In 960 AD, the "Chenqiao Mutiny", Zhao Kuangyin "yellow robe", easily seized the power of Emperor Zhou Gong and established the Song Dynasty. Similar to the previous Sui seizure of power in 581 and the unification of the whole country in 589, the Song unified the whole country in 979.
(Song Taizu Chen Qiao mutiny, yellow robe)
The reason why we emphasize Zhao Kuangyin's method of seizing power is because it had a profound impact on the politics, economy, and culture of the Song Dynasty. Almost by the end of the Song Dynasty, the basic national policy of the Song Dynasty was to emphasize civil affairs over military force, and to strengthen civilian rule and reform the imperial examination system, so as to make feudal centralization more stable. Mr. Cao Baolin's words for the Song Dynasty regime were: "In terms of territory and national prestige, it is undoubtedly the most depressing in history."
(Map of the Song, Liao, and Western Xia Territories)
Indeed, whether it was the Liao and Western Xia in front, or the Jin and Mongol in the future, the Song rulers could not win the war, and they had no choice but to swallow their anger, and in 1279, Lu Xiufu lost the emperor and threw himself into the sea, and the rule of the Song Dynasty for more than 300 years was finally ended by powerful force.
(Lu Xiufu lost the emperor and threw himself into the sea)
The cultural development trend of the Song Dynasty is basically corresponding to its weak and poor national strength, although the culture of the Song Dynasty has some characteristics of its own development, and cultural giants have emerged in endlessly, the eight masters of ancient literature in the Tang and Song dynasties, except for Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, the remaining six are all Song Dynasty people, but in terms of the overall pattern and bearing, it is difficult to compare with the grandeur of the strong Tang Dynasty.
The "congenital insufficiency" of Song Dynasty calligraphy
Calligraphy, as an art, has its own unique laws of development. Calligraphy attaches more importance to the inheritance of brushwork and the reference of art forms, while the calligraphy of the Song Dynasty faced serious congenital deficiencies at the starting point:
First, there is a shortage of teachers. Calligraphy relied on the "Taoism" passed down from teacher to student, and after the war of the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, the Central Plains culture was destroyed once in a few years, which made the "Taoism" cut off, and people were busy with survival and had no time to take care of calligraphy learning, and those who had the intention to study calligraphy had nowhere to seek teachers.
In the Five Dynasties, there was a Yang Ning style with a pretended whole body, Su Shi felt strange, he said: "In the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, the articles were despicable, and the calligraphy and painting followed. Yang Gongning's pen is male, often on par with Yan Liu, and it is even strange!"
In fact, we know that Yang Ningshi was born in the late Tang Dynasty, although he feinted to survive in the five dynasties, he still obtained a good calligraphy education due to family reasons, and he actually belongs to the remnants of calligraphy in the Tang Dynasty. In fact, the characters written by the five generations of martial artists were unattainable in the eyes of the Song people.
Second, the excellent calligraphy heritage was destroyed by the military disaster, and then monopolized by the inner government. The Tang people went to the Wei and Jin dynasties not far away, and there were still many famous deeds left, so Tang Taizong had the conditions to respect the king alone. However, after five generations of catastrophe, most of the famous deeds have been scattered, and only the relatively calm Ten Kingdoms regime still retains some, but even so, in the end, they were all received as trophies for the Song royal family. Although Emperor Taizong of the Song Dynasty later ordered the "Chunhua Pavilion Post" to be engraved, only the ministers of the second government could be given a set at the beginning, so its role in promoting the revival of calligraphy was very limited.
The consequences of the monopoly of calligraphy heritage have deprived truly talented calligraphers of the opportunity to learn from the past and open up the present. Take Mi Fu as an example, he was 38 years old in Li Wei's house to see Jin Xian fourteen posts, want to be easy, had to return to simulate a few glyphs, talk about masturbation, to 51 years old, he used the water to coerce the disgraceful hand to get the fourteen posts of the most heartbroken "August 5 post"; in addition, he fought with the clan for Wang Xizhi's "Wang Luo", at the expense of spending "150,000 money".
(Playful Mi Fu)
It can be seen that the calligraphy of the Song Dynasty has to make some progress, and the energy and material resources paid by the calligraphers are several times more than that of the previous generations.
