Harvard-Yenching Institute

The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody Author(s): Victor H. Mair and Tsu-Lin Mei Source: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 375-470 Published by: Harvard-Yenching Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2719286 Accessed: 30/11/2010 06:30
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The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody

VICTOR H. MAIR, University of Pennsylvania
TSU-LIN MEI, Cornell University

ECENT Style poetry (chzin-t'i-shih WUM) occupied a special

position among Chinese verse forms. Emerging in the sixth century from the literary salons of the Southern dynasties, it became an obligatory part of the chin-shih examination during the
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Ludo Rocher, George Cardona, and Ernest Bender for explaining some of the niceties of Indic metrics; to James Robert Hightower and the late Roman jakobson for introducing us to the Bunky5 hifuron; and to Richard Bodman for many stimulating discussions. Abbreviations: AP Agni-puraina (see note 87). We have also consulted the prose English translation by Manmatha Nath Dutt Shastri, AgniPurainam, The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies, vol. 54 (Varanasi: The Chowkhama Sanskrit Series Office, 1967). BK Bunkyo hifuron (see note 7) KD Kdvyddars'a (see Appendix IIE) KL also spelled Kdvydlarmkdra Kdvydlankdra, (see note 83) NS Nat,yas'astra (see note 14) TT TaishoTripitaka (the standard edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon) WH Wenhsuian 31:, comp. Hsiao T'ung Wi (facsimile rpt. of 1809 ed., Taipei: I-wen yin-shu-kuan, n. d. ). d defect or dosa/ping (as a prosodic term); departing (as a metrical term) e entering 1 level r rising u upamd-dosa ("defect of simile") v viparyaya ("opposite [of a merit]") y yamaka,or "rhyme" (as a prosodic term); level (as a metrical term) 375

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High T'ang.' Thus assured a steady supply of talented practitioners, it was soon transformed by Tu Fu into a versatile instrument of lyrical expression.2 Wang Wei, Li Shang-yin, Tu Mu, and many other T'ang poets also used this form to create great poems.3 Even during the Sung when much creative energy was channelled into tz'u, all aspiring scholars had to master the form because the composition of Recent Style poetry was a requirement on the civil service examination. Thus renowned tz'u poets such as Su Shih, Lu Yu, and Huang T'ing-chien were also accomplished in the Recent Style.4 This tradition remains alive among men of letters well into the twentieth century. Even today, the Recent Style poems of Lu Hsiin and Ch'en Yin-k'o, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are still widely read and much admired.5 Whether in terms of longevity, vitality, or quantity, Recent Style verse deserves to be considered the dominant and most representative genre of Chinese poetry. When Western scholars discuss "Chinese poetry," or "Classical Chinese poetry," they are sometimes in fact referring to Recent Style poetry.6
THE PROBLEM

One feature that made Recent Style poetry famous is the intricacy of its tonal patterns, and the question naturally arises as to how and when these tonal patterns came about. Previous studies on the subject have traced the origin of tonal prosody to the theory of "Four Tones and Eight Defects," traditionally attributed to Shen Yiieh (441-513).7 They have also shown how individual prosodic
Wang Li-ch'i's ETIJW preface in his Wen-ching mi-fu lun chiao-chu ;Z;., NA.8 (Peking: Chung-kuo she-hui k'o-hsiuehch'u-pan-she, 1983), pp. 13-14. 2 Yeh Chia-ying (Taipei: , Tu Fu ch'iu-hsing pa shou chi-shuo -? g Chung-hua ts'ung-shu pien-shen wei-yiuan-hui, 1966), pp. 1-62. 3 See the Recent Style poems by these T'ang and Sung authors in Kao Pu-ying ; T'ang Sungshih chui-yao ; (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1959).
4 1

Ibid.

5 Chou Chen-fu 1ftft Lu Hsiinshih-ko chuu$,t ( Hangchow: Che-chiangjen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1980); Yu Ying-shih +,* Ch'enYin-k'owan nienshih-wen shih-cheng Mp#} 1 I42+S;C (Taipei: Shih Pao wen-hua ch'u-pan shih-yeh yu-hsien kung-ssu, 1984). 6 Encyclopaedia Britannica,15th ed. (1975), 15:75e; Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Stylein Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 360. A fuller and more intelligible list of prosodic defects is preserved in Kuikai's ^ (774835) BunkyohifuronXz;.,JWA, a unique compilation of T'ang and pre-T'ang texts on

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rules emerged sequentially during the sixty-year period between 488 and 551, and how such rules first produced the tonal prosody of the Ch'i-Liang (479-557) Style, and then a more stringent version, the prosody that defined the Recent Style poetry. Scholars have identified twenty-five eight-line poems written before the T'ang that conform to the tonal patterns of Regulated Verse.8 They have also done considerable work on the social and political milieu that nurtured the development of tonal prosody and the literary controversy surrounding it.9 These studies, though informative, leave one important question unanswered. Namely, they fail to identify the origins of three radical ideas associated with tonal prosody: the classification of the four tones into two prosodic categories, level and deflected; the imposition of tonal rules on the internal syllables of a line; and the imposition of additional rules on the matching middle syllables belonging respectively to the two lines of a couplet and to the two couplets of a quatrain. These ideas had no precedent in the Chinese prosodic tradition. Up to the time of Shen Yiieh, the four tones were only used in prosody as part of the implicit definition of rhyme, and in that capacity each of the four tones served as its own prosodic category; the tradition had up to then made no requirements whatsoever of the internal syllables of a line; and the concept of the quatrain as a prosodic unit had not yet arisen. Previous studies tell us a great deal about who the inventors of tonal prosody were, how and under what circumstances they put these ideas into practice, who supported or opposed them on what grounds, and how long it took for these ideas to come into fruition. In short, all early investigations on this subject simply took for granted that Shen Yiieh
3 vols. (Dai ko ; Bunkyo hifuron poetics and prosody. KonishiJin'ichi 'YJS-, nihon yubenkai kodansha, 1948-1953); Richard Bodman, "Poetics and Prosody in Early hifuron"(Ph.D. diss., Cornell Medieval China: a Study and Translation of Kuikai'sBunkyo (see note 1) are the three works most useful University, 1978); and Wang Li-ch'i, Chiao-chu for the purposes of this paper. We have borrowed extensively from Bodman's diss. When the BK is cited, section numbers refer to volume 3 of Konishi, which contains his critical edition. 8 Takagi Masakazu ti% E-, "Liu-ch'ao lii-shih chih hsing-ch'eng" -/ N4 Jffi)$, 13.9-10 (1956): 17-18, 24-32. The trans. Cheng Ch'ing-mao *I1'j a, Ta-lutsa-chih . original article in NCGH4 (1951): 35-49, with level and deflected tones marked, is more convenient. 9 Ami YuijigBti, Chu-goku kenkyui 1t1ffltL ;C*F5E (Shinchosha, 1960); chuseibungaku shi p hyoron Chu-goku chaseibungaku Hayashida Sinnosuke 4It,JtM, (Sobunsha, 1979).

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and his followers somehow got these prosodic ideas, and focused on the subsequent developments. The question remains: how did the inventors of tonal prosody obtain these revolutionary ideas in the first place? Ch'en Yin-k'o was the first modern scholar who sensed that the topic could be pursued further. In his 1934 paper, "Ssu-sheng sanwen" (Three questions on the four tones),10 he proposed that the Chinese discovered the four tones under Buddhist influence. Citing a number of Chinese sources, including Chapter 13 of Hui-chiao's Biographies of Eminent Monks (composed between 519 and 533)" which is devoted to the lives of chanting masters of satras and Buddhist psalmody-Ch'en called attention to several significant facts. Under imperial patronage, the chanting masters were concentrated in Chien-k'ang (now Nanking), the capital of the Southern dynasties, during the second half of the fifth century. Many of the monks were Central Asians with native training in Sanskrit and in Buddhist psalmody. These monks were on good terms with the native Chinese literati. A key link was provided by the imperial prince Hsiao Tzu-liang (460-94, Prince of Chin-ling), whose suburban residence on Chi-lung Hill outside Chien-k'ang served as a gathering place for both the monks and the literati. Among the prince's literary friends were Shen Yiieh, Hsieh T'iao (464-99), WangJung (468-94), Jen Fang (460-508), and Fan Yiin (451-502), all of whom advocated the use of tonal prosody in poetry. Most importantly, the Biographies of Eminent Monks records that in 489 the prince had a dream in which he chanted the "Vimalakirti hymn" before the Buddha. The tones and rhymes he employed in his dream so impressed him with their smoothness and skill that the following morning he assembled the chanting masters of the capital to decide upon new tones for Buddhist chanting. A year earlier, in 488, Shen Yiieh had completed the Sung shu (Sung History), and in that work he used the afterword to the "Biography of Hsieh Ling-yuin" to issue a manifesto on tonal prosody. From these and other facts, Ch'en concluded that Shen Yiieh and
CHHP 9.2 (1934): 275-87. Ch'en Yin-k'o W*M-, "Ssu-sheng san-wen" g _, 1 For background, see Arthur Wright, "Biography and Hagiography, Hui-chiao's Livesof (Kyoto: KyotoUniversity of theZinbunKagakuKenkyusyo Jubilee Volume Monks," Silver Eminent Jimbun kagaku kenkyujo, 1954), pp. 383-432.
10

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his associates must have discussed tonal prosody before 488. Thus the 489 meeting called by Hsiao Tzu-liang, ostensibly to discuss the proper method for Buddhist chanting, was just an occasion to show off the latest fashion in prosody. Ch'en also suggested that by making the four tones the basis of the new prosody the Chinese literati must have come under Buddhist influence. Ch'en's paper is both brilliant and oddly out of focus. On the matter of the four tones, he cited the well-known fact that ancient Indians in chanting the Vedas used three tones: uddtta("raised," i.e., "acute," or "high"), anuddtta ("non-raised," i.e., "grave," or "low"), and svarita (" sounded," i.e., "falling [dkyipta,pranihanyate, or pravana] from high to low"). The Chinese matched these three tones with level, rising, and departing tones, and added a fourth for stopped syllables ending in -p, -t, -k. This, according to Ch'en, is why the Chinese discovered four tones instead of five or seven. The truth of the matter, however, is that rhyming words from the Book of Odes down to the pentasyllabic verse of the fifth century A.D. are predominantly in the same one of the four tones, which shows that the Chinese had long been making tonal distinctions. The coming of Buddhism probably did make them conscious of the existence of the four tones. But neither the Buddha nor anyone else could have made the number of tones in Middle Chinese other than four. 12 At the same time Ch'en presented strong evidence that during the formative period of tonal prosody, Shen Yiieh and his followers were in close contact with Buddhist monks. Without making an outright claim, Ch'en also implied, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, that Buddhist influence was responsible for the development of tonal prosody. The question then becomes: what did the inventors of tonal prosody know about Sanskrit prosody and poetics, and in what specific ways did such knowledge contribute to the making of tonal prosody? This paper will show that, under the influence of the Sanskrit theory of poetic defects, Shen Yiieh and his followers invented tonal
CYYY 12 This criticism has been made by Chou Fa-kao , A, "Shuo p'ing-tse" FAV(, lun-wenhsuan P 13 (1948): 153-62; Yu Min , Chung-kuoyii-wen-hsiieh , "Wen-hsin tiao-lung sheng-Ii p'ien yiu (Koseikan, 1984), pp. 303-306; Jao Tsung-i wen-shih lun-ts'ung Chung-hua Chiu-mo-lo-shih t'ung-yiin" 5 @@9;t^it 3 (1985): 215-36, esp. 227-30.

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prosody in order to reproduce, in Chinese, the same euphonic effect achieved by meter in Sanskrit. Our first line of argument concerns the long tradition in Sanskrit poetics that classifies and analyzes poetic defects, or dosa ("fault, vice, deficiency"), in Sanskrit."3 The tradition may be traced to the Ndtyas'astra (hereafter NS) of Bharata, composed sometime between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D.4 Though the work as a whole is concerned with dramaturgy, it includes chapters generally recognized as representing the first systematic treatment of prosody. In the chapter on "Verbal Representation and Prosody," the author defines the concept of yamaka as "the repetition of words (or syllables or sounds) at the beginnning of the feet and at other places," and proceeds to classify this poetic defect into ten types. This line of inquiry was further developed in the Kdvydlankdra (hereafter KL) of Bhamaha and the Kdvyddars'a (hereafter KD) of Dandin, both seventh- or eighth-century works that relied heavily on earlier prosodists. It is our thesis that the famous "Eight Defects" of Shen Yuieh and the "Twenty-eight Defects" of the BunkyoIhifuron (819, hereafter BK) were derived from Sanskrit treatises on poetics. In what follows, it will be seen that some of the names of specific defects are identical in Chinese and in Sanskrit, the number and types of defects in the two traditions are comparable, and the presentation follows the same format of defining a specific defect and then citing examples to illustrate it. Our second argument suggests that it was from Sanskrit conventions that Shen Yiieh and his associates got the idea of bifurcating the four tones into two prosodic categories. Sanskrit meters are based upon the opposition between long and short syllables, which for the purpose of prosody are called laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy"). In a famous passage in the afterword to the "Biography of Hsieh Ling-yiin," Shen Yiieh used the equivalent terms ch'ing ("light") and chung ("heavy") to refer to the prosodic categories later called level and deflected: "Within a line, initials and finals
13

Cf. Bechan Jha, Conceptof Poetic Blemishes in Sanskrit Poetics (Benares: The Chowkhamba Manomohan Ghosh, ed. and tr., The Ndtyasastra (A Treatise on Ancient Indian Dramaturgy

Sanskrit Series Office, 1965).

