History of Couplets

Couplets, also known as couplets, door pairs, spring stickers, spring couplets, pairs, peach charms, couplets (named for the pillars that were mostly hung in the halls of buildings and mansions in ancient times), etc., are a kind of couplet literature, originating from peach charms. It is a pair of statements written on paper, cloth or carved on bamboo, wood or pillars. Simple words with deep meaning, neat pairs of words, coordinated pairs of words, the same number of words and the same structure, it is a unique art form of the Chinese language.

Couplets are a treasure of traditional Chinese culture, and the earliest recorded couplets appeared in the Three Kingdoms era. During the Hongwu period of Ming Dynasty (1368-1399), in the place of Luling, Jiangxi Province (present-day Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province), a large iron cross was unearthed, on which the year number of Sun Quan Chiwu of the Three Kingdoms era (238-250) was cast. In the iron cross and cast a beautifully artistic couplet cloud: "four seas to celebrate the peace and prosperity, the iron pillar of precious light to stay in the cross; ten thousand people to embrace the Great Zephyr, the golden furnace incense seal seal affinity a thousand years." The couplets hung during the Spring Festival are called spring couplets, those for funerals are called elegiac couplets, and those for joyous occasions are called celebratory couplets. Couplets are a national literary style written in Chinese characters, and generally do not need to rhyme (only the couplets in poems need to rhyme).

The two direct sources of the couplet are ekphrasis and metered verse. In the course of their own development, the couplets absorbed the characteristics of ancient poetry, prose, lyrics and music. As a result, the sentence pattern used in couplets, in addition to the sentence pattern of poetic verses and parallelism, there are also the sentence pattern of ancient poems, prose, and imitation lyrics and songs. Different sentence styles are applied with different laws and different degrees of severity. The most stringent requirement is the leveling of the poetic form, while the ancient poetic form has no restriction on the leveling of other positions except for the end of the sentence.

Spring Festival couplets come from spring stickers, the ancients on the day of the Spring Festival more stickers "Yichun" two words, and gradually developed into Spring Festival couplets, expressing the Chinese working people a kind of warding off evils and disasters, and welcoming the good wishes of the lucky.

The Spring Festival couplets have a long history and are said to have begun in the Five Dynasties after the Lord of Shu, Meng Chang. His inscription on the peach rune on the door of his bedchamber: "New Year's Day, Jiajie No. Changchun", so-called "Peach Runner" (see "Shu Legend"), which is China's earliest couplets, but also the first pair of spring couplets. Different historical sources in the Song Dynasty say different things about this, and the author will be attributed to Meng Chang's son. Thus, the author of this pair of spring couplets in the end is who, is still a mystery.

As a custom, couplets are an important part of traditional Chinese culture, and in 2005, the State Council of China listed the practice of couplets as one of the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage. The custom of couplets has been passed down and spread among Chinese people and people who use Chinese language around the world, as well as those who have cultural origins with Chinese characters, and it is of great value to the promotion of Chinese national culture.

Historical Exploration

Couplets are the literature of counterpoint. The parallel symmetry of language and writing is similar to the so-called "Tai Chi gives birth to two meters" in philosophy. That is to say, everything in the world is divided into two halves of yin and yang which are symmetrical to each other, and they are very similar in the nature of thinking. Therefore, we can say that the philosophical origin of Chinese couplets and the deep-rooted national cultural psychology is the concept of yin and yang dualism. The dualism of yin and yang is the foundation of ancient Chinese worldview. To grasp things with the concept of yin-yang duality is the thinking method of ancient Chinese. This yin and yang dualistic concept of thought has a very far-reaching origins, "I Ching" in the trigram symbols, that is, by the yin and yang two lines, "I Chuan" said: "a yin and a yang is called the road." Lao Zi also said: "Everything negative Yin and hold the Yang, and the gas for and." (Lao Tzu, chapter 42.) Xunzi, on the other hand, argues, "Heaven and earth unite to bring forth all things, and yin and yang unite to bring forth change." (Xunzi - Rites of Passage) The Huang Lao Pali Shu, on the other hand, states, "The way of heaven and earth has a left and a right, a yin and a yang." This concept of yin and yang is not only an abstract concept, but also widely infiltrated into the ancient Chinese people's understanding and interpretation of the natural world and everything in human society.

