Collections Of Excellent Virtues

Collections of Excellent Virtues is a kind of encouraging kindness novel in NanSong dynasty. The author is Li Yuangang. His Birth and Death is unknown. Li Yuangang’s pseudonym is BaiLianZhenYin. He was a ShangYangSheng official during the reign of Emperor Qianlong. The date that Collections of Excellent Virtues was completed is unknown. While the book cited a JiaZhi story from book YiJianZhi, so it can be inferred that the Collections of Excellent Virtues was completed before ShaoXing Year 32 in NanSong dynasty when JiaZhi was completed. Versions of Collections of Excellent Virtues nowadays are the series, which mainly contains two systems of four volumes and one volumes.In Song dynasty, culture and education were developed prosperously. Scholars in that time usually had higher pursuit of self-moral and intense awareness of social responsibility so that novels in that time often tended to show strong moral exhortations. Collections of Excellent Virtues was written in those background. The content of the book is mainly collections of stories about scholar-officials in Song dynasty doing virtue things and praising highly kind morality. The content mainly involves the famous ministers. Meanwhile, it also included the people who were in low official position and the ordinary people. Themes of the book are relief, redressing mishandled cases, helping others, being scrupulous in separating public from private interests and paing a debt of gratitudeThere are 207 stories cited in Collections of Excellent Virtues, which involves 42 books. In those books,23 books exist now, the remain 19 books have been lost. It has value of literature significance. Collections of Excellent Virtues collected a large amount stories, which also recorded in those books named SongShi, XuZiZhiTongJianChangPian and DongDuShiLue. Still, there are some stories about famous scholar-officials that are never mentioned or recorded more detailed by history books, so it has a certain value of supplementing historyCollections of Excellent Virtues is similar with the contemporaneous books in the content and form such as SongMinChenYanXingLu, ZiJinBian, LeShanLu. Collections of Excellent Virtues is mainly about stories about famous scholar-officials, which is similar with SongMinChenYanXingLu written by Zhu Xi in language style, compiling method, bookmaking purport. And there are 26 same items in the two books. ZiJinBian, written by Zhao Shanliao in NanSong dynasty is another book about collections of stories about famous scholar-officials and there are 87 same items in the two books. By correlating, most of items in ZiJinBian is not same as the original book but is similar with Collections of Excellent Virtues. It is possible that ZiJinBian borrowed from Collections of Excellent Virtues.Collections of Excellent Virtues and ZiJinBian belongs to a kind of exhortation novel in Song dynasty, which is mainly influenced by Confucianism. It tried to avoid novels about ghosts and gods. It used a lot of kind stories to promote the moral concept of "love". There is another kind of exhortation novel in Song dynasty, LeShanLu written by Li Changlin in NanSong dynasty. Collections of Excellent Virtues and LeShanLu set encouraging kindness as the main idea. But LeShanLu used traditional beliefs like ghosts and gods and promoting karma. It discussed benefits of doing good from the two aspects between good and evil, provided specific reference standard for people. The main object is ordinary people.