This article takes as its point of departure the Great Preface of the Mao Shi, which outlines the overarching principles of the Shijing, the earliest extant poetry anthology in China, and examines how the notion that poetry allegorically represents society was inherited and transformed in later poetic traditions. Chapter 2 refers to both the text of the Great Preface of the Mao Shi and the commentary by Kong Yingda, confirming that poetry composed by the people was understood to reflect the goodness or badness of politics in its own time, and that poetry was interpreted as mirroring political conditions and broader social trends. Chapter 3 investigates how poetic terms and motifs found in the Shijing were employed in later poetry. It points out, for example, that in cases such as “wolves and tigers”, terms or motifs that originally appeared merely as elements surrounding evil figures came, in later usage, to function as allegorical expressions directly representing such figures themselves. It also highlights cases such as “bamboo”, in which the same motif is used allegorically across periods while signifying entirely different states or conditions. It has often been assumed that the language of the Shijing can be interpreted wholesale in terms of allegory. However, rather than treating the allegorical vocabulary of the Shijing and that of later periods as forming an undifferentiated continuum, it is necessary to examine the characteristics and transformations of individual terms with greater precision. This article represents one attempt to clarify that point.
Haruka Komiyama (Sun,) studied this question.