14

ascribed to Bharata-Muni; (revised 2nd ed., Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, andHistrionics) 1967), vol. 1 (Chapters 1-27).

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must be different; within a couplet, light and heavy sounds must be . @ i distinct." -MFP1, J,, IN, M The third argument stresses that the bulk of Buddhist Sanskrit meter, and asserts that it is the acquaintverse is written in the s'loka ance with this meter on the part of Shen Yuieh and his followers that triggered the revolution in prosody. In trying to pinpoint the type of influence Sanskrit prosody might have exerted during this period, the historian of literature needs to know with which Sanskrit meters the Chinese Buddhists were most likely to be familiar. Treatises on Sanskrit metrics usually list two or three hundred meters, but there is only one meter that actually needs to be considered seriously. In all the Sanskrit texts that we could verify as having been translated into Chinese between 450 and 550, the most common meter is the sloka. This is also the case for Sanskrit verses preserved in Tunhuang manuscripts. In addition, the floka is the second most frea quent meter in the Lotus Suftra (Skt. Saddharmapundaraka-suztra), text that had been several times translated into Chinese before 400 but became enormously influential through Kumarajiva's (344413) version (406?), not only for the period we are primarily interested in, but also into the T'ang as well. For most Chinese of the fifth and sixth centuries who professed to have some knowledge of meter was equivalent to "Buddhist verse." They Sanskrit, the s'loka might have heard the meter in the Sanskrit verse chanted by foreign monks, or they might have come across a description of this meter. The sloka meter is a development of the Vedic anustubhstanza of octosyllabic lines. Both anustubhand s'lokabasically mean "hymn of praise or glory," or in Chinese, sung A ("hymn of praise") or tsan There are several varieties of the sloka. The T ("eulogy"). authorities do not always agree in their description, but the basic scheme is clear."5 Odd pdda: x x x x -)(-)-) Even pdda: x x x x x

The sloka consists of four pdda, or quarter verses, of eight syllables each, or two lines of sixteen syllables each. Each line allows great
15 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary(Oxford: Clarendon, 1899), p. 1104.

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liberty except for the 5th, 13th, 14th, and 15th syllables, which should be unchangeable, as in the above schema, where the crosses denote either long or short, the bars long, and the breve signs short. The authorities differ as to the degree and type of restriction placed on the 6th, 7th, and 8th syllables; hence the parentheses around the signs for long and short. Certain distinctive features of tonal prosody can be directly traced to Sanskrit meter in general and the floka in particular. The foremost is the bifurcation of the four tones into two prosodic categories, level and deflected, the Chinese equivalents to long and short in Sanskrit. This is of considerable importance because the level/deflected distinction underlies not only Recent Style prosody but all varieties of tz'u prosody as well. Other features include the imposition of prosodic rules on internal syllables of a line, the imposition of less restriction on syllables at the beginning of a line, and the requirement to maintain a balance between level and deflected syllables, both in a line and in a couplet. At higher levels of organization, the emergence of the quatrain as a basic module of composition may be mentioned as a feature due to the four-pdda structure of the s'loka. Motivation Thus the inventors of tonal prosody obtained their revolutionary ideas from Sanskrit prosodic practices. This prompts two further questions: what motivated them to develop a new prosody of their own? And what gave the new prosody its specific form? A convenient place to begin is a passage from the "Biography of Kumarajiva" in Hui-chiao's Biographiesof Eminent Monks:
From the very beginning the highly talented s'ramanaHui-jui has been assisting Kumarajiva in translating and explicating Buddhist texts. Kumarajiva often discusses the literary genres of Western Regions with Hui-jui, pointing out their similarities to, and differences from Chinese forms. He says: "The custom of India attaches great importance to verse making, and regards the modulations and rhymes that can be set to music as the finest. An audience with the king requires a eulogy. In Buddhist ceremonies, chants are of the highest value. The gdthas and the slokas in scriptures all belong to this type. Once Sanskrit is converted into Chinese, the subtle nuances are lost. Though the general meaning gets across, there is no way to bridge the gap in genre and style. It is like feeding another person with

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chewed-over rice. Not only is the flavor lost, it will cause the other person to vomit.

The key phrases are: YLE1IE, . 1 1 1 Here sung A corresponds to Skt. sloka ("hymn of praise X, , or glory"), and chi XZto Skt. gdthal("the metrical part of a suitra"). Kumarajiva makes clear that in the Indian tradition, to sing praise to the Buddha and king, one has to use the sloka. The words can be translated into Chinese, but not the meter. Elsewhere in the "Discussion of Sutra Masters" of the Biographiesof Eminent Monks, Hui-chiao makes the same complaint in less precise terms (TT 50:414c-415a):
Now the songs of the Eastern countries are such that a succession of rhyming finals (*t~) make up a song. In the chanting of the Western regions, however, a hymn Ever since the Great (X gdthd) is made by harmonizing the sounds (Thu).... Teaching flowed to the East, translators of texts have been numerous, but transmitters of their sounds have been few. This may well be because Sanskrit words are polysyllabic (i;A), while Chinese is monosyllabic (W4). Moreover, if one uses a Sanskrit accent to chant Chinese, then the sounds are cumbersome (14) and the is forced. Or if one uses a Chinese song-form to chant a Sanskrit text, then the gdthaI finals are shortened (JAE) and phrases are elongated. For this reason, the golden words of the Buddha have been translated, while Sanskrit sounds have not been passed on.

All translators of poetry are of course familiar with the difficulty of conveying the style and rhythm of the original. But, for the Buddhist kings and princes of the Ch'i and Liang dynasties, the failure to transmit Sanskrit meter was tantamount to sacrilege. Not only did they wish to pay homage to the Buddha and to receive homage from their Buddhist subjects; they also wanted to do it right, as done in the land of the Buddha, which meant using verse in the sRloka meter. Compelling the literati of the realm to compose verse in Sanskrit was difficult, even with the aid of the Buddha. A more practical course open to the Buddhist kings and princes was to create the same euphonic effect in Chinese that was achieved by the silokain Sanskrit.
16 chuan TT50:332b. Robert Shih's French translation of chuan1-3 of the Kao-sheng AMf, (Louvain: Institut orientaliste, Bibliotheque de l'Universite, des moinesedminents Biographies 1968), p. 37, translates fX and , of this passage as "les gatha and "les sloka."

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In this context we can better understand why the prince Hsiao Tzu-liang had a dream in which he chanted before the Buddha. Whether it be hagiography or biography, the prince's dream encapsulates the fervent desire to worship the Buddha properly. Significantly, a list of Buddhist works compiled under his patronage includes three items concerning chanting, one of which is entitled "Resolving Difficulties in the Method of Chanting Sutras. "17 Royal interest and participation in prosodic matters were not just limited to the prince. After the demise of the first generation of pioneers, the pivotal figure Hsiao Kang (503-51, Emperor Chien-wen), as crown prince during the reign of Emperor Wu of Liang, continued to experiment with tonal prosody. Under a succession of powerful patrons who were both Buddhists and poets, the search for a new prosody became a national passion spanning two dynasties. However, formidable difficulties had to be overcome before Sanskrit meter, or a prosody structurally similar to it, could be adapted for Chinese poetry. One obstacle was the widely differing natures of the two languages themselves. Chinese was uninflected and isolating, whereas Sanskrit was one of the most inflected languages known to man. In Chinese the most prominent suprasegmental feature was the presence of tonal distinctions, which before the time of Shen Yuieh had not yet been fully exploited for prosodic purposes, whereas in Sanskrit the long/short distinction had for centuries been the linguistic basis of Indian prosody. Chinese was written in a morphosyllabic script composed of more than five thousand characters,18 whereas Sanskrit used Devanagari, a syllabary of forty-nine characters with strong alphabetic capabilities. As written, Classical Chinese was largely monosyllabic, whereas Sanskrit was polysyllabic and had a predilection for forming enormously long compoundsa fundamental difference, which Hui-chiao had already noted. Another obstacle was the typological difference between Chinese and Sanskrit prosody at the time of their encounter in Chien-k'ang.
'7

Ch'usan-tsang chi chi

TT 55:85-86. These works are no longer extant.

'8 Chiu Hsi-kuei (Qiu Xigui) AVfi , Wen-tzu-hsiieh kai-yao3;Z!1EMN (Peking: Shang-

wu yin-shu kuan, 1988), p. 31, points out that in spite of the large number of characters included in dictionaries, the actual number of characters in use remains in the range of 4,0005,000 throughout the ages. There are about 4,000-5,000 distinct characters (Vj) in the oracle bone inscriptions, and 6,544 in the thirteen Classics. These numbers are comparable to the 4,000-5,000 frequently used characters estimated for Modern Chinese.

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By the fourth and fifth centuries, before the invention of tonal prosody, pentasyllabic verse had become the dominant form of poetry. The majority of the poems by Juan Chi (210-63), T'ao Ch'ien (364-433), and Hsieh Ling-yiin (385-433), for example, are in this form. The prosodic rules for the pentasyllabic verse were quite simple:19(1) each line has five syllables, (2) each line has a caesura after the second syllable, with a second caesura occurring either after the third or fourth syllable, depending on meaning, (3) a couplet forms an independent two-part prosodic unit, and (4) the rhyme falls on the final syllable of the second line of a couplet. The pentasyllabic verse differs in two important aspects from earlier poetry, that is, the Book of Odes, the Ch'u Tz'u, and Han ballads: whereas earlier poetry permits a variable number of syllables per line and a variable number of lines per poem, in pentasyllabic verse the number of syllables are standardized to five per line, and the number of lines to multiples of two. And unlike earlier poetry, which was sung, pentasyllabic verse was divorced from musical accompaniment and chanted, which may be why the number of syllables was no longer standardization of variable. In retrospect, both innovations-the the number of syllables per line and the separation of poetry from a stable platform for the rise of tonal prosody. music-provided In a prosodic typology, pentasyllabic verse belongs to the class of syllabic verse-a class that also includes the Japanese haiku and tanka and the Classical French Alexandrine.20 With a fixed number of syllables within the line as the organizing principle, syllabic verse seems to be particularly suited to the genius of the Chinese language. Theorists of comparative poetics have also identified three other types of prosody: quantitative verse, which includes Old Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit poetry; accentual-syllabic verse, which is the usual form of English poetry; and accentual verse, which occurs in strongly stressed languages such as Germanic. Unlike syllabic verse, these three types of poetry are informed by meter, with example, two obligatory characteristics: a binary opposition-for
19 Kao Yu-kung, "The Aesthetics of Regulated Verse," in Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen, eds., The Vitality of the Lyric Voice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 335. 20 EncyclopaediaBritannica (1975), Micropaedia, 6:842 under "meter" provides a convenient reference for prosodic typology.

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is applicable to all syllables long/short or stressed/unstressed-that of the language underlies the prosody; and a metrical requirement that in principle pertains to all positions in a line. Specifically, Sanskrit meters are based upon the long/short opposition, and according to the above classificatory scheme, the silokameter should be called "quantitative-syllabic" verse. As Classical Chinese was neither accentual nor quantitative, it was impossible to adopt meter directly from Sanskrit or any other Buddhist language with which it might have come in contact. Perhaps the greatest obstacle was that at the time the Chinese simply had no concept of meter, or more precisely, they had great difficulty in expressing the concept of meter, as the translations of will illustrate: the following passage from the Lanikavatara-sutra
sma. punar api gathd[bhi]gitenanugdyati Atha Ravano Lankadhipatih totakavrttendnugayya Then, Ravana, the Lord of Lanka, after having chanted [these verses] in the Totaka meter, proceeded to chant [the following] in gathais.

The author of this passage explicitly identifies the meter of the verses as the Totaka, which, incidentally, is an anapestic was tetrameter: - - - - - - - - - - - -. The Lanikdvatara-sutra translated into Chinese three times, by Gunabhadra in 443, Bodhiruci in 513, and Siksananda in 700-704.21 How did the translators handle this passage? Gunabhadra does not account for it. Bodhiruci has the following:
G ~i4g tb3Ibui, t16%XXtXB, ttAnkfE3 (after having praised the
ff
>.

Buddha with various Totaka marvelous sounds), I

Siksananda, an early T'ang translator from Khotan, is somewhat circumlocutory but still has the same basic details:
M*W,WP3ftT, Totaka sounds), U-416tUE!-M . (after having sung praise to the Buddha with

The astounding thing about the Chinese treatment of this passage is that Bodhiruci and Siksananda had no way to translate vrtta ("meter") accurately, which may be why Gunabhadra ignored it altogether. Bodhiruci has vrtta equal to miao sheng 09 ("marvelous sounds"), while Siksananda equates it with yin r ("sounds").
21 Respectively TT, Nos. 670, 671, and 672.

