Early China

Early China

Introduction

The spirituality, ideals, experiences, fears, and hopes of medieval Asia are contained in its sophisticated philosophical, moral, epical, and religious texts. Literacy and learning were prestigious; even Japan's samurai warriors were literate and composed poetry. Despite the fact that women did not attend regular schools and were not tutored as boys were, some were taught to read and write by their family members. Such was the case especially in imperial Japan among court ladies, such as Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the Genji monogatari. In India, where religion was a focal part of life, most of the early literature was associated with India's Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In China, the Confucian tradition favored philosophical texts that focused on human existence in this world rather than speculating on a life everlasting. By the sixth century, China's acceptance of Buddhism encouraged new works of fiction and poetry, countering the Confucian view that creative works were wasteful, self-indulgent exercises.

The history of Chinese literature is long. The nature of Chinese writing is often both ambiguous and allusive. Language changes and meaning become slippery. Readers frequently need clarification to help them understand what old texts mean, and ancient scholars were often able to earn their livings supplying that need. For all those reasons, writings that explained, clarified, or amplified basic texts soon became necessary adjuncts to the texts themselves, and the literary historian Haun Saussy has traced a long and rich tradition of such Chinese explanatory or exegetical writing for us.

Saussy points to the Book of Changes as the Chinese classic that has benefited most from successive layers of explanatory writing. As each successive generation of readers found earlier versions difficult, new explanatory material clarified the older text and the former glosses.

Confucius's Annals of Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu, or Ch'un Ch'iu) provided a skeletal framework upon which a body of helpful commentary could be and needed to be erected so that readers would know why Confucius had selected the original entries in the book. Among the most important and fundamental examples of that sort of amplifying commentary are those that appear both in the fifth century BCE's Zuo zhuan (Tso chuan; Commentary of Zuo) and, almost 700 years later, in Luxuriant Dew of the Springs and Autumns by Dong Zhongshu.

Chinese Literature

In contrast to medieval south Asian literature, which generally has a religious context, China's early literature focuses on secular existence and addresses the necessary conditions for successful governance. Confucian tradition dictated that early Chinese literary compositions conform to rigid standards and have some secular value. The era of the Han Dynasty was notable as a period of literary transition. This period featured the development of Chinese governmental record keeping and the use of these records to provide documentation for the writing of official dynastic histories, which were written by the subsequent dynasty, and the composition of essays that apply Confucian logic and the historical past to the resolution of current societal needs.

Chinese poetry reached its fullness in the Tang and Song ...