Allusion in classical Chinese poetry has a rather broad definition that has caused difficulties to the reader and ied to misunderstanding on the party exegetes—both inside as well as outside of China. This essay attempts to a more reasonable quantity. The essence of this new definition is that an allusion should have an interpretative source that coincides wholly with its textual source.

This essay explores the relation between classical Chinese poetic language and the “ideogrammic” method of the Anglo-American modern poets beginning with Pound and Fenellosa, by tying both to Freud’s theory of latent and manifest “dream-text” in The Interpretation of Dreams and Lacan’s “semiotic” view of the human unconscious. That is, classical Chinese poetics in a sense grounds modern poetics because the former is a more direct and unmediated language of the unconscious, in which time-logic and space-logic are combined in the rebus-or puzzle-pattern of condensation and displacement. This insight is necessary to our search for a common poetics across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

This essay explores the “other side,” perhaps the (officially) repressed side, of Song (宋) and Ming (明) Neo-Confucianism. While the li-xue (理學) or “philosophy of principle” of the Song thinker Zhu Xi (朱熹) serves as apotheosis of the Confucian order by making of ethical subjectivity a metaphysical absolute, the Ming thinker Wang Yangming’s (王陽明) xin xue (心學) (“philosophy of mind/heart”) can be read as an effort to revitalize the neo-Confucian order of li (理)-principle by grounding it in the more fundamental and more encompassing notion of xin (心), taking xin not as (the abstract Confucian principle of) “mind/heart” but as “physical heart” (“feeling,” “sensuality”), in close conjunction with the terms ti and shen (“body,” “embodiment”). Such a reading of Wang’s philosophical text is reinforced by the overtly erotic character of much popular literature and art in the Ming period, epitomized by the Ruo Putuan (肉蒲團), which tends to parody the sacrosanct Confucian philosophy by linking it to that baleful “lower stratum” of the body sexuality. The crucial but neglected historical link between Song li xue and Ming xin xue may be best explored through a close reading of the Ming “aesthetic” discourses of physical pleasure.

This essay is a response to a tendency in recent comparative studies on Western and traditional Chinese theories of language to overemphasize the influence of the Daoist view of language in Chinese culture, to the effect of isolating it from the larger historical and intertextual contexts. By tracing the early development of language theories in the Confucian and Daoist traditions, it contends that the Confucian view of language has exerted a dominant impact on the culture, although its lack of ontological concern also prevents it from engaging the Daoist polemic on its own ground. it points out that the vigorous ontological investigation of Laozi and Zhuangzi begins to lose its edge in the Neo-Daoist era, when the “inadequacy of language” becomes the institutionalized doctrine of the elites. The essay focuses, however, on the “aesthetic turn” in Chinese thinking on language in the Six Dynasties (as typically shown in the critical works of Cao Pi, Lu Ji, Liu Xie, and Zhong Rong) resulting in a new concept of the aesthetic and creative potential of language, which may be considered a form of counter-discourse against both the Confucian and the Daoist claims on language. It is also in the Six Dynasties that the Daoist valorization of the “enlightened silence” begins to be transformed into an aesthetic theory of poetic expression.

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