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Because the Chinese language was unable to express the concept of meter, these translators had no choice but to transpose "meter" into phonological or musical terms. The term "marvelous sounds" also occurs in the "Discussion of Suftra Masters" in Hui-chiao's Biographies of Eminent Monks (TT 50:415b):
In order for suitra-chanting to be beautiful, it is important that both words and intonation be successful. If there is only intonation without [good] words, then there will be no way to arouse men's spiritual nature. If there are only words but no [good] intonation, then there will be no way to penetrate the feeling of the uninitiated. This is what is meant when the siutra says: "Sing praises of the Buddha's virtue with subtle and marvelous sounds."

Recall that the same Hui-chiao, in reporting Kumarajlva's conversation with Hui-jui, wrote: "An audience with the king requires a eulogy. In Buddhist ceremonies, chants are of the highest value. The gdthalsand flokas in the scriptures all belong to this type NPH ,, WA hA. " Hui-chiao was certainly familiar with the significance of metered verse for Buddhism. He was also a contemporary of Bodhiruci, who translated vrtta ("meter") as "marvelous sounds." Therefore, what Hui-chiao wanted to say in the last sentence on chanting, and what we would have rendered in a freer translation, is the following: "This is what is meant when the suitra says: 'Sing praises of the Buddha's virtue in meters such as the sloka or the gath. .'" Although the Chinese were unable to make direct and specific reference to the concept of meter, this does not mean that they were unaware of its significance for poetry. Let us also go back to a phrase in the "Biography of Kumarajlva," in which Kumarajiva is discussing the similarities and differences between Chinese and San-

skrit literary forms and reportedly said:

"

Lr

<

Our translation was: "The custom of India attaches F,ItUA .A, great importance to verse making, and regards the modulations and rhymes that can be set to music as the finest." What could Kumarajiva have been talking about? We believe that in the process of translating Buddhist texts, he would have discussed with Hui-jui, his ablest Chinese assistant, the difference between prose and verse

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in Sanskrit, and the nature and function of various types of verse. It should also be noted that Hui-jui knew some Sanskrit and probably wrote a tract on Sanskrit phonetics at the request of Hsieh Ling-yuin (TT 50:367b). But what Kumarajiva was supposed to have said is, in a more literal translation: "Among the forms and rhymes with kung and shang notes, the ones that can be set to strings are regarded as the finest. " Kung and shang are the names of two notes in the pentatonic scale of Chinese music, and the names of musical notes were also used at the time to refer to the four tones. What Hui-chiao was trying to do here is to refer to the four tones in musical terms, and insofar as the four tones underlie the emergent tonal prosody, to extend the meaning of "kung and shang" to refer to the Sanskrit analogue, namely, meter. After the Chinese encountered Sanskrit meter, then, two processes were underway. Since the concept of meter was absent both in their prosodic tradition and in their language, the Chinese adopted the time-honored method of ko-i %X ("matching concepts"); that is, they referred to Sanskrit meter by using the terminology of Chinese music or phonology. Simultaneously, because the sloka had religious significance in Buddhism, the Chinese also embarked upon the challenging process of creating something that could serve the same function as the "marvelous sounds" of Sanskrit. Given the typological differences between Sanskrit and Chinese, the imitative process must have resulted from stimulus diffusion, not from direct borrowing. In other words, only after discovering the structural principles of Sanskrit meter could the Chinese invent a new prosody of their own that mirrors these principles. Indeed, if we define "meter" broadly as the obligatory, rhythmic repetition of prosodic features across all syllables within a certain domain, then Recent Style poetry may in a sense be said to have meter or meterlike features. Two Generations of ExperimentalPoets In tracing the origins of tonal prosody, we have so far identified the Buddha as the final cause, Sanskrit meter as the formal cause, and Middle Chinese tones as the material cause. To complete the Neo-Aristotelian analysis, we now turn to the efficient cause, the

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craftsmen who invented Recent Style poetry between 488 and 551 in the Southern capital Chien-k'ang. Buddhism enjoyed three periods of florescence during the Southern dynasties (420-589): the Yiian-chia (424-53) reign, with the great poet Hsieh Ling-yiin (385-433) as a leading figure; the period when the imperial prince Hsiao Tzu-liang served as prime minister (ssu-t'u IJP) under Emperor Wu of Ch'i (483-93); and the long reign of Emperor Wu of Liang (502-49).22 This chronology corresponds well with the early stages in the development of Recent Style poetry. At the time of Hsieh Ling-yiin, Chinese poetry had already been greatly influenced by Buddhist ideas, but not by Sanskrit meter; his poetry represents tonal prosody at degree zero. In 488, Shen Yiieh used his afterword to the "Biography of Hsieh Ling-yiin" to issue his manifesto on tonal prosody, thus making a conscious break with the past. The year 549 witnessed the fall of Chien-k'ang to Hou Ching's forces in April and the death of Emperor Wu of Liang at the age of eighty-six in June. In 551, with the murder of Hsiao Kang (Emerpor Chien-wen) by Hou Ching's men, the golden age of Southern literature came to an end. By that time Recent Style poetry had been fully developed as a verse form, though as yet not widely practiced. Between 488 and 551 flourished two generations of experimental poets. The older group was led by Shen Yiieh and the younger by Hsiao Kang. To gain a true appreciation of their achievement, let us go back briefly to the age of Hsieh Ling-yun. As Erik Ziurcher has shown in The Buddhist Conquestof China, Buddhism had already spread among the gentry and the aristocracy of the South during the period 320420. By the beginning of the fifth century, with the exodus of Kumarajiva's disciples to the South and the arrival of Fa-hsien in Chien-k'ang from India and Ceylon in 414, the stage was set for the first florescence of Buddhism during the Southern Dynasties. One indication of the popularity of Buddhism was the growing interest in the Sanskrit language. In 417 and 418, Fa-hsien and Buddhabhadra translated the Sanskrit syllabary of fifty letters, arranged
Han-Wei ChinNan-pei-ch'ao Fo-chiao T'ang Yung-t'ung ,l, shih A 4 (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chui, 1955), pp. 415-416.
22

I -A

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in the order of vowels, dipthongs, and consonants that formed chapters of the Mahdparinirvadna-siutra (TT 376, 8: 887c-888b) .23 Sometime between 418 and 433, at the request of Hsieh Ling-yun, Huijui, the disciple of Kumarajiva, also composed a manual entitled Shih-ssu yin hsun hsii tEJII, ("Explanation of the Fourteen Sounds with Semantic Interpretations"; TT 50:367b). This text, as Arthur Wright has noted, was also based upon the Mahdparinirva-nasutra but only treats the fourteen Sanskrit vowels and diphthongs.24 At the beginning of the fifth century, another Sanskrit syllabary of forty-two letters, accompanied by semantic interpretations but arranged in the arapacanaorder, was (after having appeared in various Chinese translations of Buddhist texts at the end of the third century) retranslated in the Paicavirhsatisdhasrikd-prajnadparamita (TT 223, trans. Kumarajiva, 402-4 A.D.), the Upadesa (TT 1509, Kumarajiva, 404-6), the Avatam'saka-sutra (TT 278, Buddhabhadra, 418-20), and the Mahasamrnipdta-sutra (TT 397, Dharmaksema, 41420).25 Except for the two items by Kumarajiva, all these texts were translated in the south. During the fifth century, the Chinese were also becoming better acquainted with the general characteristics of Sanskrit. Buddhologists, in discussing the language of primitive Buddhism, often cite the following passage from the Vinayaof Mahisasaka, translated into Chinese by Buddhajiva of Kashmir in 423-24 at Yang-chou:
There were two Brahman brothers who recited the text of the Chando-veda("sacred knowledge of metrics"). Later, having been converted to the True Law (saddharma), they quit the life of the householder (pravrajita). Upon hearing the bhiksus reciting the sultras incorrectly, they scolded them saying: "You reverends (bhadanta) have been monks for a long time. Yet knowing neither the masculine and feminine genders (pum-stri-linga), nor the singular (eka-vacana) and the plural (bahu-vacana), nor the present (bhavat), past (samatita) and the future (bhdvi), nor the long (dfrgha) and short (hrasva) sounds, nor the light (laghu) and heavy (guru) syllables, you recite the suitras of the Buddha in this fashion." The bhiksus heard this and felt ashamed. These two bhiksus went to the Buddha and told him what happened. The Buddha said: "Let them recite according to the speech of the country (desa-bhdsa ["local language, or dialect," i.e., the vernacular]), but they should not distort the inten23

Paul Demieville's review of R. H. van Gulik, Siddham: An Essayon theHistoryof Sanskrit Arthur Wright, "Seng-jui Alias Hui-jui: A Biographical Bisection in the Kao-seng See note 23.

Studies in China andJapan, TP 45 (1957): 243.

24

chuan," Sino-Indian Studies 5.3-4 (1957): 279 n. 30.

25

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tion of the Buddha. It is forbidden to regard the words of the Buddha as the language of the outsiders (wai, i.e., heretic, non-Buddhist, bdhyaka)."

thxmw1
7xfl"fPQk A

- A, xrArL"rn.=a.iAE&m*R. r%mL_r_gx.T-E,
kL_r rlIR f?EttEX4G
AS t

aw

2-3-

kr_it
}fiX

if

M , Al

b ?.i?n

T W ;1{?ii

The Sanskrit being described was clearly a heavily inflected language with the long/short distinction in its phonological system and the light/heavy distinction in its prosodic structure. Aside from reading translated texts such as the Vinaya of Mahisasaka, the Chinese of the fifth century also could have learned these linguistic facts directly from their foreign friends resident in China. The above passage with a precise date provides some concrete evidence for the sort of information they were gaining about Sanskrit. Although Chinese of the fifth century did know something about Sanskrit, it would be misleading to conclude that many of them knew Sanskrit. From the roster of translators in the Biograpiesof Eminent Monks, it is clear that the overwhelming majority were foreigners and that very few Chinese monks had learned Sanskrit well enough to translate Sanskrit texts into Chinese on their own. Chih-yen, and Pao-yuin-had acThe few exceptions-Fa-hsien, tually traveled to either India or other places that had large communities of Sanskrit scholars. For those Chinese followers of Buddhism who never went abroad, tasks were limited to assisting with the translation or revising texts already translated, which was what Hsieh Ling-yun did for the Nirvdna-sdtra.27And what Buddhist biographies really mean when they say that Chinese Buddhist monks and laymen "had made a profound study of the Sanskrit language," is that they were instructed in Siddham-the principles of Sanskrit script, spelling, and pronunciation that every Indian child had to learn as he began his education.
26 Wu-fen lii E5 TT 22:39c, cited with Sanskrit equivalents for Chinese terms in Lin Li-kouang #V)%, L'Aide-Mimoire de la VraieLoi (Paris: Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1949), pp. 218-19; and in Chi Hsien-lin *A11, Yin-tuku-taiyi-yen lun-chiFP9t;tfVi & * (Peking: She-hui k'o-hsiieh ch'u-pan-she, 1982), p. 408; with additional explanations. 27 T'ang Yung-t'ung, Fo-chiao Stream: TheLife shih, p. 439; J. D. Frodsham, TheMurmuring and Works of Hsieh Ling-yan(Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1967), p. 72.

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Nevertheless, exposure to the Sanskrit language and Indian linguistics for several centuries made the Chinese more aware of the phonological features of their own language. The first fruit was the invention of thefan-ch'ieh 14P method of spelling (namely, taking the initial sound of one character and the final sound of a second character to represent the pronunciation of a third character). Though its date of origin has always been controversial, thefanch 'ieh method was clearly in general use by the fourth century. The Sanskrit syllabary of forty-two letters was presented in the arapacana order, that is, a, ra, pa, ca, na, etc.; a Buddhist text containing such a syllabary had been twice translated before the end of the third century. It did not require too much linguistic acumen to observe that by holding the vowel a constant and varying the initial consonant one could form a series of syllables, each represented by a separate Sanskrit letter. Transferring this principle to Chinese, one obtains thefan-ch'ieh spelling system, which implies that the canonical form of the Chinese syllable consists of an initial followed by a final. Since Middle Chinese was a tonal language, it was necessary, in making up fan-ch'ieh spellings, to take the tones into account; the second character of thefan-ch'ieh spelling had to be in the same tone as the character to be spelled. Thus by the first part of the fifth century, shortly before the time of Shen Yuieh, Chinese phonologists had become aware of the four tones. The growing awareness of the phonological properties of words was also operative among poets. For example, Shen Yuieh and Liu Hsieh (465-522), both strongly influenced by Buddhism, were extremely discriminating in choosing rhyming words in their verse. By the latter half of the fifth century, Buddhist psalmody and Sanskrit poetics were beginning to influence Chinese prosody. This is evident when, for instance, we consider Hsieh Ling-yiin's poetry, not in terms of its intrinsic merits, but as representing a stage in the development of Recent Style poetry.29 Particularly noticeable is his
28 (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chui, 1966), Chou Tsu-mo WM& Wen hsueh chi pl p. 466. 29 For a study of Hsieh Ling-yuin'spoetry, see Lin Wen-yueh #1ZjA, HsiehLing-yun M (Taipei: Ch'un A (Taipei: Ho-luo ch'u-pan-she, 1977) and Shan-shuiyuku-tien[U71(lt: wen-hsueh ch'u-pan-she, 1976), and Kang-i Sun Chang, Six DynastiesPoetry(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 47-78.

