A Study About The Literature Of Scholars’ Rocks In Northern Song Dynasty

In Northern Song Dynasty,the cultural life was developed and literati often had cultural and personal obsession.Scholars’ rocks are naturally-occurring and viewing stones which could be appreciated by Chinese literati without any restriction of stones’ kinds and shapes.This study aims to restore the literary text into the literati’s daily life in Northern Song Dynasty,in order to find and describe more concrete aspects of the culture of scholars’ rocks,which may be related with different fields like buying,presenting,collecting,praising,appreciating,writting,communicating and so on.Specifically,literati in Northern Song Dynasty liked to appreciate and chant scholars’ rocks,especially Taihu stones and Lingbi stones.People usually paid attention on viewing stones’ shape,location and function.There was an ancient cultural tradition about rockery and strange stones in the garden.At this time,a new change was the appreciation of miniaturization.Literati began to choose and favour small stones and replace them from gardens to studies and from on the ground to on the desk.For literati in Northern Song Dynasty,delicate stones were important ornaments in their cultural studies.Besides,Buddhists sometimes collected a few beautiful stones in the temples to decorate surroundings,draw audiences and make friends with literati,and men of letters might also notice and write poems about stones in the temples.It was worth being further studied because of the special identity and occasion.There were some main ways to get viewing stones like personally exploring in the wild,buying in the markets and presenting and getting in the communities.A few poems might be concerned with the buy while more works were about the complimentary reply.In fact,the price of buying and cost of transporting influenced the mobility of stones in the daily life and social network.Such problems aroused scholars’ moral anxiety and they often used some words like flying to disguise the process of transporting stones and defended themselves with the explanation of aesthetic and personal rights.The reason why people had the contradictory psychology of both obsession and anxiety was that this hobby was costly to some degree.It is difficult to study how literati wrote and edited the texts about scholars’ rocks in the history but possible to discuss the process that such marvelous stones appeared and inspired them.Literati could appreciate viewing stones at the scenes of gardens and studies and the vision and touch might inspire creativity.What’s more,they could read some texts about the stones in the letters and poems and reply,and they also tended to watch visual images including paintings and murals about scholars’ rocks.The real stones were not always necessary,and textual and visual medium could make contribution to the spread of such aesthetic experience of appreciating stones at the scene.In the literature and art of scholars’ rocks,some ways,like seeing and touching,writing and replying,reading and painting,could make a network of literature production and form a cultural model.Fans of different generations may be connected because of the common hobby and related texts.There are some following features in the literary texts about scholars’ rocks in Northen Song Dynasty.Firstly,people might chant stones while express their moral anxiety and aesthetic criticism.There was an obvious conflict between the personal aesthetic hobby and Confucian morality in such literary works.Secondly,writing for scholars’ rocks was a special way to reason something out,which was also an example of the argumentative characteristic in the poems of Song Dynasty.Last but not least,with the mass production of related poems and essays,some classical texts about scholars’ rocks gradually formed.Later generations used such texts to write and rewrite the cultural memory of scholars’ rocks,and some words like Xuelang Stone and Hua Shi-Gang became the famous symbols in the literature.The writing about Yan-shan,an unique kind of scholars’ rocks having the function of the inkstone and the shape of the mountain,was special in the literature in Northern Song Dynasty.Mi Fu made Yan-shan famous.He was obsessed with Yan-shan,and often chanted such stones collected,and even painted for the missed one having been given to others.Mi Fu’s memory about Yan-shan existed in his own Yan-shan poems and contemporaries’ notes and memoirs.Later generations praised highly the cultural symbol of Mi Fu’s Yan-shan and they usually used different ways to recall and reconstruct the typical pedigree of collecting and inheriting Mi Fu’s Yan-shan.The images of Yan-shan were the representation of this historic cultural narration’s visualization.The mental motivation of chasing after the celebrity and tradition pushed people to restate in the fields of literature and images,history and memory.Therefore,we need to reflect the question of authenticity in the historic narration and cultural classics.In brief,in the study of the literature of scholars’ rocks,we should not only sort texts out,interpret literary images or explore literati’s thoughts,but also pay more attention on the objects themselves,analyze the generative model of literature and reflect cultural classics and so on.The key is surpassing the text,restoring the historical context and comprehensively studying how the scholars’ rocks became the part of literati’s daily life and influenced their aesthetic tastes and literary writing.