Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Odes of the Temple&Altar, Praise-Odes Of Lu & Sacrificial Odes Of Shang

[x_los]

LAST WEEK OF SHI JING!!

Get your comments in on what we do next here, and I'll put up the poll on Saturday!

* I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.

Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.

* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo. 

* Remember you can also look at How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context.

* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.

* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.

Comments

商頌 - Sacrificial Odes Of Shang: 303. 玄鳥 - Xuan Niao

[x_los]

天命玄鳥、降而生商、宅殷土芒芒。
古帝命武湯、正域彼四方。
方命厥后、奄有九有。
商之先后、受命不殆、在武丁孫子。
武丁孫子、武王靡不勝。
龍旂十乘、大糦是承。
邦畿千里、維民所止、肇域彼四海。
四海來假、來假祁祁、景員維河。
殷受命咸宜、百祿是何。

Heaven commissioned the swallow,
To descend and give birth to [the father of our] Shang.
[His descendants] dwelt in the land of Yin, and became great.
[Then] long ago God appointed the martial Tang,
To regulate the boundaries throughout the four quarters.
[In those] quarters he appointed the princes,
And grandly possessed the nine regions [of the kingdom].
The first sovereign of Shang,
Received the appointment without any element of instability in it,
And it is [now] held by the descendant of Wu-ding.
The descendant of Wu-ding,
Is a martial king, equal to every emergency.
Ten princes, [who came] with their dragon-emblazoned banners,
Bear the large dishes of millet.
The royal domain of a thousand li,
Is where the people rest;
But there commence the boundaries that reach to the four seas.
From the four seas they come [to out sacrifices];
They come in multitudes; -
Jing has the He for its outer border.
That Yin should have received the apppointment [of Heaven] was entirely right; -
[Its sovereign] sustains all its dignities.

Re: 商頌 - Sacrificial Odes Of Shang: 303. 玄鳥 - Xuan Niao

[x_los]

"the swallow," you think your ancestor comes from a bird? this is the first I've heard of this!

So a potted history, telling you the Role of various important families/tribes, and stressing they are culturally unified by a shared heritage, a modern state and ongoing rites that serve as a trans-historical connective tissue.

Re: 商頌 - Sacrificial Odes Of Shang: 303. 玄鳥 - Xuan Niao

[x_los]

Birds in Chinese mythology, art and life
http://www.csstoday.com/Item/5781.aspx

Birds played a prominent role in the mythology surrounding the origins of human among the ancient Chinese tribes. The legends of the Shang Dynasty (1600?-1046? BCE) associated its antecedents with a mythical bird called Xuan Niao. According to the Records of the Grand Historian, Qi, the predynastic founder of the Shang lineage, was miraculously conceived when Jian Di, one of the Emperor Ku’s wives, swallowed an egg dropped by a Xuan Niao.

Re: 商頌 - Sacrificial Odes Of Shang: 303. 玄鳥 - Xuan Niao

[superborb]

Isn't it a bit weird if you're a vassal state who descended from the previous dynasty to write all these poems praising the time when you were the ruling dynasty? Gotta be some weird dynamics there, right?