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conscious deployment of alliterative and rhyming binoms, for example, in these lines from his "I Follow the Chin-chu Torrent, Cross the Peak, and Go Along by the River":

MMVUtM1 bjenbieng-.djam s'JOM

A M kuo buo-tsydng tsjdn Duckweed floats upon its turbid depths, Reeds and cattails cover its clear shallows.30 With alliterative syllables represented by A, and rhyming syllables by B, the pattern is A A - B B / B B - A A. The use of alliterative and rhyming bisyllables, a frequent feature in the poetry of Hsieh Ling-yun and his younger contemporary, Pao Chao (415-66), was in part stimulated by the rise offan-ch 'ieh spelling. Whether alliteration and internal rhyming are desirable would soon be dealt with in the last four of Shen Yiieh's "Eight Defects." Hsieh Ling-yiin's arrangement of alliterative and rhyming bisyllables and his semantic categories both anticipated the tonal patterns of the couplet and the quatrain in Recent Style prosody. Furthermore, Hsieh Ling-yiin was a master of the antithetical couplet in his choice of diction, arrangement of phonic patterns, and placement of the verb in the middle of the line. But because the poetic convention of his time allowed the poem to consist of any number of couplets, his landscape poems were more descriptive than lyrical and resembled a series of beautifully crafted still-pictures strung together in linear progression without a formally motivated point of closure. It is also noteworthy that, in spite of his many technical advances, he virtually ignored the four tones. Finally, we should remember that he was the most admired poet of his generation. As the "Biography of Hsieh Ling-yiin" in the Sung shu states: "Whenever one of his poems arrived [from Kuei-chi] the high and low around the City all rushed to have it copied, and overnight it was read by the gentry and the commoners alike. His poetry was admired far and near; his fame resounded in the capital." It was against this background of
'aoshih 4/-fJl= Ch'ian Han San-kuoWei ChinNan-pei-ch 2M (Taipei: I-wen yin-shu-kuan, 1968), p. 818, cf. Frodsham, pp. 135-36. Middle Chinese _Lt; 5E,, CHHP, n.s. 9.1-2 transcriptionis that of Li Fang-kuei in "Shang-kuyinyen-chiu" (1971), 4-7.
30 Ting Fu-pao TN9,

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heightened prosodic sophistication that Shen Yuieh issued his manifesto on tonal prosody in the afterword to Hsieh's biography, which states in part:
Ying Chung-wen (d. 407) was the first to change the style of Sun Cho (314-70) and Hsui Hsuin (ca. 345); and Hsieh Hun (d. ca. 412) greatly altered the manner of the T'ai-yuian period (376-96). In the Liu Sung dynasty, Yen Yen-chih (384-456) and Hsieh Ling-yiin were prominent voices. Hsieh Ling-yiin's inspiration was lofty, while Yen Yen-chih's writing was clear and precise. Together they provided a model by which to measure former blossoms and left an example for posterity to follow. Now in speaking frankly from the heart about former writers and discussing their various instances of skill and awkwardness, it seems as though still more could be said. The reason why the five colors illuminate each other and the eight musical instruments harmonize with each other is because dark and light colors andyin and yang notes are each appropriate to specific objects. If you wish the notes kung andyu to alternate and the low and high tones to balance each other, then wherever there is a "floating sound" in front, there must follow a "cut-off sound." Within a line, initials and finals must be different; within a couplet, light and heavy sounds must be distinct. Only those who attain this subtle meaning can begin to discuss literature.

How brash and iconoclastic is Shen Yuieh's concluding statement! With one sentence he dismissed all previous poets and critics. Shen Yuieh also defended the principle of tonal prosody in a letter to Lu Chuieh:
There are five tones but tens of thousands of distinct words. The matching of the profusion of tens of thousands with the handful of five tones-high and descending, low and rising-is not something that can be rationally conceived. Nor does it stop merely at this. Within a couplet of ten syllables, the tones are matched in mirrorfashion. Even with no more than ten syllables, the artful permutations cannot be exhausted; how much the more so, then, when there are more? . . . Besides the categories of rhyming and non-rhyming, there is also the distinction between "fine" and "coarse. "31

The new prosody is further discussed as follows by Liu Hsieh (465-522) in the chapter on sound rules of the Wen-hsin tiao-lung (The LiteraryMind and OrnateRhetoric):
There are two kinds of tones-flying and sinking; and there are two kinds of between a pair of words with the same initial consonant, and that resonance-that between a pair of words with the same final. Alliterative syllables must not be
31 Li Yen-shou lk,

Nan-shih t

(Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1975), 48.1196-7.

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separated within a line; rhyming syllables must not be scattered within a couplet. The sound of the sinking tone, when uttered, is cut off; the flying tone soars straight and does not return. These two must alternate, like the rotation of a windlass; they must match each other like a dragon's rows of opposing scales. In "When going leads to their intercourse they observe the maxim of the Changes: obstruction, coming leads to union. " If a defect should occur, it is a stutter on the part of the author.... (rhyme). A poet's full strength and skill is demanded in the ho(harmony) andyuTn When different tones follow each other, it is called ho; when the same sounds answer each other, that is termedyuin.Once the rhyme (yiin) has been determined, the remaining syllables are easy to place; but since the pattern of ho is based on the alternation of rising and falling sounds, it is hard to make them fit together like the two halves of a tally.32

Several items are worth noting in these passages. Perhaps most significant is that Shen Yiieh and Liu Hsieh both reveal Buddhist or Sanskrit influence. The terms ch'ing ("light") and chung ("heavy") are direct translations of laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy"); in Buddhajiva's Chinese translation of the Vinaya of Mahisasaka, completed in 423-24 A.D., the Sanskrit terms are indeed translated as such. The term ho-sheng("harmonizing the sounds") used by Huichiao to describe the method of chanting Sanskrit gdthd (in the passage translated above on p. 383) is now used by Liu Hsieh to refer to one of the two main skills in composing Chinese poetry: "When different tones follow one another, it is called ho (harmony). " This suggests that Shen Yiieh and his associates were equating Chinese tones with Sanskrit long and short syllables, and tonal prosody with the Sanskrit meters of the gathd. It also appears that, for Shen and Liu, there are two types of tones, variously named "low and high tones," "floating and cut-off sounds," "light and heavy sounds,'" "flying and sinking tones,'" etc. The prosodic concept underlying these expressions is the binary opposition in tones. Last, both Shen and Liu indicate that these two kinds of tones should alternate within each line and couplet. Shen calls for the alternation of tones within one line when he states, "Wherever there is a 'floating sound' in front, it must be followed by a 'cut-off sound' "; and Liu stresses the same sort of contrastive balance when he defines ho as "different tones follow[ing] each other."
32

tiao-lung 'LX,W ff (SPPY ed.), 7.6ab. Wen-hsin

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Opposition between the tonal patterns of the two lines of a couplet is specified by Shen Yiieh when he says, "Within a couplet of ten syllables, the tones are matched in mirror-fashion," and by Liu Hsieh when he says, "They must match each other like a dragon's rows of opposing scales." In short, around 488, half a century after the death of Hsieh Ling-yiin, Shen Yiieh and his followers were developing a new tonal prosody with the aim of achieving the same euphonic effect as that achieved by meter in Sanskrit. But their programmatic pronouncements still leave two questions unanswered. First, which particular syllables are required to alternate? And second, should the alternation be required among all four tones, or only between "light" and "heavy" ones? If the latter, how should the four tones be divided-into two and two, or one and three? These practical problems were worked out between 488 and 551 by two generations of experimental poets. The older group, also known as "the eight friends of the Prince of Chin-ling," were led by Shen Yueh. The younger group, led by Hsiao Kang, crown prince and later Emperor Chien-wen of Liang, included the great poet Yu Hsin (513-81), his father Yu Chien-wu (ca. 487-551), and Hsui Ling (507-83), the editor of the Yu-t'ai hsin-yung (New Songsfrom a Jade Terrace). Among the "eight friends" who frequented the salon of Hsiao Tzu-liang, it was Shen Yiieh, WangJung, and Hsieh T'iao who did the most to launch the prosodic revolution. Shen Yiieh came from a Southern military family of low status." A consummate literary entrepreneur and astute politician, he was able to channel the literary energy of his time in the direction favored by his royal Buddhist patrons. During the period Hsiao Tzu-liang's salon served as a gathering place for foreign monks and Chinese literati, he was senior both in age and in rank among the "eight friends" and hence their leader. In all likelihood, he was credited with some of the achievements of his followers. Wang Jung and Hsieh T'iao performed most of the prosodic experiments. In addition to having precocious poetic talent, they came from the two greatest aristocratic families of the Southern
33 For the life and works of Shen Yiieh, see Richard Mather, ThePoet ShenYueh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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that had produced a succession of prime dynasties-families ministers, generals, scholars, poets, calligraphers, and artists. The elite naturally looked upon these two young poets as trend setters. Indeed, the contemporary critic Chung Jung ranked their contribution to the making of tonal prosody above that of Shen Yiieh.34 Wang Jung was a young genius who forfeited his life at the age of twenty-six as the result of a foolhardy attempt to put the Prince of Chin-ling on the throne. A short life means a thin corpus. Therefore in order to observe tonal prosody at the first stage its development, we need to concentrate on the poetry of Hsieh T'iao, supplementing it when necessary with the work of Shen Yuieh and Wang Jung. Hsieh T'iao came from the same family as Hsieh Ling-yiin, and each was regarded as the finest poet of his time.35 The difference in their poetry can to a large extent be attributed to the shift in literary ambience during the seventy odd years separating them. Hsieh the elder was born at the ancestral estate in Chekiang and returned there whenever his official career suffered a setback. In many of his famous poems, he assumes the persona of a lonely traveler, enjoying the scenery as he hikes along mountain trails or sails along craggy shores-all the while lamenting the absence of an understanding friend. As we have already seen (p. 393), it was necessary for these and other poems written in the provinces to be transmitted to the capital: "Whenever one of his poems arrived [from Kuei-chi] the high and low around the City all rushed to have it copied, and overnight it was read by the gentry and commoners alike. " In sharp contrast, Hsieh T'iao was born right in the capital, knew the flavor of palace life from childhood, and became famous in court circles at the age of fifteen. When he was establishing his reputation with his superbly crafted couplets and innovative prosody, he was more often than not sitting in the pavilion of a luxuriant private garden in the company of such men as the Prince of Chin-ling, his younger brother the Prince of Sui, Shen Yuieh, or Wang Jung. In short, Hsieh T'iao was very much a creature of the literary salons, and no O 34 Shih-p'in, "Third Preface," the passage beginning with tWiM M7Y j "Wang Jung initiated (the notions of 'tones' and 'defects'), and Hsieh T'iao and Shen Yuieh stirred up its waves." 35 See Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties,pp. 112-45 for an excellent discussion of Hsieh T'iao's poetry.

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salon was then more prestigious than that frequently held by the Prince of Chin-ling at his suburban villa outside the capital Chienk' ang. The collective enterprise of the salon was to compose poetry. Sometimes the assembled poets wrote on the same topic, for example, "'On the Zither,'" "'On the Lute,'" "'On the Brazier,'" "'On the Lamp, " or "On the Candle. "36 Sometimes they pooled their talents to compose linked verse by having each poet in turn contribute a quatrain.37 These gatherings were in effect poetry competitions, where budding literati could show off their skills in front of their elders. When the group assembled was large, the verse form had to be relatively short so that everyone could take a turn. Thus Hsieh T'iao's corpus contains a high proportion of quatrains and octave poems, many of which were composed for such social occasions. Competition also requires rules and standards. Formal rules such as those pertaining to tonal prosody and the strict rhyming of finals are objective and hence highly desirable as criteria for adjudicating is also why Recent Style poetry was made an contests-which obligatory part of the chin-shih examination during the T'ang. Since the senior judges were known to favor such rules, the literary salons of the capital and the provinces were soon transformed into humming laboratories for new prosodies. The emergence of tonal prosody was also fostered by other changes in fashions and aesthetic values, which were particularly evident in the palace gardens as settings for literary salons and a symbol of artistic excellence. Nature in Hsieh Ling-yiin's landscape poetry consists of the rugged mountains and swift streams of the south. The garden, unlike the landscape found in nature, is a selfcontained world perfected by human design. The literary analogue to this shift from natural scenery to man-made parks is apparent in Hsieh T'iao's replacement of Hsieh Ling-yiin's discursive mode of description with the self-contained vehicle of the quatrain or the octave, miniature forms ideally suited to encapsulate a miniaturized landscape. Moreover, just as the landscape architect joins nature and art to create the garden, so Hsieh T'iao fuses subjective emo36 These are titles of poems by Shen Yiieh, WangJung, and Hsieh T'iao, cited in Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties, p. 124. 37 See Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties, p. 139 for an example of linked verse.

