Tongbian concerns the dialectics of tradition and change or of convention and innovation. First made prominent by Liu Xie 劉勰 (c. 465-522) in his Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), and further developed by Ye Xie 葉燮 (1627-1703) in the Qing Dynasty, the concept is based primarily on the Yijing (Book of Changes). While advocating a return to the sources of the classical canon, Liu nevertheless insists that writers assert their originality by adapting to changing situations. In his Yuanshi 原詩 (1627-1703) (On Poetry) Ye Xie weaned himself from undue emphasis on tradition and looked at the old and the new with equal eyes. To him the familiar and the fresh alternate just as the Russian formalists consider “top” and“bottom” elements in a literary trend go through a cyclic change. Among those prominent literary theorists in the West who view the concept dialectically, we may single out Coleridge, Eliot, the Russian Formalists (such as Tynjanov and Jakobson), and Harold Bloom. Coleridge considered the imaginative faculty capable of reconciling opposites, including novelty/freshness with the old/the familiar, so that the creative mind is pulled by both centripetal and centrifugal forces. Eliot advocated the “historical sense,” which implies a simultaneous order of the whole of tradition and new creations. The Russian formalists saw literary change as an incessant alternation between automatized and deautomatized devices. Bloom viewed tradition pragmatically, considering that its usefulness lies mainly in challenging or blocking the creative mind to live out its “anxiety of influence.” A comparison of their views reveals that Liu Xie’s views are similar to Eliot's, Ye Xie’s close to Coleridge’s and the formalists’, and Bloom’s at the further end asserting that tradition serves only to challenge and stimulate creativity. Generally, those who hold dialectical views of tradition and change see that familiarity breeds freshness, and freshness reveals familiarity: the two evolve in a moving equilibrium.

Shi yan zhih 詩言志 (“The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently”, Owen: 26), is the fountainhead of Chinese poetics, being one of the most important theoretical concepts in ancient Chinese poetic theory and having a profound influence on the development of Chinese poetic theory and poetry itself. In comparison with ancient Western poetics early Chinese poetic theory’s characteristic was the stress on the relationship between poetic creation and the poets mentality, as in, for example, shi yan zhi and the related concept shi yuan ging 詩緣情, “poetry traces emotions” (Liu: 192) etc., and not the relationship between the poem and external reality. This apparently determined that Chinese poetry should become an indispensable part of the daily life and moral cultivation of the cultured individual of that time, through activities such as the expression of feelings, exchanging poems, presenting them to friends, etc. Therefore, if one wishes to understand ancient Chinese poetry fully one must understand the theory of shi yan zhi.

Discussions of whether poetry is engendered primarily due to the poet’s urge to express his heartfelt feelings (yuanqing) or superstructurally to express his conception of an ethical will (yanzhi) are often lumped together to form intertwined issues. While the former notion dwells on poetry as a product of individual necessity first heralded in the fourth century A.D., the latter takes poetry as fulfilment of a social need, representing an earlier recognition. Confucianists often interpret feelings (qing) in terms of expressions that fall within the ethical (or didactic} bound of propriety. The authorial will (zhi) too, has to reflect the Confucian ethics. Therefore, traditional interpretation of poetry does not differentiate the yuanging from the yanzhi notion. However, Lu Ji, the inventor of the yuanqing notion, intends to free poetry from the traditional yoke of ethical interpretation. Qing, to him, is the individual expressive desire of poetic sentiments rather than a social mode serving as a handmaid to class ethics. While clearing up the interpretive maze of lyric poetry, Lu Ji has also offered us a view on the nature of poetry not eradicating the social dimension but emphasizing the literary creative significance of it. Yuanqing, therefore, contributes to the aesthetic perception of poetry as versus yanzhi, the ethical counterpart view of it.

Fu, bi, xing are an inseparable unity of modes which figure centrally in the Chinese poetical tradition. Viewed trichotomously, they are the constants in Chinese lyricism, underlying an imagistic insight into both presentation and representation, a sense, rational and practical, of categorical correspondence, and the spontaneous response to subtleties in natural phenomena. Zhong Rong 鍾嶸 (466-518) advocated the synthesis of the three modes by warning that the exclusive use of the latter two, bi and xing, would result in a kind of reconditeness beyond comprehension and damage the fluency of verbal expression; whereas the unaided employment of the first could only lead to too overt a delivery of one’s poetic ideas in a loose and diffused style. Liu Xie 劉勰 (465-520) held that xing is comparatively obscure as against bi which is obvious. Bi involves parallels between different objects, that is, the use of simile or metaphor; xing consists in affective responses to stimuli. Reason is to be supported by juxtaposing things with comparable features; emotion is to be revealed by insinuating perceptions with finesse. Xing, as a mode of expression, springs out from the poet’s emotional urge, while bi is intended for poetic reasoning. According to Liu Xizai 劉熙載 (1813-1881), to express one’s feelings through giving account of a situation of things is call fu; to single out something to parallel one’s sentiments is called bi, to feel something so deeply as to further arouse intense [poetic] emotions in one is called xing. In Pang Kai's 龐塏 (?-1700?) opinion, fu plays the leading role, xing and bi are geared to the function of fu. in the process of evolution, fu’ as a mode also developed into a genre called rhyme-prose due to its self-containment and autonomy. For this triad, the diversity in definition as well as the perplexity critics have experienced in their efforts to find its equivalent in Western texts, can be attributed to the interdependence and interpenetration of the three modes and especially the indivisibility of bi and xing. For comparative studies, we recommend Paul Ricoeur's proposition of “the metaphorical process as cognition, imagination, and feeling.” To regard this triad as the dialectical unfolding of poetic process, and relate it to other triads in Chinese poetics in a schematic configuration, will enable us to see more clearly how these modes are predicated on a distinctive tradition which is characterized by what F.S.C. Northrop terms “the immediately experienced aesthetic continuum.”

