(Source: IC Photo)
Xiangren Peng II/Wen
In the minds of many people, Tao Yuanming is an eternal and unchanging existence, the representative of China's most famous reclusive poet. But Through "Dust Records", Tian Xiaofei let us see a more complex, more contradictory, and more energetic Tao Yuanming.
This may be a more real Tao Yuanming.
One
According to Tian Xiaofei's own account, the book "Dust Records" came from the spring of 2000, when she taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at Cornell University. While preparing for a graduate class, she reread Tao Yuanming's poems. The version she used was the Tao Yuanming Collection edited and proofread by the Shandong scholar Lu Qinli. She commented on the book, "The advantage of this edition is that it contains a large number of different texts. In general, these foreign texts have not received much attention from scholars throughout the ages. ”
Tian Xiaofei's words also stimulated me greatly. For several years, I read Tao Yuanming in a different version than Tian Xiaofei's: Yuan Xingpei's Notes on Tao Yuanming's Collected Notes, published by zhonghua bookstores. This book also contains different articles about Tao Yuanming throughout the ages. I'm ashamed that I didn't think they were important at the time.
But Tian Xiaofei noticed. In the introduction to The Book of Dust, she recalls the past: "While reading, I happened to notice that on more than one occasion, taking a different text instead of a generally accepted text would not only change the meaning of the entire verse, but even the whole psalm completely different. The question arises: since the original, which the author himself has edited, is it that prompts an editor to choose one text and reject another? In the five or six hundred years from the Jin Dynasty to the Song Dynasty, how many different texts were lost due to the inadvertent neglect and intentional exclusion of scribes and editors? And what does it mean to start asking and thinking about these questions? ”
It is with such doubts that Tian Xiaofei began to peel back like a detective, constantly searching, screening, and investigating in the labyrinth created by history and words, trying to discover the truth. She finally found that beneath the smooth and stable surface of the text, a chaotic, fluid world was in motion. This is the world of manuscript culture. This world, the average reader, has no chance of knowing, because it has left only a few traces in the few surviving early texts, and even these traces are often ruthlessly deleted by editors.
This discovery is so important that many readers, including this author, ignore it. Today, it is being noticed by more and more scholars. Another book, "Poetry from the Tang Dynasty: Tang Dynasty Poetry and Its Tangible World" (published in China last year), also presents a similar and lesser-known world to The Dust Records: here every poem becomes "unique" because of its differences between its scribes and readers, and it is from this complex culture of copying that poetry comes to us step by step.
"Dust A Few"
Tian Xiaofei
Publisher: Zhonghua Bookstore
August 2007
Two
Returning to "Dust Records", Tian Xiaofei used sufficient evidence to prove that there are a large number of errors in the world of manuscripts. After the author finished the work, he lost control of the original work. In the process of circulation, it is constantly rewritten, interpreted, and even some become unrecognizable.
Taking Tao Yuanming's most widely circulated sentence "Picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, leisurely seeing nanshan" as an example, Tian Xiaofei found that the earliest surviving manuscript of the "Anthology of Literature" and the early Tang Dynasty book "Art and Literature Cluster" were written as "leisurely looking at the South Mountain" instead of "seeing". Moreover, all kinds of indications show that before Su Shi proposed that "hope" was the original text, there was no Tao Yuanming's collection that was "seeing" and not "looking".
So, is Su Shi deliberately deceiving the public and does not want to give the reader a real Tao Yuanming? The answer is precisely no. Tian Xiaofei said that all of Su Shi's efforts were to find a real Tao Yuanming, but he also fell into a paradox: Su Shi felt that he was Tao Yuanming's cross-generation confidant and knew Tao Yuanming best; but the contradiction was that Su Shi's understanding of Tao Yuanming could only come from those false manuscripts, and if he wanted to return to Tao Yuanming's "original appearance", he had to find understanding and answers from the imperfect Tao Yuanming's manuscript.
Therefore, we do not know whether Su Shi is looking for a real Tao Yuanming or an ideal Tao Yuanming in his mind.
Is there no other circumstantial evidence other than poetry? In the second chapter of the book, Tian Xiaofei cites four different biographies of Tao Yuanming, the most authoritative in history, and through analysis and comparison, we are surprised to find that Tao Yuanming is a vague image, his original fixed appearance, and he is a little unstable in reality.
Why is that?
First, Tao Yuanming was not famous in his time, and his fame was after the Tang and Song dynasties. Therefore, Tao Yuanming's life deeds have been rarely circulated. Second, even in Tao Yuanming's four different biographies, the main material comes from Tao Yuanming's own article "The Biography of Mr. Wuliu". But whether this is Tao Yuanming's real self, there is still controversy in the academic circles. As a result, in all kinds of intentional or unintentional packaging and publicity, Tao Yuanming has become a superb, extraordinary, flat image.
In "Dust Records", I think the most interesting is the sixth chapter: Shi Shu Shi Zhen. Tian Xiaofei deliberately turned the reader's attention to a stone called "Drunken Stone" in Lushan Mountain, Jiangxi Province. It is said that Tao Yuanming was drunk once and once lay on it. This fictitious thing was gradually interpreted into a real thing: some people found the drunken stone, some people found that the drunken stone was more than one piece, some people inscribed poems on it, and some people solemnly wrote it in the "Lushan Zhi" and various anthologies.
Thus, the drunken stone becomes a fable: even a physical object as strong and tactile as a stone can become full of errors in the long river of history, deformed and unfathomable.
And this is also what Tian Xiaofei wants to remind readers.
Although Tao Yuanming did not know that a drunken stone produced so many stories because of himself, this impermanence was familiar to him. He experienced all kinds of impermanences, and wrote about them in poetry. Therefore, we can see impermanence in Tao Yuanming's poetry, and we can also see the transcendence of impermanence.
In this regard, if anyone wants to ask, today's we are far away from the era of manuscripts, will we repeat similar situations? Tian Xiaofei's answer was yes. Her rationale: "Although internet culture lacks physical substance, it has fundamental similarities with manuscript culture: they are all multidimensional, both lack center, lack stability, and lack authority." This change is disturbing. But it can also bring unprecedented freedom to civilization. Whether it is the culture of manuscripts or the culture of the Internet, it is actually a fable of the human situation. ”
Tian Xiaofei saw the problems with Internet culture and manuscript culture, but did not deny their advantages and strengths. This is the proper attitude of a rigorous scholar.
In "A Few Records of Dust", we see a sophisticated Tao Yuanming, a naïve Tao Yuanming, a contradictory Tao Yuanming, and a simple Tao Yuanming. But is this the real Tao Yuanming?
It should be mentioned that in this book, Tian Xiaofei made many wonderful analyses of Tao Yuanming's poetic texts. However, for some analysis, the author still has reservations. Is Tao Yuanming really like what Tian Xiaofei said? Not necessarily. A real Tao Yuanming is still on the way to find, "Dust Records" is not the end, nor is it the end. But it doesn't matter, that doesn't get in the way of the book's charm.
Tian Xiaofei once explained why she named the book "Dust Records". This is a quote from the Famous Northern Song Dynasty courtier, scholar and bibliophile Song Shuo, "School books are like dust, swirling and swirling." ”
On top of the dust table, on the ash-covered table, scholars kept wiping the dust that covered it, wanting to see the truth. And more dust is generating and falling. But the scholar did not give up, wiping was his mission, his job.