Overview of the development of exegetics before Qing Dynasty

The pre-Qin Dynasty to the Han Dynasty was the period of the development of exegetics: the book of letters said that Zhou Song had a destiny in heaven, which indicated that exegetics had existed as early as the Spring and Autumn Period. There are two reasons for the great development of exegetics in Han Dynasty:

First, Confucianism was regarded as authentic, and teaching and explaining Confucian classics became the primary task of scholars at that time.

Second, the Han dynasty has gone to ancient times, and the ancient meanings and sounds of many words are beyond the understanding of ordinary people, so it is urgent to explain ancient documents.

Wei-Jin period is the development period of exegetics, which is mainly manifested in the following four aspects:

1, the annotation scope continues to expand. In addition to continuing to annotate classics, there are a large number of exegetical works that explain historical books, sub-books, literary works and even Buddhist classics;

2. The emergence of righteousness and sparseness;

3. There are many monographs on exegetics, the most important of which is Guangya by Zhang Yi. Lv Chen's Ci Lin; Gu's jade piece;

4. There have been some works on previous exegetical monographs.

The Tang Dynasty was a conservative period of exegetics: basically conservative, without innovation. Confucius and others wrote Justice of the Five Classics on the basis of the Six Dynasties and Sui Dynasty. The righteous are righteous, the predecessors' righteousness is sparse, and righteousness belongs to one family. In this way, the justice of the Five Classics became the official meaning of the Five Classics, and Confucian scholars must take this as the standard, so the interpretation of the Five Classics was fixed and then became a rigid dogma. There is no innovation in the Five Classics Justice, but many precious materials are preserved.

The Song Dynasty was a period of change in exegetics: the Song Dynasty paid more attention to righteousness and reason than to chapters and sentences, among which Zhu had a great influence on exegetics. Mr. Yin Menglun summed up Zhu's viewpoint on ancient books, including eight points:

(1) Attach importance to calligraphy and phonology, and exegesis of famous things;

(2) respecting the ancient teachings and adopting the theory of modern times;

(3) Advocating that annotations should be easy to understand;

(4) Do not write footnotes;

(5) You can't interpret ancient books by yourself;

(6) Understanding the meaning to determine the exegesis;

(7) No written explanation;

(8) If you don't know, you must doubt.

Mr. Hong Cheng summed up the achievements of exegetics in this period and said that five things were new developments:

Word (1) is divided into virtual and real, and half virtual and half real;

(2) the bud of ancient phonology;

(3) Describing idioms in The Book of Songs in Yi language is a precedent of modern research methods;

(4) Emphasize the use of grammar to criticize the mistakes made by predecessors in sentence making, sentence reading and exegesis;

(5) The philology has changed. The study of exegetics declined in Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and there were few new works of exegetics in Yuan Dynasty. What is worth mentioning is Lu Yiwei's Language Gang, which is the earliest monograph on function words.

Gu said that "the book of the wise is nothing more than stealing". Only Pianya by Zhu Mouwei, Tongya by Fang Yizhi, Zishi by Huang Fumeng and Yi Fu were newly edited in this period, each with its own characteristics. The word books of this period include Mei's Dictionary and Zhang Zilie's Zhengzitong.

Vocabulary is the first dictionary compiled by stroke arrangement in China. It combines 540 radicals of Shuo Wen Jie Zi into 2 14 radicals, and lists them in order of the number of calligraphy and painting. The words in each radical are also arranged according to the number of strokes. Compared with the rhyming books arranged in alphabetical order in Shuowen and Bian Yu, it greatly facilitated the readers to look up words, and it was the most progressive method at that time, which had a great influence on the compilation of dictionaries in later generations. Later, Kangxi Dictionary was completely arranged according to the dictionary search method, the radicals and arrangement of orthographic characters.