Is there anything in the mountains? Is there anything or nothing?

Liu Rachel said in Wenxin diaolong: “The thought of writing is also far away from God. Therefore, when one contemplates in silence, one’s mind is bound for a thousand years; when one is moved in silence, one’s vision is bound for ten thousand miles. This means that literary conception can transcend time and space without any constraint. Wang Fuzhi in the “Jiang Zhai poetry” pointed out: “the body of the past, the eye sees, is the iron threshold. Even if you write about great scenes, such as ‘the yin and the yang,’ ‘the sun and the universe floating day and night,’ you will not exceed this limit. This means that the poet can see as far as he can, and the poetic pen extends as far as he can, and cannot go beyond the threshold of vision. Both of these apparently opposing statements have had many supporters, and thus distance in poetry has become the focus of controversy and controversy.

According to Wang Deuchen of the Song dynasty, “Bai Fu went from Jiujiang to Zhongzhou, crossing the river to Jiangxia. He said: “White flowers and waves splashed at Toutao Temple, red leaves caged in the parrot island. The sentence is beautiful, but Toutuo Temple in the east of the county at the top, west of the Yangtze River, the farthest, although the wind and waves are bad, how from and of. “‘Bai Fu’ refers to the poet Bai Juyi. In his later years, Bai Juyi was the young master of the crown prince, so he was often referred to as “Bai Fu”. Although Bai Juyi was a great poet, Wang Deochen disagreed with his poem “splash of white flowers at Toutao Temple, red leaves caged in parrot island”. The reason was that Toutuo Temple was at the top of the city east, far away from the Yangtze River, and no storm would splash the waves on the river to Toutuo Temple. Although some people told him that this was an exaggeration, and that it was the same thinking as the so-called “the extreme is greater than the sky” in the Book of Poetry, he still believed that poetry should stick to the principle of The “transcript” principle, excluding “white flower splash”. In the book, Ouyang Xiu said that Ouyang Xiu “sent Liu Gong’s father Shou Wei Yang to make a long and short sentence,” which is not true.

Ouyang Xiu, Yong Shu, No. Drunken Weng, Yan You Yi, in the Art Court Feminine, said that Ouyang Xiu “sent Liu Gong’s father to Shou Wei Yang to make a long and short sentence. In the context of ‘the mountains of the left side of the river’, Ping Shan Hall is very close to the mountains of the left side of the river, or in the case of Uncle Yong’s short-sightedness, it is said that ‘the mountains are in the middle of nowhere’. Because the distance is “very close,” in some people’s view, “there is no middle in the mountains. The poem cannot be expressed in terms of “whether the mountains are there or not”. The “Yong Shu short-sighted” and so on, can be said to be Ouyang Xiu’s cool comment. In response to this point of view, Yan Youyi, like a roundabout way, pointed out that “the mountains and colors are there or not, non-smoke and rain can not be also”. According to modern scholar Shen Yucheng’s testimony, the Ping Shan Hall in Yangzhou, “the distance from the Jin, Jiao, Beigu mountains, not ‘very close’, about Thirty miles, the rain and smoke started falling, and when I looked into the distance from the hall, I could see whether the mountains were there or not”. It can be seen that because of the problem of distance, “whether the mountains are in color or not” became the focus of the game. In fact, Wang Wei had already written the phrase “the river flows beyond the heavens and the earth, and the mountains are there or not”, and Ouyang Xiu’s phrase is not only improvised, but also dictionary-like. It is no wonder that “Dongpo laughed at this, and gave the ‘Fuya Pavilion’ as a way of saying it: ‘I long remember the hall of the flat mountain, interjection pillowing the smoke and rain of the south of the Yangtze River, and there is no lonely hong, and I recognize the words of the drunkard, and the mountain color. There is no middle.’ “

Yang Shen of the Ming Dynasty commented on Du Mu’s poem “Spring in the South of the Yangtze River” in his poem “Poems of the Shengan”: “Who can hear the warbler crowing for a thousand miles? A thousand miles of green and red, who can see it? If we make ten li, then the scenery of the warbler crying, the village walls, buildings, monasteries, and wine flags are all in there. “Yang Shen believes that Du Mu’s poetry covers the “thousand miles” The range is beyond human hearing and eyesight, so it is assumed that Du Mu’s poem was originally “the cry of a warbler from ten miles away,” but now it is “the cry of a warbler from ten miles away”. A thousand miles of warblers cry,” is “the common man adds a stroke. “It was caused by the fact that, with great contempt, he said, “The common man cannot heal. “

He Wenhuan disagreed with Yang Shen’s statement, and said in his “Poems of the Past Dynasties”: “Even if you make ten miles, you may not be able to hear or see everything. The title cloud “Jiangnan Spring”, the south of the Yangtze River, a thousand miles wide, a thousand miles, the warbler crowed and green reflection of the water village and mountain Guo, nowhere without wine flag, four hundred and eighty temples, buildings and more in the rain also. The meaning of this poem is so broad that it cannot be referred to one place in particular, so it is always called “Jiangnan Spring”. The disagreement between He Wenhuan and Yang Shen is not only about the understanding of the poem’s main idea, but also about the distance the poem covers and the scope it covers.

There is a saying that distance creates beauty, but the above poems show that distance is enough to create controversy. If we go back to the roots of these controversies, we can see that the reason for them lies in the criterion of evaluating poetry. Qian Zhongshu, in his preface to Selected Notes on Poems of the Song Dynasty, says that the evidence can only conclude that “it is so,” while literature and art can conceive of it. “Of course” and measuring its “so what? It is not a question of whether or not a poem is a good idea. When poetry is measured by the ruler of evidence, it is inevitable to put a square peg in a round hole, and controversy is inevitable.

As a matter of fact, “what you have experienced and what you have seen are iron gates”, which means that literature originates from actual life, but it does not mean that literature cannot be written beyond time and space. Although literature comes from life, literature is after all a dynamic reflection of life, and can be seen for miles and thought of beyond the sky. And it is precisely the short-sightedness of poetry critics that makes the distance involved in poetry a controversial topic.