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tion and objective description, whereas Hsieh Ling-yiin tends to keep them apart. Carry this process of fusion one step further and we find the principle of formal symmetry, already apparent in Hsieh Ling-yiin's arrangement of alliterative and rhyming bisyllabic expressions and semantic categories, being extended to the design of the palace garden and thence to the patterning of tonal features of the poem as a whole. For an aristocrat such as Hsieh T'iao brought up exclusively in refined surroundings, everything in life should approach the perfection of a well-wrought urn. This is indeed his view of literature when he says, "Good poetry should be round and beautiful; it should roll and turn like a bead."38 What then did the first generation of experimental poets know about tonal prosody? The answer can be stated in terms of the first four of the traditional list of "eight defects. " Takagi has shown that Shen Yiieh and his immediate followers had already put "raised tail" and "crane's knee" into effect.39 As will be shown later in the section on "Sanskrit Contributions to the Making of Recent Style Prosody," the joint application of "raised tail" and "crane's knee" generated a binary opposition between level and deflected tones in the final syllables-an opposition that then spread to the other positions in the poem. The prohibition against "wasp's waist" was never observed in the Recent Style poetry of the T'ang and the meaning of the term is still controversial. Among the first four defects, only "level head" still remains to be discussed. In the mature tonal prosody informing the Recent Style poetry of the T'ang, the second and fourth syllables of a quatrain observe the following pattern, which will hereafter be referred to as Pattern 1: O A O B O / O B O A 0 // 0 B O A 0 / 0 A O B O A (level) and B (deflected) are opposite with respect to level and deflected tones and 0 is optional. In Regulated Verse, the first quatrain follows this pattern and is repeated for the second. Two prosodic rules are involved here: the second and the fourth syllables of a line should be opposite with respect to level and deflected; and the second and seventh syllables of the couplet should be similarly opposed. The latter is the prohibition against "level head."
38 39

Li Yen-shou, Nan-shih, 22.609.

See note 8.

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Previous scholarship has shown that the obligatory opposition between the second and fourth syllables was one of the first rules put into effect by Shen Yiieh and his immediate followers. But the role of "level head" for these poets is less clear.40 There are many couplets by Shen Yiieh, Hsieh T'iao, and WangJung with the pattern 0 A 0 B 0 / 0 A 0 B 0, which shows that during the first stage, "level head" has not yet been established. Hsieh T'iao, however, wrote four quatrains that totally conform to Pattern 1. There are also at least two octave poems by WangJung in which the pattern alternates between even lines and odd lines. For example:
EEO, rm-

ZMWO + O4 t t

0 A 0 B0 0 B0 A0

4XIE MntiM8 Th2fflTX 4, 3 50t: tA #M1

0 0 0 0 O 0

A0 B0 A0 B0

B0 A0 B0 A0

A 0 B0
B0 A0

Going up a High Terrace

The sightseer wishing to gaze afar, Mounts the steps and goes up a high terrace. Lotuses in the courtyard bloom during summer; Cassia trees by the window open their buds in autumn, The petals fly too low to get in; Birds scatter in the distance to pay a call. He returns to watch the cloud-decorated pillars, Whose shape sways back and forth with the moon. Scholars from the Ming on have been engaged in tracing the lineage of Recent Style prosody, and their verdict has usually been that Hsieh T'iao and his contemporaries failed to advance to the level of T'ang Regulated Verse.4" Specifically these scholars charged them
Takagi, " Liu-ch'ao lii-shih. " (FI1) 4.61-62; Li Chih-fang Hu Ying-lin -f1W (1551-1602), Shihsou (neip'ien) N shih chu &V I334M (Hong Kong: Wan-yu t'u-shu kung-ssu, f t:t, Hsieh Hsuan-ch'eng pp. 38-49. 1968), in the section "Hsieh T'iao shih yen-chiu" ME i,
40 41

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with violating the prohibition against "level head." Surely this is an anachronistic offense since the poets, living a hundred years before the T'ang, had no way to foresee the outcome of their experiments. In light of the evidence outlined above, a more judicious assessment would be that Hsieh T'iao and Wang Jung were asking each other, "Should we consider 'level head' a defect?" To that extent they were aware of this prosodic rule. Another contribution Hsieh T'iao made to the development of Recent Style poetry is a preference for the shorter forms of verse. For example, among the 130-odd shih poems by him, sixteen are quatrains and forty-two are octave poems, whereas among Hsieh Ling-yun's seventy-odd shih poems, only five are quatrains and two are octave poems. The trend started by Hsieh T'iao was to become even more pronounced during the next fifty years. In summary, the first generation of experimental poets introduced prohibitions against "raised tail" and "crane's knee," explored the issue of "level head," and established the quatrain and the octave poem as the preferred formed of pentasyllabic verse. In the process of Sinicizing Sanskrit meter, they also instituted "light" and "heavy" as the prosodic categories for a new type of poetry. But they left the completion of Recent Style prosody to the next generation of experimental poets. The year 502, when Hsiao Yen began his long reign as Emperor Wu of Liang, marks the beginning of a .new era. By then just about all the prominent members of the first generation of experimental poets had passed away-Wang Jung in 494, Hsieh T'iao in 499, and Fan Yiin in 502. Shen Yiieh did live to 513, but he lost his influence at court after 502 and spent the last years of his life in semiseclusion. During the first few decades of Emperor Wu's reign, it seemed that the prosodic revolution, which started out with a bang, would peter out with a whimper. Providence then intervened. In 531 the heir apparent Prince Chao-ming, named Hsiao T'ung (501-31), died as the result of a boating accident. Hsiao Kang was immediately summoned to the capital and installed as the crown prince at the age of twentyseven.42 The two brothers had vastly different poetic tastes. Hsiao
Ti (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976) provides useful inJohn Marney, LiangChien-wen formation about Hsiao Kang but fails to mention his contribution to the development of tonal prosody.
42

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T'ung preferred the more orthodox literature and classics to the ornate and sensual poetry then in vogue. Although he did experiment with tonal prosody to some extent, he was not in favor of it. Hsiao Kang, in contrast, belonged entirely to the avant garde. He was partial to Palace Style Poetry, a genre that specializes in the sensuous and erotic depiction of palace ladies. Even more important, he was a dedicated champion and accomplished practitioner of tonal prosody. When he was made crown prince, the poets in his circle become dominant members of the literary establishment: his two tutors Yu Chien-wu and Hsii Ch'ih (427-551); their two sons Hsii Ling and Yu Hsin, and Hsiao Kang's younger brother Hsiao I (508-54, Prince of Hsiang-tung and later Emperor Yuian). This generation of experimental poets, under the patronage of the crown prince Hsiao Kang, continued the revolution started by Shen Yiieh, and in due time formulated the canonical prosodic pattern of Regulated Verse. The program to develop a new prosody based on tonal distinction was controversial from the start. A few years after Shen Yiieh issued his manifesto on tonal prosody, there was the exchange of letters between him and his critic Lu Chueh. Of the two major systematic works on literary criticism of the time, Liu Hsieh's Wen-hsin tiao-lung, especially in the chapter on sound rules, was squarely behind Shen Yiieh, whereas ChungJung's Shihp 'in (PoetryRankings) attacked tonal prosody as being cumbersome and artificial, and put down Shen Yiieh and Hsieh T'iao by awarding them mediocre grades. Soon the entire literary world was embroiled in this controversy. After he mounted the throne, Emperor Wu regarded the controversy with studied aloofness, as the following oft-repeated story reveals. Happening one day upon the courtier Chou She (469-524), the emperor asked, "What are the 'four tones' all about?" Chou She responded with four words illustrating each of the four in sequence, "[Your Majesty is] Son of Heaven, sage and wise" (t'ientzu sheng-chei "Nevertheless," the account concludes, "to fl. the end of his life the emperor never followed or made any use of tonal rules. " The story presumably was intended to illustrate Emperor Wu's ignorance of, and disapproval towards, tonal prosody. But as Richard Mather has observed, the emperor was feign-

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ing ignorance.43 A member of the Prince of Chin-ling's salon as a young man, he certainly knew what the group was attempting to do. Moreover, he avoided "raised tail" eighty percent of the time, a higher percentage than the poets who preceded him.44 Had he been truly ignorant of the four tones this would have been impossible. Emperor Wu had good reasons to appear uninterested in prosodic matters. As the founding emperor, he had to unite all factions and avoid unnecessary controversy, especially one in which his two oldest living sons, Hsiao T'ung and Hsiao Kang, were aligned on opposite sides. Another reason is that, upon mounting the throne, Emperor Wu sought to distance himself from the power group formerly associated with the Prince of Chin-ling, and especially from its senior surviving member, Shen Yiieh. Finally, as a matter of state policy, the emperor tried to give equal support to Confucianism and Buddhism.45 It would have been highly impolitic for him to be openly associated with a foreign-inspired fashion in prosody. With the emperor not taking an active role in the conflict, leadership in the literary world devolved upon the crown prince, the position held by Hsiao T'ung (Prince Chao-ming) before 531 and Hsiao Kang after 531. Hsiao T'ung is famous as the editor of the Wen hsuan (Literary Selections, hereafter WH). A work containing both prose and verse arranged under thirty-seven heads, it is rightly regarded by later ages as the Anthology par excellence. Its contents also reveal the intense ongoing struggle between the supporters of New Poetry and its critics. For example, the WHprizes Hsieh Lingyiin (42 poems) over Shen Yuieh (17 poems) and Hsieh T'iao (21 poems). In making their selection, Hsiao T'ung and his co-editors were following the lead of Chung Jung, the critic of tonal prosody, who in the Shih p 'in gave an A grade to Hsieh the elder but a B grade to Shen Yiieh and Hsieh the younger. When Shen Yuieh made his grand survey of past literary giants in the afterword to the "Biography of Hsieh Ling-yiin," he did not even mention T'ao Ch'ien. Hsiao T'ung not only admired T'ao Ch'ien intensely, but
Richard Mather, Shen Yueh,p. 38. See the statistics cited under Rule 2 in the section entitled "The Rise of the Ch'i-Liang Style. " shih, pp. 476-77. 45 T'ang Yung-t'ung, Fo-chiao
43 44

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included his poems in the WH and set out to edit his collected more important for our purworks. Even more shocking-and pose-is that the WH gives no indication whatsoever that tonal prosody was in the process of being invented. To be sure, a few poems by Hsieh T'iao in the anthology incidentally conform to some of the tonal rules,46 but they are buried among other non-conforming poems under the same head. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Hsiao T'ung and his associate editors went out of their way to repudiate Shen Yiieh's program. Had the prince survived the boating accident of 531 to succeed his father to the throne, tonal prosody would almost certainly have been suppressed and then forgotten. Fortunately history took a different turn. After Hsiao Kang became the crown prince in 531, he mounted a vigorous campaign to reinstate and further develop Shen Yiieh's program. The lasting testimony to his efforts is an anthology of love poetry, the Yu-t'ai edited by Hsii Ling under Hsiao Kang's patronage. The hsin-yung,47 title "New Songs" (hsin-yung) immediately announces the contemporary orientation of the anthology. Of the 656 poems in the collection, seventy-five percent belong to the century or so before its compilation. The poets represented by the largest number of poems are members of the royal family, Emperor Wu (41), Hsiao Kang (39), Hsiao I (11). For the late Prince Chao-ming, only one poem, undoubtedly a token, is included. The New Songs thus repudiates not only Prince Chao-ming, but his orthodox view of literature as well. Highest on the list among poets outside the royal family are Shen Yiieh (37) and Hsieh T'iao (17), with Hsieh Ling-yiin (1) demoted to the bottom of the list, exactly the opposite of the ranking in the WH. Before sponsoring the compilation of the New Songs, Hsiao Kang had written a letter stating his views of literature to his younger brother Hsiao I, then Prince of Hsiang-tung.48 In the letter Hsiao Kang said: "And so by copying Hsieh [Ling-yiin] one does not attain his vitality or his vividness. All one achieves is his verbosi46 E.g., Hsieh T'iao's "Yu Tung T'ien" iVAkW, included in the WH under L "Sightseeing." The tonal pattern of this poem has been analyzed by Takagi. 4' For an English translation see Ann Birrell, New Songsfrom a jade Terrace (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). 48 Text, Nan-shih,50.1247-8; English translation, John Marney, Chien-wen Ti, pp. 80-81.

