Study On Ma Ruichen And His Book Named General Explanation Of Mao's Annotations For Book Of Songs

Ma Ruichen is a famous scholar of the Qing Dynasty, his masterpiece General Explanation of Mao's Annotations for Book of Songs is a comprehensive expression for the research of the Book of songs, it not only includes many famous sholar's notes about Book of songs in history, but also quoted some contemporary research findings and the author's own views in it. Since it's published, researchers have given great attention and some valuable explanations have widely quoted by generations. But if we take an overview of these works, it's no hard to find that most of these works are to take some fragments as a proof to prove their point of view, or to discuss from particular aspect of this book, but the research work on its overall structure is rarely. Moreover, the historical records over the life of Ma Ruichen are also brief, because few letters, notes and other works was left, which gives researchers a great many of difficulties. For that reason, the research on Ma Ruichen is not many too. Therefore, this paper aims at a closer research on the man and his work General Explanation of Mao s Annotations for Book of Songs, hoping to be a little benefit to those who study this book.Ma Ruichen was born in Qianlong period of Qing dynasty, and lived through Jiaqing, Daoguang, and Xianfeng three emperors. It's a time of moral decaying, the natural disasters and peasant uprisings come to exist one by one, though at that time,the Qing government still maintained its rule, but as the saying goes, "a centipede dies but never falls down". In such a period full of internal and external problems, Ma Ruichen tried his best to serve the country, but twice been demoted, and finally returned to hometown, devoted himself to writing. His official story is unknown, but from the General Explanation of Mao's Annotations for Book of Songs, we can get a light on his political outlook. Ruichen was a stubborn person, after the Taiping Army captured Tong cheng city, he lead people against the enemy, and fight to die. His masterpiece, General Explanation of Mao's Annotations for Book of Songs has a significant achievement in the phonology, exegesis; in this book it gave a fair evaluation to the textual studies in Song dynasty, which were always been scorned by the scholars of Qing Dynasty. This book had a wide range of literature citations, one can find it's author's extensive knowledge, on the other hand, it also reveals his open mind and eagerness to the academic ideas. In addition, General Explanation of Mao's Annotations for Book of Songs also absorbed some new results in epigraphy, and other disciplines in the Qing Dynasty, it played a supporting role for interpretation of ancient classics.In short, the Qing Dynasty there had been lot's of classics, and new subjects come to being more and more, Ma Ruichen has deep family learning and his own tireless efforts, General Explanation of Mao's Annotations for Book of Songs was finally published after sixteen years later, this books might have some imperfectness, but it still have fundamental values in the research on Book of Songs, the status can not be ignored.