ABSTRACT
On first looking into The Book of Songs (Shijing [Shih ching]), the Western reader might find it somewhat difficult to discover the grounds for the revered position it occupied in traditional China. To be sure, its very antiquity—it seems to have taken something close to its present form by the sixth century b.c.e.—would have assured it no small measure of respect, but the 305 poems in the collection do not offer any other immediately apparent reasons for their designation as a literal canon (jing [ching]) during the second century b.c.e. Those reasons exist, of course, but they cannot be located solely within the text itself. The Book of Songs thus illustrates a fundamental principle taken for granted by all traditional Chinese readers: that no literary text has meaning on its own but must rather be understood within its context, its background and sources—personal, social, political, and textual—its audience and reception, and its interpretive tradition. Indeed, the collection not only provides the first example of this principle, it establishes the precedent for the entire poetic tradition.