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ty (OC)." And: "As for contemporary writings, the poetry of Hsieh T'iao and Shen Yuieh and the prose of Jen Fang and Lu Ch'ui are indeed the crown of belle-lettres and the models for documentary writings." Not surprisingly, the New Songs edited under his patronage expresses his literary tastes. In terms of formal features, the New Songs shows unmistakable signs that it was intended as the prime exhibit of the ongoing experimentation in tonal prosody. An overwhelming majority of the poems is in pentasyllabic verse, the stable basis of tonal rules. Of the 656 poeins, 515 are no more than twenty lines long. The majority of the poems have only four lines (157 poems); the next largest group, eight lines (129 poems); and the next, ten lines (85 poems), thus continuing the trend towards brevity started by Hsieh T'iao. Finally, in the poems by members of Hsiao Kang's immediate circle (Hsiao Kang himself, his younger brother Hsiao I, Yu Chien-wu, Yu Hsin, and Hsii Ling), conformity to tonal rules in various combinations is very much in evidence. There is also reason to suspect that the editor Hsii Ling had a hand in injecting tonal rules into the revised version of "Southeast Flies the Peacock."49 When Hsiao Kang became the crown prince in 531, history came around full circle. Shen Yiieh's revolutionary program, after an interregnum of almost three decades, again became the dominant vision of the literary establishment. Nothing encapsulates better the contribution made by members of Hsiao Kang's court to the making of Recent Style prosody than the following list of Regulated Verse by them: Yu Chien-wen (ca. 487-551) Hsii Ch'ih (472-551) Yu Hsin (513-81) In Attendance at a Banquet fa On a Writing Brush U* Looking at the Moon from a Boat 74t@A Odes on Paintings on a Screen Nos. 11 and 15 R&IlEF)R--M t-, tEfi:

49 Tsu-Lin Mei, "Ts'ung shih-Ii ho yii-fa lai k'an Chiao Chung-ch'ing ch'i te hsieh-tso " f';fq, CYYY53.2 (1982): 227-49. i nien-tai" "Mfi+

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Hsii Ling (507-82)

To the Tune "Breaking a Willow Branch" Vrth Farewell to Mr. Mao of Yungchia II 7* Cooling off in the Backyard F'9 A Courtyard on a Hill in Spring Night *fLUJ1A Looking at Mountain Lights at Night from the Hall of Triple Excellence PI

Chiang Tsung (518-90)

In addition to these poems, which conform perfectly to the tonal rules of Regulated Verse, many other poems by the same men would, except for a few minor lapses, be acceptable as specimens of Recent Style poetry. Historical facts thus contradict the view that the theories of Shen Yiieh and his cohorts found few followers "during their own day, and at least for the next hundred years. "" The movement to create tonal prosody gained support from the leaders of the literary establishment of two dynasties, Hsiao Tzu-liang, Shen Yuieh, and Hsiao Kang, and attracted the two most talented poets of the period between 450 and 600, Hsieh T'iao and Yu Hsin. Prosody, being a social convention, is an invention whose making requires a critical mass of like-minded poets. As Takagi has definitively stated, "Fifty or sixty years after Shen Yiieh announced his program, the foundation for the prosody of Regulated Verse was firmly laid. "

THE MAKING

OF RECENT

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Our chronological study of the rise of tonal prosody will begin with a poem by Yu Chien-wu. This poem, though not particularly outstanding, is one of the earliest specimens of Regulated Verse.5" Written sometime before 551, it provides a convenient landmark to measure the distance traveled since Shen Yiieh launched his revolutionary program half a century before. In the following scheme
50
51

Richard Mather, Shen Yueh,p. 37. Ting Fu-pao, Shih, p. 1339.

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and elsewhere below, A =Deflected; B = Level; 0 = Optional; (R) = Rhyme; the Deflected tones are xl = d = departing, x2=r= rising, x3 = e = entering; and y = Level. 13tM^:, f ff1; 9_ 14 kDDLLd L L D D L LLLDr D D D LL LD LLe L L D D L L L D D r D D D LL OAOBx, O BO A y O B O Ax2 O AO By O A O Bx3 O BO A y O B O Ax2 O AO By (R) (R) (R) (R)

c A rA
83aBbXj fkmntx Wi*iTP "I m 26 E4J

In Attendance at a Banquet Bathed in the Way, I meet a veritable sage, Raising our goblets, I join with leading worthies; Kindly breezes reveal a lovely scene. Auspicious influence moves propitious clouds. Yellow leaves rustle on autumn trees, Dark lotuses sink into the cold pond; My fate does not deserve the royal favor, Which I swear to repay in this life. ("someone about to be a sage") in the first line is Chiangsheng*PLn a term of praise reserved for the crown prince, which suggests that the heir apparent was the host of the banquet. The poem begins with three antithetical couplets, more than the minimum two middle couplets required for Regulated Verse. Overall, the poem conforms to the tonal prosody for Recent Style poetry. What Yui Chienwu (who was a member of Hsiao Kang's court both before and after the latter became Emperor Chien-wen) did was to sing praises of the prince in metered verse, that is, essentially to compose a floka in Chinese. The column on the right shows the tonal patterns of Regulated Verse, which operate in terms of two separate systems: that of the A's and B's for even-numbered syllables, and that of x's and y's for the final syllables. An A or an x may be either level or deflected in tone, A is always the opposite of B, and x the opposite of y. A and y

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are independent variables. The poet's choice of value for two crucial syllables, the second syllable of the first line and the final syllable of the second line, substantially determines the pattern of the entire poem. The tonal prosody of Regulated Verse gives structural importance to the principle of binary opposition for tones, which works on three levels: the line, the couplet, and the quatrain. Within a line, A's are opposite to B's; within a couplet, the pattern of the second line is opposite to that of the first; and within a quatrain, the A's and B's of the second couplet are the mirror-reversed images of those in the first. Balancing this principle of opposition in the tones is a principle of similarity embodied in the rhymes. The latter principle is further complemented by the requirement that the final syllables of odd-numbered lines avoid the rhyme-words on the one hand, and show maximum tonal differentiation among themselves on the other (hence xi, x2, x3 in the diagram instead of just x); together these requirements give exclusive prominence to the rhymes. The musical effect of Regulated Verse may be compared to a two-part composition, in which one part beats out a constant rhythm while the other part simultaneously plays a melodic variation. To recapitulate, for each of the two quatrains in Regulated Verse, the tonal patterns are:52 O O O O A 0 BO B 0 AO B xl A y A x2

By

Our next task is to analyze the individual rules for these patterns. Then we shall determine when each rule emerged and relate it to
52 G. B. Downer and A. C. Graham, "Tonal Patterns in Chinese Poetry," BSOAS26.1 (1963): 145-48, defined the tonal patterns of Recent Style poetry as 0 A y B x / 0 B x A y 11 O B y A x / 0 A x B y. Our diagram differs from theirs in two respects. First, Wang Li has shown that during the T'ang dynasty it was still common practice for the final syllables of successive odd-numbered lines not to be in the same one of the four tones (Han-yushih-l hsueh A* M* [Shanghai: Shang-hai chiao-yii ch'u-pan-she, 1962], pp. 119ff.); hence instead of two x's for the final syllables of lines 1 and 3, we have xl and x2. Second, Downer and Graham's alternation between the third and fifth syllables, not attested in actual practice, is eliminated.

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statements in contemporary texts on prosody. But first we must examine the level/deflected distinction, which the majority of patterns presupposes. Distinction Sanskrit Ingredientsin the Level/Deflected The history of the level/deflected distinction raises six separate but related questions. First, when did p'ing and tse first appear as terms for prosodic categories? Chou Fa-kao quotes a poem by the recluse Han Shan that contains the lines: OTf0TINXM, R-L,=I;ffi, "You don't know how to place level and deflected [syllables] / But just arrange words as they come."53 Han Shan's dates are uncertain, but a conservative guess would place him in the late eighth or early ninth century. However, the terms p 'ing and tse also turn up in an earlier text, Yin Fan's Rf preface to the Ho-yuiehying-lingchiiMa an anthology of poetry dating from about 753. He writes:
The poems of Ts'ao Chih and Liu Cheng have much straightforward language, but few antithetical couplets; at times five syllables in a row will be deflected, or ten yet they still have an enduring syllables will all be level (fi-s1U, qtJJAT);

value.

Thus in the absence of further evidence, we may tentatively conclude that p 'ing and tse first appeared in the eighth century as terms for prosodic categories. Second, when did the level/deflected distinction first appear, irrespective of the terms used to designate it? This question is different from the first, though the two are often confused in the literature on the subject of Regulated Verse prosody. The earliest passage testifying to the level/deflected distinction, preserved in BK 88 (under No. 3, "Wasp's Waist"), comes from the hand of Liu T'ao, who flourished about 545. Liu Shan-ching quotes from him as follows:
Liu T'ao has also said that "of the four tones, the entering tone is the rarest. As to
the remaining two tones, they should be combined with the entering tone, for exampleatE tsgjang,a ctsjang, f; tsjangD, tsijkD, oriEjctsja, M Ctsja, ff tsja', 1tsjakD.54 The level tone is long and drawn-out and is used most frequently. Compared with Chou Fa-kao, "Shuo p'ing-tse. " To indicate the four tones in Middle Chinese, we adopt the traditional method of marking the four corners, beginning with the lower left and proceeding clockwise.
53 54

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the other three, the syllables of this tone constitute a majority. Within a fivesyllable line, there are usually two or three of them...."

In context, "the remaining two tones" refer to the rising tone and the departing tone. So Liu T'ao says that the rising, departing, and entering tones should be grouped together to form one prosodic category, to be opposed to the other prosodic category consisting of the level tone alone. We know that the level/deflected distinction was put into effect no later than 551; witness the tonal patterns of Yu Chien-wu's "In Attendance at a Banquet." Another indication that the distinction was established sometime between 500 and 550 can be drawn from Takagi's statistical evidence concerning various tone rules, most of which are based on the level-deflected distinction, as will be discussed in the next section. Third, what were the inventors of tonal prosody thinking when they embarked upon the program that eventually led to the adoption of the level/deflected distinction? We have suggested that one of their aims was to duplicate the long/short contrast in Sanskrit, and that the key link is the terms "light" and "heavy" used by Shen Yiieh. We will now show that up to the eighth century Chinese writers still understood these terms in Shen Yuieh's sense. In Buddhajiva's Chinese translation of the Vinayaof Mahisasaka, completed in 423-24, the terms laghu and guru were translated quite literally as ch'ing ("light") and chung ("heavy"). Some sixty years later, Shen Yiieh used the terms ch'ing and chungin his manifesto on tonal prosody when he declared "within a line, initials and finals must be different; within a couplet, light (ch'ing) and heavy (chung) sounds must be distinct." Li Yen-shou (?-628), the author of the Nan-shih (History of the SouthernDynasties), reported Shen Yiieh's position as follows:
Shen Yiieh and the others all used the notes kung and shang in writing verse, and regulated the rhymes by means of the four tones: level, rising, departing, and entering. There were [tonal defects to be avoided such as] level-headed, raised tail, wasp's waist, and crane's knee. Within five syliables the initials and finals must be distinct; within a couplet, the notes chiao and chih must be dissimilar [for each correr ).55 sponding position], rP, 'E9 ifilf-, f
i5Nan-shih,

48.1195.

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In paraphrasing Shen Yiieh's statement, Li Yen-shou uses "the notes chiao and chih" as the equivalent of "the light and heavy sounds." Since "chiao and chih" refers to tones, this means Li understood "the light and heavy sounds" as signifying types of tones. A passage by Wang Ch'ang-ling (698-?) in Section 114 of the BK also uses the terms "light" and "heavy":
There are several ways of using words. There are light (i) words and heavy (1) words, medium-heavy (ir4@) words and medium-light (4 4t) words.56 There are cases in which heavy and impure (100) words can be used, but light and pure (iA) cannot be used. Everything requires a detailed rule. If you use a heavy word and then oppose it with a light word, that is fine. A composition will be stable if the first and fifth words are light and pure. Even if the middle three words are heavy and impure, no harm will be done. For example: A-tR ElJ1L ckdu cddi ctd cpji cpjung ctjdu fiZjetDtsiauD pkD clj3m

On the tall tower, much sad wind; Morning sun lights up the north woods. If all five words are light, then the line will be unrestrained and have no place to stop and anchor. If all five words are heavy, then the line will be dark and murky.

The second line in the couplet, with the first and fifth syllables in the level tone and the other three syllables in deflected tones, is the one described in the text as having "the first and fifth words light and pure, and the middle three words heavy and impure. " The first line with all syllables in the level tone is the one described as having all five words light. Thus ch 'ing ch'ing GM ("light and pure") and chung cho IN ("heavy and impure") are respectively synonymous bisyllables of ch 'ing ("light") and chung("heavy"). The latter terms refer to the same opposition later referred to by the terms "level" and "deflected." The following passage from the NS (XVI. 132-35) illustrates not only that Wang Ch'ang-ling uses the Sanskrit-derived terms
56 The concept of four grades of heaviness, mentioned but not applied, is probably modin AncientIndia (London: Oxford Unieled after Sanskrit theory. W. Sidney Allen, Phonetics (XVIII.41-44): versity Press, 1953), p. 86 cites the following from the 1?k-prdtiydkhya "(A syllable containing) a long vowel is heavy; and heavier if accompanied by a consonant; (a syllable containing) a short vowel with a (preceding) consonant is light; and lighter without a consonant."

