate bureaucrats carrying on administration by documentation, and due to the fact that the Shijing had been utilized by the Western Zhou Dynasty and the other lords of the Spring and Autumn period, it came to play a valuable political role in legitimizing kingship during the following era characterized by rebellion and usurpation. It was also a time when the Shijing itself went through a transition from oral to written from, as the knowledge of it demonstrated by the followers of Confucius spread throughout the strata of would-be bureaucrats. It was under such a situation, as indicated by the archeological evidence, that during the Warring States Period, the Shijing became one of the ancient classics and changed along with Chinese society as a whole in the transition from the Zhou and Spring and Autumn Period to the world of the Qin and Han Dynasties.