Zhou Yi - Preface to Gua Chuan "there is heaven and earth and then there are all things, there are all things and then there are men and women, there are men and women and then there are couples, there are couples and then there are fathers and sons, there are fathers and sons and then there are rulers and ministers, there are rulers and ministers and then there are up and down, up and down, and then there are rituals and there is a measure of it." The Yi Chuan, respectively, to a variety of specific things to symbolize the yin and yang two lines. Yin represents kun, earth, female, woman, son, minister, abdomen, down, north, wind, water, zephyr, flower, black and white, supple, etc.; in contrast, yang represents qian, heaven, male, husband, father, ruler, head, up, south, thunder, fire, mountain, fruit, red and yellow, rigid and so on. This omnipresent concept of yin and yang, deep into the subconscious of the Chinese nation, thus becoming a national collective unconscious. The concept of yin and yang is expressed in the national psychology, one of the important features is the "two", "pair" of the form of things appearing in the characteristics of the obsession and fascination. The format of the couplet is strict, divided into large and small words relative to each other. Traditional couplets have a common form, connected content, harmonized tones, and rigorous counterpoints.

Language Roots

The most essential feature of a standard couplet is its "counterpoint". When it is expressed verbally, it is a verbal counterpoint, and when it is written, it is a textual counterpoint. What is the meaning of verbal counterpoint? Usually we mention the four requirements of equal number of words, relative word nature, equal and oblique, and the same syntax, and the most crucial of the four is equal number of words and equal and oblique, and the equal number of words here is different from the equal number of words in English, which is essentially the equal number of syllables. Here, the number of words is different from the number of words in English. That is, one syllable corresponds to one syllable. In English, the words "car" and "jeep" are equal in number, but not in syllables. In Chinese, "truck" and "jeep" are equal in number and syllables. The reason why Chinese can realize the equality of syllables is that Chinese is a language with monosyllables as its basic unit. Syllables, morphemes and characters are three in one. Each syllable in Chinese is independent, has a definite length and tone, and the tone has four tones in ancient times, namely, Ping, Shang, Go, and In, and in modern times, there are four tones, namely, Yangping, Yinping, Shangsheng, and Daosheng, which are divided into two major categories: Ping and Oblique. Ping to oblique is called the phase of the argument. In this way, the Chinese language can establish the relationship between morphemes and morphemes (i.e., between characters) with equal number of characters and harmonious ping and oblique. In English, even though the names and concepts of things can be relative, the number and lexical nature of words can be relative, and the syntax of two sentences can be relative, the syllables are of different lengths, weakly independent, freely spelled, and have no tones, so they cannot be relative.

Most of the couplets are written in words, and many times they are written, hung or engraved on other buildings or artifacts. Therefore, the second level of the couplets is the so-called relative text. The word relative means that couplets are not only language art, but also decorative art. As a decorative art, a pair of couplets requires neatness and symmetry, giving people a harmonious and symmetrical beauty. Chinese characters have the right conditions to realize neatness and symmetry; they exist in the form of individual squares, square and neat, each occupying an equal spatial position in writing. It is readable and visual. Its square shape has both the principle of aesthetics and the requirement of mechanics. Whether it is written horizontally or vertically, it can appear sparse and dense, neat and beautiful. On the other hand, English is a pinyin script, each word is of different lengths, only expresses the sound, not the meaning, not to mention the visibility, can only be arranged horizontally, can not be arranged vertically, and can not realize the real symmetry from the form. The following is a comparison of two Chinese and English pairs of sentences with the same meaning, to further illustrate why only the Chinese language has true symmetry, while the English and other pinyin scripts do not.

Couplets originated in the Qin Dynasty and were known as peach symbols in ancient times. Regarding the earliest Chinese couplets, Mr. Tan Cicang Xue, writing in the fourth issue of 1991 of Knowledge of Literature and History, pointed out that the earliest Chinese couplets appeared in the Tang Dynasty. He used the Mogao Grottoes Cangjing Cave unearthed volume No. Stein 0610 Dunhuang remains as the basis:

Year: the three suns began to cloth, the four sequences of the first opening.

Fortunes and celebrations are new, longevity and prosperity are prolonged.

And also: the three suns back to the beginning, the four sequences to auspicious.

Fortune extends to the new day, and longevity is celebrated without boundaries.

On the day of the first spring: the Copper Hun first celebrates the mat, the Jade Law first adjusts the sun.

Five blessings in addition to the three evils, Wan Gu □ (coffin) a hundred disasters.

Baoji can seclude the evil, Ruiyan solution to present auspicious.

The spring is on the door, and the children and grandchildren will prosper.

And also: the three suns are beginning to spread, the four fierce (Meng) first opened.