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"light" and "heavy, " but that his phraseology and format of presentation are also modeled after Indian treatises on poetics:
132. The feet of Pathya [regular varieties of the iloka] are thus of various types; in the remaining [types of Anustup] even and odd feet may be made up with other triads (trika). 133. In this metre a triad ending in a heavy syllable (i.e. ma, ra,ya, sa) or consisting of light syllables (i.e. na) is never to occur (lit. desired) after the first syllable, while after the fourth syllable a short syllable must occur (lit. is prescribed). 134. If in the feet of a Pathya there are three heavy syllables at the end it is called [Anustup] Vaktra. Example: I 135: danta-ksatadharam subhrujdgara-gldna-netrantam vaktramll prdtah sambhoga-khinnamte darsanijya-tamam 0 fair lady, the lips being bitten by teeth, eyes being languid due to keeping awake, your face has become most charming, in the morning after the exhaustion in love's enjoyment [at night].57

In both the BK and the NS, a permissible pattern is described first and then illustrated with short verses. While the former speaks of three heavy syllables in the middle, the latter refers to three heavy syllables at the end. The terms ch'ing ("light") and chung ("heavy") are also used in other senses in Chinese phonological texts. In the opening passage of Annen's description of T'ang tones in the Hsi-t'an tsang(880 A.D.), "light" refers to the allotones associated with voiceless initials, and "heavy" refers to the allotones associated with voiced initials.58 For example, the "light" allotone of the level tone is what is now called the yin p 'ing M tone, and the "heavy" alloton-e of the level tone is what is now called the yang p'ing - tone. In Section 10 of the BK, "light" and "heavy" respectively refer to unaspirated and aspirated initials.59 And in the Sung treatise Ch'i-yin luiehAFM, "light" and "heavy" stand for the presence or absence of the -umedial, equivalent in usage to the standard terms k'ai r "open, unrounded" and ho "closed, rounded."60 Of these three interpretations, the first may be considered an extension of the original
-

Ghosh's translation, p. 290. See Tsu-Lin Mei, "Tone and Prosody in Middle Chinese and the Origin of the Rising Tone," HJAS 30 (1970): 98-101. 59 For an explanation of the Sanskrit origin of this usage, see Jao Tsung-i, "T'ung-yiin," p. 225. 60 (Taipei: Kuang-wen shu-chui, Tung T'ung-ho 1RMP , Han-yuiyin-yun-hsueh W' E 1968), p. 124.
57
58

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sense of Shen Yuieh and Wang Ch'ang-ling. The other two are late is, non-prosodic-contexts usages occurring in phonological-that and therefore irrelevant to our discussion. In sum, the prosodic terms "light" and "heavy" in Shen Yiieh's manifesto acquired their technical meaning from Sanskrit antecedents and were still understood in that sense up to the eighth century. The fourth question is what was the phonetic criterion for distinguishing the level tone from deflected tones? The question cannot be answered simply or directly. To answer it we would need to know what values the four tones had in the dialect of Chien-k'ang when the level/deflected distinction was first established. The earliest interpretable description of the four tones, by Yuan Chinch'ing, is preserved in Annen's Hsi-t'an tsang.6' Yulan was a Chinese savant who went to Japan in 735, and what he described was clearly a Mandarin dialect, probably that of Ch'ang-an. But the level/ deflected distinction was first established between 500 and 550 in Chien-k'ang. Since one cannot assume that the tonal values of sixth-century Chien-k'ang are the same as eighth-century Ch'angan, and since comparative reconstruction of tonal values is beyond our present capacity, the question concerning the phonetic criterion for the level/deflected distinction is moot. Nevertheless, let us discuss briefly what has been said on the subject by previous scholars, including one of the present authors. The criterion for distinguishing the level tone from the deflected tones is, for Chou Fa-kao, length; for Tsu-Lin Mei, pitch; and for Ting Pang-hsin, prolongability.62 In the forms in which they were presented, all three theories depend upon evidence drawn from T'ang or post-T'ang sources and therefore suffer from anachronism. A revised version of Ting's theory, which we present in this paragraph, may be defensible. Since the level tone was called "level" at the time of Shen Yuieh, we may assume that it had a level contour then, and hence could be prolonged without losing its contour. Note that Liu T'ao of the sixth century also said "the level tone is long and drawn out +Wtz. " The entering tone, with its -p, -t, -k endings, could not be prolonged; nor could the rising and
See note 58. Chou Fa-kao, "P'ing-tse"; Tsu-Lin Mei, "Tone and Prosody"; Ting Pang-hsin, "P'ing-tse hsin k'ao" DTQWi*, CYYY47.1 (1975): 1-15.
62

61

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departing tones, since they were likely to be contoured. Here we must distinguish what the actual tonal values of the four tones were (which we do not know) from what the phonetic features of the four tones were perceived to be. Since in instituting the level/deflected distinction, the Chinese of the fifth and sixth centuries were trying to duplicate the long/short opposition in Sanskrit, they were likely to have perceived the distinguishing phonetic feature of the level tone as long or prolongable and that of the deflected tones as short or not prolongable. The fifth question is how did the level/deflected distinction arise? That is, what led to the bifurcation of the four tones into two prosodic categories, with the level tone constituting one category by itself and the other three tones constituting the other category? The theory just proposed is tentative. There is no conclusive evidence to indicate that the inventors of tonal prosody went about looking for phonetic criteria to classify the four tones into prosodic categories. Even if the phonetic criterion of prolongability was used, it could have been a post hocjustification of a classification arrived at through trial and error. For these reasons, we would like to propose an alternative hypothesis, which may complement the theory based on an equally hypothetical phonetic criterion. Let us begin with the observation that Middle Chinese has more words in the level tone than those in any one of the other three tones. Liu T'ao alludes to this when he says: "The level tone . . . is used most frequently. Compared with the other three, the syllables of this tone constitute a majority. Within a five-syllable line, there are usually two or three of them. " Liu T'ao had the right intuition, but the actual figure is closer to 40%. According to Bruce Brooks, level-tone syllables account for 33% in one sample of Ts'ao Ts'ao's writing and 42% in another.63 Yui Min found the figure to be 43% in Hsi K'ang's "Letter to Shan Chui-yiian Renouncing Friendship" :5R ON Related is the fact that the Ch/'ieh-yiin(601 and the later Kuang-yun devote two chiian to level-tone A.D.) characters but only one chiianeach to characters in each of the other
63

Bruce Brooks, "Journey Towards the West: An Asian Prosodic Embassy in the Year
ed., Versification:Major Language Types, 1972), HJAS 35

1972" (review of W. K. Wimsatt,

(1975): 241.
64

Yii Min, Chung-kuoyii-wen-hsueh lun-wen hsuian, p. 305.

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three tones. The percentage of characters contained in each chiianof the Kuang-yun is: "Level Tone (Part 1)," 23.9%; "Level Tone (Part 2)," 22.1%; "Rising Tone," 17%; "Departing Tone," 19. 1%; and "Entering Tone," 17.7%; this gives a total of 46% for level-tone characters. The most important consequence of tonal asymmetry in the lexicon is that the poetic corpora from the Han to the end of the Period of Disunion always have more poems with level-tone rhymes than rhymes in the other tones. For example, in the pentasyllabic shih poems of Hsieh Ling-yiin, those with leveltone rhymes account for 52% of the total; the figure is 50% for Hsieh T'iao. Poems rhyming level-tone syllables, then, occupied a dominant position in verse writing. By making the Chinese realize that one should avoid yamaka or infelicitous repetition, the Sanskrit theory of poetic defects had a clear role in calling attention to the numerical superiority of the level tone. As we will see in the next sub-section, the first result of this Sanskrit-induced experimentation was the formulation of rules calling for the avoidance of "raised tail" and "crane's knee." Both rules are concerned with non-rhyming final syllables, which by convention occur in odd lines. "Raised tail" forbids the non-rhyming final syllables to have the same tone as the rhyming syllables. "Crane's knee" forbids the two non-rhyming syllables of a quatrain to have the same tone. Both rules are designed to give exclusive prominence to the rhyming syllables, which, as we have just seen, are predominantly in the level tone. An octave conforming to both rules would look like this (where y = Level; x = Deflected [rising, departing, or entering]; superscripts indicate pairs of nonrhyming lines; and for all pairs of xi and xi, xi?xit in tone): 1. 3. 5. 7. 0 0 0 0 xI 0 0 0 0 x1l 0 0 0 0 x2 2. 4. 6. 8. 0 0O y 0 0 0 0 y

0000y
0 0 0 0y

0 0 0 0x2'

In Yui Chien-wu's "In Attendance at a Banquet," for example, the final syllables of lines 1, 3, 5, and 7 are respectively in departing, rising, entering, and rising tones. Being familiar with the Sanskrit distinction between long and short syllables and its value as the prosodic basis for Buddhist verse,

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the Chinese at the time of Shen Yuieh were predisposed to view the tones in terms of binary opposition. Through reanalysis, poets would convert the defacto opposition between level and deflected syllables into a dejure opposition (where y = Level; x = Deflected): 1. 3. 5. 7. 0000x 000x 00O0x 00O0x 2. 4. 6. 8. 0000y 0000y 0000y 0000y

That is, instead of thinking of the opposition between the level tone on the one hand and the rising, departing, and entering tones on the other, they now thought of the same opposition as being between the level tone and the non-level tones. To express this new opposition, they sometimes would use the terms "light" and "heavy," and eventually would adopt the now standard terms "level" and "deflected." Since this opposition divided the lexicon into roughly equal halves, it soon spread to other prosodic positions of the poem. Finally, how did the prosodic terms p'ing ("level") and tse ("deflected") arise? In Dandin's KD, there occurs a pair of opposite terms-sama "level, even" (cognate to English "same") and visama "uneven, deflected"-used to characterize the phonological aspect of a verse.65 A verse is said to be "uneven" when a proportional combination of soft, harsh, or neutral ligatures is lacking. Otherwise it is "level." The Chinese equivalents of the terms, p'ing ("level") and tse ("deflected"), occur in the Biographiesof Eminent Monks, where they are used, along with other terms, to describe the chanting style employed by various fan-pai (MON) masters.66 Fa-lin was known for "level" pitches repeated over several lines (+MJ.RIj); Chih-hsin (446-505) was expert in using "deflected" pitches (PIUJ); Tao-lang's notes were slightly drawn-out (1J41), while Fa-jen's sounds were sudden and short (WVJ). Seng Pien, one of the principle chanting masters at the time of Hsiao Tzu-liang's reform of the fan-pai, was known for his innovation of a "broken" pitch (tNAl). This usage persisted into the Tun-huang manuscripts of the
Viparyaya no. 3, see Appendix IIE. TT50:414b-415a. The two syllables of the Chinese expressionfan-paitranscribe, respectively, the initial sounds of brahman (signifying "Sanskritic" or "Indic") and pdtha("recitation"). Hence, together they mean "recitation in an Indian mode or fashion."
65
66

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T'ang, in which some of the Chinese gdthds(chi-yii Xi;) are prefaced with notations such as p'ing ("level"), tse ("deflected"), p'ing tse ("level" and "deflected"), tse yin {1944 ("chant in deflected pitches"), tuan Di ("cut off"), and ching M ("?utra").67 Although we do not know how Buddhist hymns, or gdthds, were chanted or intoned, there can be no doubt that p 'ing, tse, and the other terms in these contexts refer to the performatory features of the piece as a whole-which corresponds exactly to the usage of sama and visama in the KD. Our preliminary answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paragraph, then, is that p 'ing and tse first acquired a technical usage in the context of Buddhist chanting, most likely as loan translations from Sanskrit during the fifth century. Three centuries later, during the T'ang, these terms became standard names for a pair of prosodic categories. The Biographies of Eminent Monks was written between 519 and 533; Dandin flourished between 660 and about 715. Clearly the KD could not be the direct source of the technical usage of p 'ing and tse in the Biographies.To complete the etymology, some further explanation needs to be added. The term visama already occurred in the NS (first century B.C. to first century A.D.) of Bharata as a general category of metrical defects. The opposite term, samatd("evenness"), did exist as a poetic virtue for Bharata (NS XVII.98), but he meant by it smoothness of expression. The converse of visama for Bharata was saukumdrya ("tenderness, delicacy"), by which he intended agreeably employed meters and well-connected euphonic conjunctions (NS XVII. 102). Thus in the earlier tradition sama and visama had not yet become technical terms expressing a dichotomy. Since the same applies to p'ing and tse in the Biographiesof Eminent Monks, we have reason to believe that the first Sanskrit source or sources for these Chinese terms followed the tradition of the NS. P'ing at the time was probably a translation of samatd, but tse at first was neither the opposite of p 'ing, nor did it have a sense equivalent to visama. Sanskrit influence then exerted its cumulative effect. When Dandin or one of his more recent predecessors established the contrast between sama and visama, the Chinese terms p'ing and tse also
67

Chou Fa-kao, "P'ing-tse. "

