6. Discusión
6.1. Hallazgos del estudio
6.1.1. Medición del DVNO y estructura
Traditionalists break into tombs using the Poems and Ceremony.
The chief Traditionalist deigned to convey these words，“It beginneth to grow light in the east. How’s it going?”
The subordinate Traditionalist responded, “I haven’t got the skirt and jacket off yet, but there’s a pearl in his mouth.”
The high Traditionalist: “Verily it is even as the Poems say:
Green, green groweth grain upon the slopes of the mound.
The man ungenerous alive,
in death his mouth will hold no pearl.
I’ll grab the whiskers and pull down on the beard； you take a metal bar, break through his cheeks，and slowly part his jaws, but don’t damage the pearl in his mouth.”
The other side of "application" is interpretation, and traditional Chinese literary in
terpretation grew out of interpretation of the Classic o f Poetry, which in turn grew out of a larger sense of how language worked. In the following passage, Mencius speaks as a moralist, but note the assumptions about how language is understood;
it is not necessarily what a speaker or writer intends to say, but what he cannot help revealing through his words. Gong-sun Chou is questioning the great Traditionalist (Confucian) philosopher Mencius on what he considers to be his most important skills.
Mencius II A, 2.xi, xvii
Go n g-sunC hou： What, sir, are your strongest points?
Mencius: I understand language and have mastered the fostering of that boundless and surging vital force.
Gong-sun C h o u
：
W h a t do you mean by “understanding language”？
M encius
：
When someone’s words are one-sided, I understand how his mind is clouded When someone’s words are loose and extravagant, I understand the pitfalls into which that person has fallen. When someone’s words are warped, I understand wherein the person has strayed. When someone’s words are evasive, I understand how the person has been pushed to his limit.
In Mencius, we also find the earliest examples of dispute over the interpretation of the Poems. In the following passage, a thorny ethical problem is posed: When Sage- King Yao abdicated the throne to Sage-King Shun, was Yao then Shun's subject? And furthermore, was Shun's own father then Shun's subject (an unthinkable situation in which the political and family hierarchies are at odds)? Hereditary monarchy en
sured that such a situation would never arise; but among the Sage-Kings of earliest antiquity, a ruler would voluntarily cede the throne to a worthy younger man. Men
cius has made an exception to the king's dominion in these cases, but Xian-qiu Meng cites the Classic of Poetry as an authority to prove that there are no exceptions. Men
cius attacks Xian-qiu Meng's interpretation (but does not question the authority of the ifllassic of Poetry to decide such issues). The poem in question, Mencius says, arises from a particular situation in which an officer is caught between conflicting claims of duty to the king and duty to his parents. The "king's business" is the duty of all, but he feels as if he alone were charged with completing it However ques
tionable the particular interpretation may be, the way in which Mencius makes it is significant. The universal meaning of the Classic o f Poetry can only be discovered through the particular circumstances of an individual poem.
Mencius V A, 4.ii
、Xian-qiu Meng said，“I have accepted your declaration that the Sage-King Shun did not consider Yao [who abdicated the throne in favor of Shun] to be his subject. Yet there is a poem in the Classic o f Poetry:
Of all that is under Heaven, No place is not the king’s land；
And to the farthest shores of all the land， No man is not the king’s subject.
I would like to ask how it could be, when Shun became Emperor, that his father, the Blind Old M an，would not be considered his subject?”
61
Mencius replied, “The poem is not talking about that. Rather，the poem concerns the inability to care for one’s parents when laboring in the king’s business. It says, ‘Everything is the king’s business [and should be a re
sponsibility shared by all], yet I alone labor here virtuously.，In explaining the Poems of the Classic of Poetry, one must not permit the literary pat
terning to adversely affect the understanding of the statement; and one must not permit our understanding of the statement to adversely affect our un
derstanding of what was on the writer’s mind. We use our understanding to trace it back to what was in the writer’s mind—this is how to grasp it.”
Mencius' concept of understanding the Poems is not a grasp of the "meaning" in an abstract sense, but rather a knowledge of what was in the mind of the writer in a particular situation. Literary understanding was a form of personal understanding, which included ethical and conceptual issues, but went beyond them. Reading might thus offer a community of friends that could extend beyond one's local re
gion and time. In the following passage, I have translated the term shi as ^gentle- man〃； originally the shi were the knightly class who by Mencius' time had become the educated gentry of the Warring States.
Mencius V B, 8.ii
Mencius said to Wan-zhang, “A good gentleman in one small community will befriend the other good gentlemen of that community. 丁he good gen
tleman of a single domain will befriend the other good gentlemen of that domain. The good gentleman of the whole world will befriend the other good gentlemen of the whole world. But if befriending the good gentleman of the whole world is not enough, then one may go on further to consider the an
cients. Yet is it acceptable to recite their poems and read their books, yet not know what kind of persons they were? Therefore one considers the age in which they lived. This is ‘going on further to make friends.，”
The following passage from the Classic of Documents is not from the oldest sections of that work, which date back to the early first millennium. The section of the Clas
sic o f Documents from which this statement is taken probably dates from the period of The Springs and Autumns ofLu or from the Warring States; but because, up until the modern period, it was believed to have been from the original Classic, it carried immense authority and was accepted as the canonical definition of poetry. This de
finition is pseudo-etymological, based o n splitting th e character fo r "poetry," s h i 詩, into its two components. The first of these is yan 言，to "speak" or "articulate." The second element was erroneously interpreted as zhi 志，"what is on the mind intently,"
later often with the political sense of "aims" or "ambitions. The second definition takes the word yong 詠，a word for "song〃 or "singing," and divides it into yan 言, here translated as "language, and yong 永• to "prolong. Although this primarily refers to drawing out the syllables in singing, Confucian interpreters expanded the interpretation to a broader sense of extension, in which poetry, as repeatable words, could carry discourse to far places and future times.