Reasearch paper on a poet, a genre, atopic or a special aesthetic problem. Chinese Classical Poetry - Essay Example

Most of the poetry was often sung in teahouses as well as more theatrical venues and eventually evolved into longer stories and sagas and musical histories of the past. Refined for almost three hundred years this period produced near fifty-thousand poems and gave birth to almost three thousand poets. (Owen 21-32) It was also a time of blending philosophical schools of thought. Taoism and Confucianism were of purely Chinese origin and have had deep cultural impact on their society. Buddhism, however, was imported from India and adapted well to the previous two philosophies.

All being reevaluated and merged during this dynasty and were often translated to fit more in line with the mores of the Tang period. .there was an entire school of Tao-te-ching interpretation, known as Twofold Mystery, that took up the dialectic of the Buddhist school known as Madhyamaka (Middle Way). Flourishing in the seventh century under the Tang, it was represented mainly by Cheng Hsuan-ying and Li Jung and represents a thinking that strives for a balance between being and nonbeing, the via positiva and the via negativa in approaching the Tao, rejecting each in turn because any form of comprehension in relation to the ultimate truth of the Tao can only be a means, never an end.

(Kohn and Lafargue 134) The following is an example of the subtle change to the original text of the Tao Te Ching is an illustration of this influence. Li Yuehs, a Tang commentator on the Tao Te Ching, created the following changes to the traditional text and this is certainly an example of idiosyncratic personal translation. The last lines of chapter 25 usually read: The difference embodies many of the evolutions to the poetry of the age, showing not so much an order of things but a state of being.

Early influences in the Tang dynasty reflect the more natural Taoist bent as there was