3. Social atmosphere, policies and decrees are not conducive to the development of calligraphy. In the Tang Dynasty, Tang Taizong, as the king of ten thousand vehicles, learned calligraphy from Yu Shinan, a disciple of Sun Zhiyong, the seventh generation of Wang Xizhi, and wrote a commentary on the "Book of Jin: The Biography of Wang Xi", thus laying the unshakable foundation of a dynasty that respected the king alone. In the Tang Dynasty, "calligraphy" was one of the criteria for the selection of outstanding talents, and there was also calligraphy, and people could even directly use books to get officials and go to the official career.
In the Song Dynasty, the calligraphy requirements for scholars in the imperial examination and the performance appraisal of officials no longer existed, and the government and the opposition no longer used calligraphy to prevail, which inevitably made the soil for the production of great calligraphers barren. However, the brush was still in use, so the opportunistic scholars tried to imitate their writing in order to win the favor of the world's leading scholars. This extremely short-sighted pragmatism led to the phenomenon of "trending and expensive books" unique to the Song Dynasty.
The "Shangyi" style of writing in the Song Dynasty and the influence of Zen Buddhism
If you are poor, you will think about change, and it is Ouyang Xiu who really speaks out for the shortcomings that have lasted for more than a hundred years. In the process of compiling the "Collection of Ancient Records", he not only improved his ability to appreciate it, but also realized that the gap between the contemporary and the ancients had reached the point where it could not be taken lightly. Ouyang Xiu, together with Cai Xiang, who was already at the peak of calligraphy at that time, made an indelible contribution to promoting the emergence of calligraphy in the Song Dynasty.
(Su Huang Mi Cai in Kaifeng Han Garden)
The practical efforts of Su Shi, Huang Tingjian and Mi Fu marked the revival of calligraphy in the Song Dynasty. Through the trade-off of knowing themselves and knowing their opponents, they broke through the barriers of the Tang people and broke a new path of "Shangyi", and the ideological weapon that helped them achieve their goals was Zen Buddhism.
Or we can understand it this way: because of the shortage of teachers, and the addition of the Fa Ti is almost missing, the confusion of the Song calligraphers is actually "lawless", because there is no "law" to law, so they have to "law", and then "Shangyi"!
Zen Buddhism, as a sect of Buddhism, originated in the middle of the Tang Dynasty and developed into the Song Dynasty, where it became the religion of scholars. The reason is simple, first, because the rulers of the Song Dynasty advocated the simultaneous development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism out of political needs, and Zen Buddhism, which has been in the mainstream of Buddhism, has also absorbed more Confucianism and Taoism in order to establish a complete theoretical system that further adapts to society, making Zen Buddhism the best model for the integration of the three religions.
The deep national contradictions and the corruption of the bureaucratic system in the Song Dynasty caused overwhelming psychological pressure on the scholars, and the impermanence of wealth and the shortness of human life made them even more desperate for spiritual comfort. In Zen Buddhism, life is regarded as a dream, there is no difference between life and death, and it preaches that following fate and luck is liberation, and emphasizing that the solution of all practical problems is nothing more than self-psychological adjustment, etc., which is in line with the requirements of scholars.
It can be said that in the Song Dynasty, Zen Buddhism was a bit unlike religion, and it simply became the philosophy of life and lifestyle of the scholar class.
(Detail of Su Shi's "Huangzhou Cold Food Post")
Su Shi career frustration, in Huangzhou keen to participate in Zen, and Buddha Yin, Shen Xiao and other Zen masters frequent exchanges, the thinking has undergone great changes; Mi Fu lost his son in his later years, the spirit suffered a great blow, Fang Shen felt that "the illusion is like this, not to Zen Yue, how to send".
Since Zen Buddhism has so influenced the lives of the literati, its thoughts will inevitably have an impact on the literati's view of literature and art, and the "Shangyi" calligraphy theory represented by Su Shi pursues "the law of the law" and "the work of non-work", advocates "putting the pen into a play" and "being natural", and still implements the concepts of Zen Buddhism such as "pointing directly to the heart", "seeing nature to become a Buddha", and "peace is the way". Zen Buddhism's courage to "scold the ancestors", contempt for authority and not to be bound by the law inspired Su Shi and others to dare to criticize the previous generations, especially the courage of Tang calligraphy.
The writings of the Song people often carry the "edge" of Zen to inspire people to "have an epiphany", and sometimes they are inevitably involved in a casual way, giving people the feeling of not being able to grasp the essentials, obviously branded with Zen quotations and "public cases".
