Wang Kuo-wei's Jen-chien Tz'u-hua: A Study in Chinese Literary Criticism

His Poetic Theory

His Poetic Theory 23 attracted Wang Kuo-wei to them. Like Yen Yü and Wang Shih-chen in their generations, Wang Kuo-wei had become disgusted with the prevailing trend in poetry among his contemporaries. At the end of the Ch'ing dynasty he could find litt1e to praise in the writing of tz'u not only in his own day but since the Southern Sung as wel1. Wang Fu-chih's influence on Wang Kuo-wei can be seen in the latter's adaptation and deve10pment of the former's view of the interaction of two elements in poetry,‘scene' (ching 境) and ‘emotion' (ch'ing 情). The view that poetry is made up primarily of external scene and inner emotion had been expressed by Chinese critics for centuries but Wang Fu-chih contributed to an understanding of the two elements by saying: (Ch'ing and ching are two in name,but inseparable in reality' 戶 Wang Kuo-wei then took the blending of scene and emotion in a poem as the starting point for the development of his own poetic the。可 as expressed in the compound ching-chieh 墳界. His Poetic Theory The importance Wang attached to ching-chieh can be seen from the fact that it appears in the first Comment in the Jen-chien tz'u-hua. It would have been he1pful to later generations if he had gone on in the next few pages to elaborate on his initial statement, but we must read through the entire work to find only twenty-five comments in which ching-chieh or the related term ching 填 appears. Even when all these comments are brought together, the picture is none too clear. Concerning translation, James Liu in his The art 01 Chinese poetry used the English word 'wor1d' for ching-chieh as well as for ching. In this work the word has been left in transliteration as defying translation, but if one were to be attempted, some awkward phrase such as ‘sphere of reality delineated' would perhaps best convey the meaning. The word ching alone has been translated here as ‘state' or ‘poetic state'. The reasons for distinguishing between the two terms are set forth below. Although some scholars have been led by a certain emphasis in ，月Tang Kuo-wei's comments to infer that he invented the phrase ching-chieh, this certainly cannot be substantiated. The term occurs in widelyscattered ear1y texts in the basic meaning of a bounded area or region.25 24 Chiang-chai shih-hua, B/3a. ，九Tong， Siu-kit, 'Ch'ing and ching in the critical writings ofWang Fu-chih', in Adele Rickett, ed., Chinese approaches to literature from Confucius to Liang C的-ch'ao， provides an excellent analysis of Wang Fu-chih's views. 25 See Lieh-tzu, 31沛， and Hou Han shu (History of the later Han dynasty), 79/16b. 24 胏Tang Kuo-wei's Poetic Criticism It later came into Buddhist texts as a translation for vi~aya， which is defined as ‘a region, territory, environment, surroundings, area, field, sphere, e.g. the sphere of mind, the sphere of form for the eye, of sound for the ear, etc.; any objective mental projection regarded as reality'只 In the Sung dynasty dictionary of Buddhist terms, Fan-yi ming-yi (Terms translated), 5/142a,completed by the monk Fa-yün in 1143,the term erh-yen 爾燄) a transliteration of the Sanskrit f起句吼 is explained as ‘that which is known', or ‘that which is knowable', or ching-chieh. Soothi1l and Hodous define erh-yen 前‘cognizable， the region or basis of knowledge'.27 Thus we have added to the simple spatial meaning the qualifying concept of a region which embraces our objective knowledge of reality. The term also appears in the works of earlier critics: When 1 had finished reading Tu Fu's poem,‘The fields in al1 their beauty stretch without break on to the mountains, The mountains in glorious array blend straight into the water', 1 sighed and said, 'This poem of Tu Fu is not concerned alone with the scenery of mountains and fields. In everything it comprehends the unifying principle to its very core. The realm (ching-chieh) of al1 his poems was like this'.28 And, The reason the realm (ching-chieh) in tz'u has something that shih cannot achieve is that the form of the latter restricts it.29 Even Wang Kuo-wei's contemporaries have used the term. For example, K'uang Chou-yi: As for those who are good...