dankodes | Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Tang

* 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.

* 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.

* In case you missed it and are interested, some people on the com did a Scum Villain read-along here. Anyone with thoughts is welcome to chime in.

* PROGRESS REPORT: With this, we're through the first ten books of the Shi Jing. There will be four more weeks in Lessons from the States, because I'm combining the very short books Gui and Cao. Then we have about seven weeks in Minor Odes of the Kingdom, because the short Baihua will go in with the book before it. Then come three weeks in Greater Odes, then four in Odes of the Temple and the Altar. Then we're entirely done with Shi Jing, and can do Tang or Song or something.

**NEXT BATCH FEB 22.**

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

豈曰無衣七兮、不如子之衣、安且吉兮。

How can it be said that he is without robes?
He has those of the seven orders;
But it is better that he get those robes from you.
That will secure tranquillity and good fortune.

豈曰無衣六兮、不如子之衣、安且燠兮。

How can it be said that he is without robes?
He has those of the six orders;
But it is better that he get those robes from you.
That will secure tranquillity and permanence.

Robes here are I think a metonym for offices and honours? So this guy has a lot, but he hasn't received them at the hand of the addressee, who could confer higher honours and thus stability. Not sure why we slide to six from seven, unless we're moving to 'the first order' as an ultimate state/highest position.

Is it all the same man?

May be advice to anyone getting a significant position from someone untrustworthy ( 7 robes, 6 robes...) who will as easily remove the honour as grant it? Or expect you to besmirch the honour and abuse the position. Look behind the promotion guys.

Quite a modern problem.

Yeah, this sounds cogent to me.

Baike: There's another poem with the same first sentence in the Shijing, but the ideological content and artistic style are completely different.

There's some thought that the punctuation should be, instead of 6 char sentences, four chars, a ?, and then the last two chars, as an answer. So it's kind of question-and-answer to oneself.

Seven/six are just imaginary numbers (not for a real meaning), and the other char that changes between the stanza is so it still rhymes.

There are some ties to potential historical figures, but also plenty of alternate explanations that aren't about royalty

Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Tang

122. 無衣 - Wu Yi

Re: 122. 無衣 - Wu Yi

Re: 122. 無衣 - Wu Yi

Re: 122. 無衣 - Wu Yi

Re: 122. 無衣 - Wu Yi