The concept of wenroudunhou or gentleness and kindness in Classical Chinese Literature, deals with artistic and aesthetic as well as political and ethical principles in literary writings. The concept was first made prominent in the “Jingjie”經解 (Explanation of Classics) section of the Liji 禮記 (Records of Rituals). Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648), an outstanding scholar of the Tang Dynasty, gave it a full exegesis. The Confucian School lays emphases upon political and ethical functions of literary writings. According to the teaching of Confucian Canons, although poetry can serve the purposes of voicing one’s grievances, satirical sentiments and remonstrations against the rulers, it must be expressed in a mild and submissive way. An appropriate literary style marked by “gentleness and kindness” is thus conceived and recommended. In Western poetics, there seems to be no such counterpart for this special kind of poetic understatement joined as it is with similar ethical connotations. Wenroudunhou as a doctrine of the Confucian poetics exerted a tremendous influence upon writers evid critics in the past. Du Fu’s poetry epitomizes its basic tenets.

Jingjie 境界, also known as yijing 意境 or jing 境, is an ambiguous, abstract term which refers roughly to a state of free and unlimited imagination and comprehension attained through aesthetic activity. The term is found in Tang dynasty discussions on poetry and painting where its meaning varies with the context in which it is found but is still quite narrow in scope. In the Song dynasty, under the influence of Chan Buddhism, the term becomes at once more profound and abstract, with a strong emphasis on the role of enlightenment in aesthetic activity. By the Qing dynasty the term and its variants are common critical categories, with the stress on enlightenment still very much in evidence, but with an added focus on.a total aesthetic understanding. Wang Guowei of the late Qing made jingjie and the related yijing central critical categories in his theory of aesthetics, attempting a systematic definition which emphasized the mutua! interrelationship between the subjective and objective elements in aesthetic activity. Wangs conception of the perfect creative state (jingjie) stresses the poet's freedom from subjective ties and a selfless accordance with nature which in turn allow the imagination full rein to produce a limitless aesthetic effect or artistic world. Modern critics have attempted to clarify jingjie’s parameters more closely than their traditional predecessors. Recent definitions include the metaphysical theory, the intuitive imagination theory and the theory of aesthetic levels, all of which seek to broaden the understanding of this complex concept of aesthetic activity.

Fenggu as a literary term appeared in The Wei Shu (History of Wei) and then in Liu Xie’s Wenxin Diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Craving of Dragons). Roughly speaking, feng refers to literature’s affective power upon the reader, while gu refers to the content of literary work which is characterized by concreteness, force and unity. The “Fenggu” chapter in WXDL sometimes treats feng and gu separately as two terms and sometimes treats them as a compound. The latter treatment has caused tremendous troubles as modern experts on WXDL try to define fenggu as a critical term. Their opinions differ greatly; no consensus has ever been reached as to its exact meaning. This author inclines to the opinion that feng and gu are related to the idea of forceful and affective power in literature. As a style with such qualities, it comes close to zhuangii (vigorous and beautiful), which is one of the eight styles described in the chapter “Tixing” in WXDL; it bears some resemblance to the Western concepts of the “sublime” and of the “grand style.”

The meaning of the triad of yan 言 (word), xiang 象 (symbol) and yi 意 (meaning) is one of the most essential and complicated issues in Chinese poetics. According to traditional Chinese poetics, the triad represents the three stages in the regressive process of retrieving authorial meanings. Put briefly, it is held that a reader can figure out a writer’s ideas through his words, because as signifiers they have emerged from symbols fashioned by sages of old to express ideas. However, not all scholars in the past millennia have shared this view. Emerging from a debate over the use of language during the Wei-Jin Period (2nd-3rd centuries A.D.) were three schools which believed, respectively, in the expressivity, inadequacy and invalidity of language as a tool of communication. While some maintained that language revealed, these replied that language concealed. Among the various exponents of the third point of view, Wang Bi stood out and exerted considerable influence on the generations to come. Following the lead of Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu), Wang regards language as a necessary evil. It serves as an instrument to catch meaning like a fishing net or a hare trap that captures fishes or hares. Once the goal is accomplished, the tool, namely language, should be put aside. As a result, speechless understanding is considered one of the highest achievements of hermeneutical practice. In the same fashion, a paradox in Chinese aesthetics is also reached: the formal beauty of a work of art can be realized provided that it is negated in the first place.

Pre-note: This compilation of items is a revised and shortened version of a much broader bibliography which included many items of a more general nature (e.g., Western terminology issues). Most of our materials have been taken from English sources although we have included a few items in Chinese (mostly dictionaries). In fact, there is a great deal of interest in translating and explaining Western terms into Chinese, but we have deliberately concentrated most of our efforts on introducing Chinese literary terms to scholars who may not read Chinese. Therefore, this selection is only a representative sampling of a much wider range of material on the subject. Some of these publications touch on terminology in a peripheral way but are included as a stimulus towards more specialized research. Nevertheless, we also include material that is indirectly related to Chinese terminological questions (e.g., Chinese poetics, philosophy, critical theory, etc.). Readers are invited to supply further information Gneluding items in other languages). We wish to acknowledge W. L. idema’s extensive bibliography published in Zhongguo wenyisixtang shi luncong No.2 (Beijing: Peking University Press, n.d.) 356-87, which contains a substantial number of entries included here. We have added a number to each entry for easy reference.

Book Review: Kurt Werner Radtke/Tony Saich (Eds.). China’s Modernization: Westernization and Acculturation, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993.