Chinese Ancients' Consciousness Of The Divine Bird In The Shanhaijing

Shanhaijing can be called a “wonderful book” in the ancient Chinese literature.The book only has 31000 words,but contains history,geography,astronomy,calendar,weather,animals,plants,minerals,medicine,religion,mythology,archaeology and anthropology,ethnology,oceanography,and technological and so on,it is the encyclopedia of ancient social life.According to the conditions of the Times and personal preference,many scholars do the researches from many aspects but still fail to end its profound intrinsic.The author wants to get rid of the previous studies,choose the birds in the book as the breakthrough point to explore the primitive consciousness of the divine bird.Date back to the ancient times,people have noticed the existence of birds.People and birds have the same way of life.At the same time,long-term interactions constitute the basic cognitive of birds' culture.There are many kinds of birds in the Shanhaijing.Some of them are real birds in the nature,such as the parrot,white pheasant,kingfisher etc,and the others are fictional birds which are created by the original ancestors.As a scholar said,“Read the Shanhaijing,the book is the story of birds.” These “birds” image concentrated the history and culture of the primitive society;they are already beyond the ordinary natural image and become the carrier of the mysterious ancient culture.The purpose of this study is intended to reveal their cultural connotations.The first chapter will summarize the birds' image in the Shanhaijing and witness the primitive consciousness of the divine bird through the method of literature review.The second chapter will explore the culture connotation behind the birds' image.To combine literature and culture,this chapter will use the multidimensional perspective to look at,referring to the cultural anthropology,mythology,folklore and totem witchcraft theory.As is known to all,some birds usually appeared in the poetry as the literature images.So at the end of this paper,the author will choose the bluebird,phoenix and jingwei bird as the examples to analyze the development of their meanings,mainly to explore the aesthetic value of these images in tang poems.In summary,the birds' image in the Shanhaijing has a significant and profound influence on poetry in the tang dynasty.