Abstract
Poetics emerges from poetry, whose very raison d’être lies in language itself. Chinese poetics arose from the Book of Songs and its hermeneutical tradition. Its origins may be traced further back to the system of omens and associative correlations embedded in divinatory practices and the hexagram and line statements of the Book of Changes. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates philology, the philosophy of language, semiotic theory, psychoanalysis, poetic theory, and post-structuralist literary theory, this article argues that traditional Chinese poetics evolved from divinatory omens and from the poetic techniques of bi-xing (inspired metaphor) and eventually giving rise to the tripartite mode of poetic expression known as fu-bi-xing (lit. exposition, comparison, and inspiration). Within this structure, bi and xing originated in the hexagram and line statements of the Book of Changes, were transmitted through the poetic practice of the Book of Songs, and ultimately received systematic articulation in the hermeneutics of Book of Songs developed by Confucian scholars of the Han dynasty. This process laid the earliest conceptual cornerstone for Chinese poetics. Through an analysis of the omens in early archaic texts, the hexagram and line statements of the Book of Changes, and the symbolic imagery and bi-xing modes of representation in the Book of Songs, this article arrives at the following conclusion: Chinese poetics originated from the correlative imagination embedded in the hexagram statements of the Book of Changes and from the system of symbolic representation developed in the Book of Songs. Its conceptual foundation is correlative thinking, and its primary representational technique is fu-bi-xing. In the aesthetic transformation from hexagram statements to poetic imagery in the Book of Songs, symbolic representation was converted into a semiotic process of signification, eventually evolving into a poetic theory marked by distinctive Chinese characteristics and resonant with certain postmodern aesthetic features.
Keywords
Chinese poetics, Book of Changes, Book of Songs, divination, fu-bi-xing, correlative thinking
First Page
1
Last Page
11
Recommended Citation
Gu, Mingdong. 2026. "The Origins of Chinese Poetics and Its Conceptual Cornerstone." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 46, (1): pp.1-11. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol46/iss1/1
