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The earliest classic texts were compendia of traditional knowledge and wisdom. R example, the very early Shu (writings) included details of a war dance for King Wu of the Chou over the last emperor of the Shang Dynasty, as well as legal precedents, histories and poetry. The Annals compiled during the times of various kings date back to about the C9th BCE and contain folk wisdom, the calendar and agricultural and mythic material among other things. These texts were among those that scholars were expected to master, completely by rote in many cases since language use changed so much and varied so greatly over the extent of China that many texts were impossible for the scholars to understand. They were also required to know and to understand the works of the philosophers, particularly Confucius (see: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/east... whose ideas were considered central to the stability of Chinese society and families. Additional subject areas included metaphysics and aesthetics. Demonstration of the appreciation of these subjects could be managed by writing poetry involving themes involved in those texts. Such poetry showed both a lively and focused imagination and also ability with calligraphy. Right up until the twentieth century, scholars could earn a modest income by drawing special characters for the illiterate who wanted them to bring luck to their homes and businesses, among other reasons. The spread of Buddhism into China added a new layer of learning for scholars, which was at once both an opportunity to learn new ideas and a threat to be caught out as ignorant or out of touch with the particular religious beliefs of individual nobles or mandarins. The amount of Buddhist literature available was huge, with texts in India amounting to thousands of pages. Each of these pages of text had to be translated individually and then transcribed with Chinese characters that were able to approximate both the meaning and the sound of its equivalent. Copying these texts was also a laborious and time-consuming task. This acted to limit the opportunities for people to pass the imperial examinations because of the costs involved in gaining access to the necessary texts. However, this changed from the end of the C10th CE, when the printing press was invented. Although the process was still difficult to manipulate, in part because of the many hundreds of characters that had to be used, it was still possible for one skilled worker to produce one thousand pages of accurate text per day. For the first time, reading became a possibility for a wide range of people who would never have been able to hold a book before. Scholarship benefited and continues to be valued until the present day. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Scholars in East Asian History is owned by John Walsh. Permission to republish Scholars in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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