Xunzi's Study Of The Book Of Songs

Xunzi's Study of The Book of Songs influenced the Confucian Classic Study in Han Dynasties directly but there haven't been any systematic studies on it.The author studied Xunzi's Study of The Book of Songs taking the Pre-Qin Dynasty's culture as the background. After analyzing the all pieces of Xunzi's criticizing and quoting The Book of Songs, the author maintains:1.Xunzi's criticism of The Book of Songs indicated that Xunzi had taken The Book of Songs as Confucian Classic and he believed that The Book of Songs was the expression of the Sage's thoughts, which was the presupposition of Xunzi's criticism and quotation of The Book of Songs;2. The method of Xunzi's quoting The Book of Songs was still a kind of"quote out of context", which was conducted under the thought pattern by analogy. The research shows the regular pattern of Xunzi's quoting The Book of Songs as following: First, the most of Xunzi's quotations were Ya and Song, especially Da Ya, which was up to 26 times among the 57 times of whole quotations; Second, Xunzi seldom quoted the first lines of poems which was only 6 times, and he gave the explanations to each of lines from Feng and Ya; Third, 90% quotations which were used to criticize the reality were Xiao Ya; Forth, Xunzi put the poem at almost each paragraph to emphasize his ideas, while there were no one piece of poem quoted in the Chapter of Theory of Music and Evilism. The all regulation on Xunzi's quoting The Book of Songs indicated that Xunzi had already thought highly of the original meaning of the poetry in The Book of Songs and gave some more new profound explanation to the classics by analyzing according to the original meaning of the poems. It was Xunzi's quoting The Book of Songs that widened the explanation scope of the poems, made The Book of Songs authoritative, speeded up the process"Poetry to the Confucian Classic", and also put his view of literature"Ming Dao, Zheng Sheng, Zong Jing"into practice.The research of Xunzi's criticizing and quoting The Book of Songs provided that there were hand-down relationship between Xunzi and"Si Jia Potry"of Han Dynasties and Xunzi had a great influence on Mao Shi Xu.