In short, the calligraphy of the Song Dynasty, both in theory and practice, distanced itself from the Tang Dynasty. Compared with the mainstream of the Tang people's "Shangfa", the Song people paid more attention to the expression of interest and the catharsis of personal feelings, and what they wanted to write or how they wrote showed a kind of freedom of willfulness, so they were closer to the essence of art.
The four Song families, except for Cai Xiang, the other three are good at grass, and this style of writing also provides a place for the "Shangyi" style of calligraphy.
(Mi Fu "Linyi envoy post")
In the Southern Song Dynasty, although Lu You, Fan Chengda, Zhu Xi, and Zhang Xiaoxiang had their own attainments, their talents could not be compared with those of their predecessors. One is that the social conditions do not allow it (the partial security regime, how can it have the energy to vigorously develop in art), and the other is the influence of ideological conditions, because after the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhu Xi's "science" became the mainstream of social thought.
The "Shangyi" calligraphy style pays attention to the unrestrained creative mentality, and believes that the realm of "the heart does not know the hand, the hand does not know the pen" is the most worthy of Jiashang, and only in this way can it be possible to produce masterpieces that are not expected to work and work by themselves. However, physicists do not recognize this kind of "emptiness", they emphasize that the mind is the reason, and the text is the Tao, so the different creative mentality will inevitably lead to the difference in artistic effect.
Zhu Xi would rather affirm Cai Xiang in its entirety than let go of the derogatory rebuke of Su, Huang, and Mi from time to time, because their calligraphy is too "unreasonable".
As a result, the Southern Song Dynasty book scene was basically lackluster.
"Chunhua Pavilion Post" and the Song Dynasty Book Theory
One of the contributions of the Song Dynasty to the history of calligraphy is the prevalence and circulation of inscriptions.
In the third year of Chunhua (922), Emperor Taizong of the Song Dynasty went out of the ink blots of the past dynasties in the inner house, and ordered the king of Hanlin to write ten volumes, which were copied on the jujube wood board, and were called "Fa Ti" at the time, and later generations were also called "Ge Ti" or "Chunhua Ge Ti".
Although the "Chunhua Pavilion Post" caused many errors due to the lack of knowledge of the king's book (Mr. Qigong believes that the sin is not in him, because the copy used in the "Chunhua Pavilion Post" is the Southern Tang Dynasty Shengyuan Edition), and because of the distortion of the jujube wood copy, but after all, it has the merit of incarnating hundreds of thousands of calligraphy masterpieces, especially the works of the two kings (you must know that in that era, there was no photocopying and photocopying technology).
（淳化阁王羲之《八日帖》）
After "Chunhua Pavilion Post", public and private carving became fashionable. Since then, the public and private engravings are roughly as follows:
(Song Dynasty "Chunhua Pavilion Post" after the public and private carvings)
In short, the engraving of the Song Dynasty has become a kind of atmosphere, opening the precursor of "post learning" in later generations.
The Song Dynasty books discuss calligraphy-related remarks, which are mainly divided into three categories:
The first is the unique literary style that began to appear in the Song Dynasty—inscriptions—in which these contents are short and incisive, and often spontaneous with feelings, although they cannot be called systematic calligraphy, but there is no lack of flashes of wisdom and light. Later generations collected the supply lines into a book, the famous ones are: "61 Inscription" (Ouyang Xiu), "Dongpo Inscription" (Su Shi), "Valley Inscription" (Huang Tingjian), "Haiyue Famous Words" (Mi Fu), "Guxi Inscription" (Li Zhiyi), "Guangchuan Inscription" (Dong Kui), "Han Mo Zhi" (Zhao Gou), "Hui'an Inscription (Zhu Xi)" and so on.
The second type is a more systematic calligraphy work. There are mainly Zhu Changwen's "Continuation of the Book", Mi Fu's "Book History", Huang Bosi's "Dongguan Yu Theory", Jiang Kui's "Continuation of the Book", Chen Wei's "Negative Xuanye Lu", etc.;
The third type is bibliographic books related to collections. The famous ones are Ouyang Xiu's "Ancient Records", Mi Fu's "Baozhang to be Visited", Zhao Mingcheng's "Jinshi Records", Hou Ke's "Bao Zhen Zhai Law Book Praise" and so on.
([Follow the pudding calligraphy history] No. 129, some pictures come from the Internet, the copyright belongs to the original copyright owner)