The author of "Tone Spectrum," Zhao Deixin, made it clear that "two lines for the couplet, four lines for the jie (sentence), began in the Six Dynasties, and Yuan (original) is not a recent form." Wang Fuzhi said that the idea that couplets originated from metrical poetry is like "severing the head and amputating the feet, crippling the physiology of a person" - Qing Poetry

Couplets originated from the symmetry of the Chinese script's phonetics, and their emergence should have taken place before the Zhou Dynasty, and the development of papermaking and calligraphy made the couplets an independent literary genre. independent literary style.

Couplets are short and concise, and are both a vivid form of artistic expression and an excellent cultural heritage. Couplets were developed on the basis of the ancient "peach charms" and "couplets", and the earliest spring couplets in China appeared more than a thousand years ago. According to historical records, on the eve of the Spring Festival in the 27th year of Guangzheng of the Later Shu (964 AD), Meng Chang, the Lord of the Later Shu, who was always good at writing couplets, suddenly gave an order asking the ministers to write couplets on the "Peach Symbol Boards" in order to test their talents. The ministers each wrote a good, waiting patiently for the review. Meng Chang read them one by one and was not satisfied. So he wrote on the "Peach Symbol Board", "New Year's Day is a time of celebration; the festive season is an everlasting spring". This is one of the earliest spring scrolls ever written down in China.

The format of the couplet exquisite couplets, not only has a long history and traditional habits, but also in the masses on the basis of a wide range of requirements, a unified point, a fixed format. From a literary point of view, it is China's folk cultural heritage in the more demanding, more demanding a special style. From the format, it is closely integrated with the real life in the middle of two door frame and a lintel Road features correspondingly by three parts: the first line: the first sentence, also called the sentence; the next line: the second sentence, also known as the sentence; horizontal forehead: also known as the horizontal approval or horizontal phi. Upper and lower couplet is the main body of the couplet, and the wall of the wonderful, indispensable. In addition, the main practical use of the couplet, the upper and lower text, no matter how long, generally no punctuation, which is also a special format. But there are exceptions.

From the point of view of the history of literature, couplets, the Department of the ancient poetry and rhetoric in the couplets gradually evolved and developed. This development process has gone through about three stages.

Pairing stage

The time span is from the pre-Qin Dynasty, the two Han Dynasties, the Three Kingdoms, the two Jin Dynasties to the North and South Dynasties. In ancient Chinese poetry, some relatively neat couplets appeared very early. Several ancient ballads have been handed down to the present day, which have already seen their origins. For example, "Drink from the well, eat from the field", "Work at sunrise, rest at sunset" and so on. To the pre-Qin and Han, couplets are more common. "I Ching" hexagrams and lines in the rhetoric has been some of the couplets neatly text, such as: "small can see, lame can fulfill." ("Cui" hexagram "six three"), "first ascended in the sky, after entering the earth." ("Mingyi" hexagram "upper six") "Yi Chuan" in the pair of neat sentences are more common, such as: "up to watch in astronomy, down to observe the geography." ("The Next Biography of the Lineage"), "The same sound corresponds to the same qi, the water flows wet, the fire is dry, the clouds follow the dragon, the wind follows the tiger ...... then each follows its own class." (Qian - Wenyan biography)

The Poetry Scriptures, which were written in the Spring and Autumn period, are already rich in couplets. Liu Linsheng, in his History of Chinese Eroticism, said, "There is nothing in the Book of Songs that does not fulfill the ancient and modern method of composing pairs. He cited the examples of various pairs such as proper name pairs, similar pairs, serial pairs, double-sound pairs, overlapping rhymes, double rhymes, and so on. For example, "Green dickey, long my heart." ("Zheng Feng - Dicky"), "There are fusu in the mountains, and lotus flowers in the marsh." ("Zheng Feng - Mountains have Fusu") The Tao Te Ching also has many couplets. Liu Linsheng once said, "The method of arbitrating pairs in the Tao Te Ching has been varied in many ways: there are those who make pairs in a chain, those who make pairs in different ways, and those who make pairs by dividing the words. There are those who make pairs by repeating their words. There are those who make pairs in any case." (The History of Chinese Ebonics, e.g., "The letter is not beautiful, the beautiful word is not believable. Those who are good do not argue, and those who argue are not good." (Chapter 81), "Independence without change, circumspection without danger." (Chapter 22) Look again at the couplets in the prose of the sons. For example, "Fullness invites loss, modesty benefits." (Shangshu - Wucheng), "Ride a fat horse, wear a light fur." (The Analects of Confucius - Yongya), "A gentleman is at peace with himself, but a villain is always at peace with himself." ("Analects of Confucius - Shu而") and so on. Rhetoric arose in the Han Dynasty, a new style of literature that emphasizes elegance and rhythm. Pairing, a rhetorical device with the beauty of neatness, contrast and beauty, began to be commonly and consciously used in the creation of fu. For example, Sima Xiangru's "Zi Xu Fu" has: "Strike the spirit drum, raise the beacon; the car according to the line, ride on the team."

