元結の近體詩批判と「全聲」の思想

Abstract

Yuan Jie 元結(719-772) is known as one of the pioneers of the Chinese Ancient-Style Prose Movement during the Flourishing and Middle Tang dynasty. Besides his prose, Yuan also extended his archaistic thoughts to his poetry. He reminded aloof from composing Recent-Style Poetry 近體詩, and stood out among the coetaneous poets. From retrospective studies, Yuan's obscure theory on poetry was considered to have an ultimate goal of tracing back to the Fengya 風雅 tradition in the masterpiece Shijing 詩經, which required political satires in the poetry composition. However, through the studies on the “model poems” listed by Yuan himself, Yuan's poems show very few indications on politics. And Yuan's “tracing back” focuses more on formalization than content of the poems, which despises the modern poetic rules and desires for an extreme simplicity in rhetoric. Previous studies also ignored Yuan's reflections on music, which provides additional evidences for his insist on simplicity of formal rules: Yuan strongly opposes to the Confucius music which emphasizes the change in rhythm. In Yuan's music theory, he claims the monotonous sound of water falling into the rock as “Quan Sheng” 全聲 (perfect sound). And the word Quan 全 is widely used in Yuan Jie's criticism. Yuan called his greatest truth as “Quan Dao” 全道, and his ideal person as “Quan Shi” 全士. The concept of Quan comes from Taoism, especially the story about the relationship between tools 機械 and the mind of tools 機心 in Zhuangzi 莊子, which concludes that the dependence on tools will cause the slavery by tools and the loss of human's mind. In Yuan Jie's view, the various changes in rhythm of music and the complicated rules of the Recent-Style Poetry are both considered as the dependence on tools. Therefore, Yuan takes a negative attitude against them and proposed “The Simple” 淳樸, which also traces to Taoism- this time from another masterpiece Laozi 老子. As a conclusion, although there is a mixture of the Confucius and Taoism in Yuan Jie's thoughts, the theory of Quan is obviously more influenced by Taoism. This might be the main reason why Yuan Jie never wrote Recent-Style Poetry, and became “unique” among the coetaneous authors.