Parallel Stage

Paraphrase originated from the Eastern Han Dynasty's rhetorical fugue, flourished in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and flourished in the North and South Dynasties. From its name, it can be seen that it is a literary style that advocates the use of couplets and consists mostly of couplets. The use of such couplets in succession is also known as parallelism or parallelism. Liu Innocence in "Wenxin Diao Long - Ming Poetry" evaluates the parallelism as "the evenness of a hundred words, and the oddity of a sentence." In the early Tang Dynasty, Wang Bo's "Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion" is an example:

The time is September, and the preface belongs to the three autumns. The scribbling water is finished and the cold pool is clear, the smoke condenses and the twilight mountain is purple. The company's team of 4 horses on the road, visit the scenery in the Chong A. The company's team of 4 horses in the road, visit the scenery in the Chong A. Pro emperor son of Cheung Chau, get the immortal's old hall. Layers of mountains, up out of the sky; flying pavilion flow Dan, down to no place. Crane Ting Teal Islet, poor island of the haunting; Gui Hall Lan Palace, that is, the body of the situation.

Pi embroidered door, overlooking the carved roofs, the mountain plains are open to its full view, Chuanze xu its horrifying vision. Luk Yan fluttering ground, the home of the bells and bells; barge ship lost in the Jin, the axis of the green bird and yellow dragon. The clouds are clearing up and the rain is clearing up, and the colors are brightening up the area. Falling sun and a semblance of flying together, the autumn water *** long sky a color. The fishing boat sang the evening, sound poor Peng Li's shore; geese array shock cold, sound broken Hengyang Pu.

All of them are organized in pairs of sentences, of which "the falling sun and the lone rushes fly together, the autumn water **** long sky a color" is the ancient pairs of famous sentences. This pair of sentences is the further development of the ancient poems and poems in the pair of sentences, it has the following three characteristics: First, the pair is no longer purely as a rhetorical device, has become the main metrical requirements of the literary style. There are three characteristics of parallelism, i.e., four or six sentences, parallelism, and the use of canon, and this is one of them. The second is that the number of words in a pair has a certain regularity. Mainly "four or six" sentence form and its variations. Mainly: four-word couplets, six-word couplets, eight-word couplets, cross couplets, twelve-word couplets. Thirdly, the couplets have been quite skillful, but there are many heavy words ("of, and" and so on), and the sound of the couplets is not fully mature.

Rhythmic Couple Stage

Rhythmic Couple, the couplets in metered poems. This form of poetry, also known as proximity poetry, was officially formed in the Tang Dynasty. However, its origins lie in the Wei and Jin dynasties. During the Cao Wei Dynasty, Li Deng made ten volumes of Sound Classes, and Lu Jing made five volumes of Rhyme Collections, separating the clear and turbid tones, as well as the gong, shang, jiao, zheng, and yin tones. In addition, Sun Yan made Er Ya Yinyi, which used antiphonal notation, and he was the founder of antiphonal notation. Generally speaking, the five- or seven-line poems are eight lines in a chapter, and the middle two couplets, known as the jaw and neck couplets, have to be opposite each other in terms of style, level, and meaning. This is the standard couplet.

The Du Fu "ascent" can be seen:

The wind and sky high apes whistling sad, islet clear sand white birds fly back.

The falling trees are under the Xiao Xiao next, the Yangtze River is rolling.

This is the first time I've ever been to a place where I've been a guest, and I've been on the stage alone for a hundred years.

This is the first time I've ever seen a woman in the world with a hard time, and I've never seen a woman with a hard time, and I've never seen a woman with a hard time.

The poem's jaw and neck couplet, "The boundless fallen trees are under the Xiao Xiao, the endless Yangtze River rolls on." "Miles of sadness in autumn often as a guest, a hundred years of sickness alone on the stage," the battle is extremely stable. It is far better than the parallelism of parallelism in ekphrasis. In addition to the five or seven lines of poetry, Tang poetry, there are three rhymes, six rhymes, and rows of rhymes, the middle lines are also the battle.

There are also three characteristics of the rhyming couplets: first, the couplets are used as a metrical requirement of the style; second, the number of words is transformed from the even number of couplets to the odd number of couplets, and finally fixed to five or seven words; third, the couplets are precise and stable, and the sound of the couplets has matured.