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became opposites. This chronology agrees with the fact that the earliest attested instance of p'ing and tse expressing any dichotomy did not occur until the eighth century. The replacement of ch'ing ("light")/chung ("heavy") by p'ing ("level")/tse ("deflected") as designations for the two prosodic categories may be seen as an instance of Sinicization; the latter terms describe the tones they name at least for the T'ang whereas the former are simply borrowed terms. In summary, the development of the level/deflected distinction may be divided into three stages. At the initial stage, Shen Yuieh and his followers conceived of the idea of bifurcating the four tones, in a manner yet to be defined, into two prosodic categories mirroring the "light"!'heavy" opposition in Sanskrit prosody. The scheme was then implemented sometime between 500 and 550, with the level tone constituting one category by itself and the other three tones constituting the other category. Two processes were probably involved in the implementation: the use of the opposition between prolongable and non-prolongable tones as a phonetic criterion, and reanalysis of the defacto opposition in the line-final syllables between the level and the other three tones. Finally, as p'ing ("level") and tse ("deflected") became terms expressing a dichotomy, they began to replace ch'ing ("light") and chung ("heavy") as the standard designations for these two prosodic categories in the eighth century. The Sanskrit ingredients in the making of the level-deflected distinction are conceptual, terminological, and phonological. The Indian theory of poetic defects supplied the inspiration for "raised tail" and "crane's knee," two of Shen Yuieh's "Eight Defects." The long/short contrast in Sanskrit vowels may have stimulated Chinese prosodists to look for a similar opposition in their own language. More importantly, laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy") provided both the terms and the concept of a dual opposition in prosody, which was later reinforced by the sama/visama contrast in the

KD.
The binary prosodic distinction described above should not be thought of as something altogether alien to Chinese verse and arbitrarily imposed upon it. John Lotz, after studying versification in many cultures, points out that in all the metrical systems he examined, "the phonological elements are grouped into two base classes,

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never more, although in principle much finer gradations would be possible."68 He concludes: "Dual opposition may prove to be a metrical universal or at least a universal tendency." Accordingly, when the Buddhist monks of the fifth century introduced the opposition between laghu and guru, they were not polluting the Chinese spirit but helping the Chinese to recollect, in the Platonic sense, a prosodic oppostion already present in their memory. The Rise of the Ch'i-Liang Style Earlier we saw that the tonal patterns of Regulated Verse are, for each of the quatrains: O A 0 B x1 / 0 B 0 A y

O B 0 A X2 / 0 A 0 B y
Our next task is to analyze these patterns into individual rules and, for each rule, to determine the time of its emergence through documentary and statistical evidence. Statistical evidence refers to the results of Takagi Masakazu and Lu Chih-wei, refined by Richard Bodman in his doctoral dissertation."9 Documentary evidence essentially consists of the relevant passages in the Bunkyo hifuron, abbreviated in this section as BK. Our procedure is governed by two considerations. One is methodological. There are various alternative ways of analyzing Recent Style prosody, but it seems self-evident that, everything else being equal, the method most able to reflect the actual historical process of origination should be preferred.70 The other consideration is typological. Given the immense difference between Classical Sanskrit and Middle Chinese, the Chinese could not have copied Sanskrit meter per se into their own language. The Sanskrit influence, if any, must have been of a structural sort, as it were, in the form of
68 John Lotz, "Elements of Versification," in W. K. Wimsatt, ed., Versification:Major Language Types (New York: New York University Press, 1972), p. 15. 69 , Wen,0t* "Shih lun Tu Fu lii-shih te ko-Iii" Xtf-gM:X Lu Chih-wei W4,1 (1962.4): 13-35; Bodman and Takagi, the items referred to in notes hsaeh p'ing-lun tr*0 6 and 7. This section and the next are adopted largely from Bodman's dissertation. 70 Wang Li in Han-yu shih-li hsiieh, pp. 74-75 describes Recent Style prosody in terms of combinations of four types of lines: (a) D D L L D, (A) D D D L L, (b) L L L D D, (B) L L D D L. His unnecessarily complicated description fails to reflect the historical factors governing

the evolution of the prosody.

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the "spirit" of the sloka. Analyzing the intrinsic features of Recent Style prosody into individual rules will help us to determine whether a particular component of the prosody had been affected by Sanskrit practices and, if so, whether by Sanskrit meter or the theory of poetic defects. Rule 1. The sequence of final syllables should be 0 R 0 R 0 R 0 R . . . and so forth, depending on the number of lines in the piece. Ting Pang-hsin's study of the rhymes in the Wei-Chin period makes clear that this pattern is the most common rhyme-scheme in use and dates from at least as early as Ts'ao Chih in the third century A.D.7"This rule and the uniform use of the five-syllable line are the legacies of the preceding era. Rule 2. All couplets should have the form 0 0 0 0 x /0 0 0 0 y, where x and y range over the four tones. This was the next prosodic rule to develop and is equivalent to the avoidance of "raised tail." BK 87 says: "In a five-syllable verse, the fifth and tenth syllables should not be in the same tone. (If they are), this is called 'raised tail. ' " Lu Chih-wei made a study of poems rhyming in level tone syllables and obtained the following results:

% of couplets
Author Juan Chi (210-63) Lu Chi (261-303) T'ao Ch'ien (364-433) Hsieh Ling-yiin (385-433) Pao Chao (412-66) Hsieh T'iao (464-99) Shen Yiieh (441-513) Hsiao Yen (464-549) Hsiao T'ung (501-31) Hsiao Kang (503-51) observing Rule 2 54% 71% 68% 66% 78% 100% 100% 81% 100% 100%

The above figures were obtained by sampling, so the actual percentages may vary by a few points. Takagi, for example, observed that,
7' Ting Pang-hsin, Chinese Phonology of the Wei-Chin Period (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1975), pp. 49-53.

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of the one hundred and fifty poems by Shen Yiieh, only three do not avoid "raised tail. " Incidentally, the above statistics also show that Emperor Wu of Liang (Hsiao Yen) and Prince Chao-ming (Hsiao T'ung) participated in tonal experimentation. To complement Lu Chih-wei's study, we have undertaken an analysis of all the poems by Shen Yiieh and Yii Chien-wu rhyming in deflected-tone syllables, and found that close to one hundred percent of the couplets observe Rule 2. The importance of this rule may also be inferred from its wide applicability to different genres of rhymed and unrhymed compositions, and from comments in BK 87 such as:
This defect of raised tail was sometimes committed before the Ch'i and Liang dynasties; since then there have been no violators. This is an enormous defect. Literary men would regard anyone who committed this fault as one who had not yet crossed the path of literature.

Rule 3. In a sequence of final syllables, no two successive syllables in odd-numbered lines should be in the same one of the four tones. Thus, if y represents the tone of the rhyming syllable and xl, x2, and X3 the remaining tones, the succession of final syllables might look like: xl, y, x2, y, X3, y, x1 . . . and so forth, depending on the length of the poem. This rule is just another way of stating the avoidance of "crane's knee," which is defined in BK 89 as follows:
In five-syllable verse, the fifth syllable should not be in the same tone as the fifteenth syllable. That is to say, when the two heads are fine and the middle is thick, it resembles a crane's knee; for this reason there is a defect in the midst of the poem.

"Crane's knee" was first mentioned by Shen Yiieh's critic Chung Jung (?-552). He stated rather peevishly, "As for the level, rising, departing, and entering tones, I am defective and unable to employ them; while 'wasp's waists' and 'crane's knees' may be had in every village."72 Examples of the avoidance of crane's knee are found as early as Shen Yiueh, but it appears not to have become a general rule until the latter half of the sixth century, as the following statistics from Takagi suggest:
72

Shih-p 'in (SPPY ed,), chiuan-hsia,la-b.

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Author Hsieh Ling-yiin (385-433) Hsieh T'iao (464-99) Shen Yuieh (441-513) Hsiao Kang (503-51) Yii Chien-wu (487-551) Yii Hsin (513-81) Chiang Tsung (519-590)

% of violations of Rule 3 70% 50% 21% 23% 9% 11% 9%

Wang Li has studied this same pattern and found that while it was not always achieved in practise, it was considered to be a mark of the best poetry during the T'ang. Sung dynasty poets, however, no longer observed this rule. Rule 4. All couplets should have the form 0 A 0 0 0 / 0 B 0 0 0, where A and B are opposite values of level and deflected. This rule is a modified version of the avoidance of "level head," which is defined in BK 86 as follows:
In five-syllable poetry, the first and sixth syllables should not share the same tone, nor should the second and seventh syllables share the same tone. "Share the same tone" means that the two syllables should not share any one of the four tones: level, rising, departing, and entering. A poem that violates this rule is called "level head. "

Rule 4 differs from "level head" in two respects. First, whereas "level head" is defined over the four tones, Rule 4 is defined over the level-deflected distinction. Second, whereas "level head" is concerned with both the first and second syllables of the two lines making up a couplet, Rule 4 is only concerned with the second syllables. On the second point, in a passage following the one just cited BK 86 does recognize the importance of the second syllables over the first: a faultif the firstsyllableof the For thosewho want to know, it is not considered of the secondarebothin theleveltone. Butin the case firstline andthe firstsyllable of the rising,departing,and enteringtones, if even a singlesyllablehas the same tone as anothersyllable,then a faultexists.Moreover,if the secondsyllableof the firstline and the secondsyllableof the secondline sharethe sametone, no matter whetherit be level, rising,departing,or entering,it is a huge error. No study has yet examined the avoidance of "level head" as a separate item. But Rule 4 is part of, and therefore prior to Rule 6

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below, which says: "all couplets should have the form 0 A 0 B 0 / 0 B 0 A 0. " Rule 6 emerged around 580. Since "level head" is attributed to Shen Yuieh in the BK, a reasonable guess would put the date of the establishment of Rule 4 during the first half of the sixth century. Rule 5. All five-syllable lines should have the form 0 A 0 B 0. This rule is not equivalent to the avoidance of any one of the twenty-eight kinds of poetic defects. The first clear statement comes from Liu T'ao, who flourished about 545. In BK 88, he is quoted by Liu Shan-ching of the Sui dynasty as saying:
Moreover, it cannot be considered good when the second and fourth syllables are in the same tone. Although there is no name for it currently, it is more important than "wasp's waist."

That this rule was commonly observed by the middle of the sixth century is confirmed by the following figures from Takagi: Dates Author Hsieh Ling-yuin 385-433 No. of No. of lines violations inspected 894 459 % of violations 51%

Shen Yuieh Yui Chien-wu Yui Hsin Chiang Tsung

441-513 487-551 513-81 518-90

1336 820 2328 820

440 67 172 60

33% 8% 7% 7%

Rule 6. All couplets should have the form 0 A 0 B 0 / 0 B 0 A 0. This is the combination of Rules 4 and 5 above. This pattern, in which the second line is the opposite of the first, may also have been what Shen Yuieh envisioned when he said in his reply to Lu Chuieh that "within a couplet of ten syllables, the tones are matched b. A few examples of this patin mirror-fashion" ? fK? t, tern are found in Shen Yuieh's surviving poetry, but as Takagi has noted, it appears not to have acquired general acceptance until the latter half of the sixth century, as the following figures from Lu Chih-wei attest:

% of couplets
Author Hsieh Ling-yuin (385-433) observing Rule 6 18%

Pao Chao (412-66)

20%

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Hsieh T'iao (464-99) Wang Jung (467-93) Shen Yiieh (441-513) Hsui Ling (507-82) Ch'en Shu-pao (553-604) Yin Keng (?-565) Yii Hsin (513-81) Tu Fu (712-70)

27% 33% 25% 80% 58% 67% 72% 91%

(?) (?)

In the case of figures with a question mark, the available sample was too small for certainty. Lu Chih-wei's figures are confirmed in several places by Takagi, who has 20% for Shen Yiieh, 60% for Yu Chien-wu (ca. 487-551, not on the chart above), and 75% for Yii Hsin, the son of Yu Chien-wu. Let us now combine the above rules to see what sort of prosodic patterns are generated. Rules 4 through 6, together with Rule 2, form a pattern for the couplet as follows:

OA 0
OBOAy

B xl

This is exactly the pattern for the couplet in Yui Chien-wu's Regulated Verse. Rule 3 requires that in a sequence of final syllables, no two successive syllables in odd-numbered lines should be in the same one of the four tones; that is, it requires a pattern of final syllables of the following sort: xl, y, x2, y, x3, y, x1, y. . . . This is also the pattern in Regulated Verse. Otherwise, beyond the level of the couplet, the Ch'i-Liang style and Regulated Verse diverge widely. A poem in the Ch'i-Liang style might be composed of any number of couplets, and there would be no stipulation whether the prosodic pattern should repeat that of the previous couplet, or oppose it. In contrast, Recent Style poetry has a fixed length of either four or eight lines, and each quatrain is made up of two couplets whose patterns (in terms of A's and B's) oppose each other. Two quatrains make up a Regulated Verse, and the patterns of the second quatrain (in terms of A's and B's as well as x's and y's) repeat those of the first. Although verses of four or eight lines were beginning to be written in the time of Shen Yuieh, poems of six, ten, or more lines were also common. It was not until the quatrain had

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become a standard unit that Chinese poets could think in terms of opposing the prosodic patterns of its two constituent couplets. An example of the Ch'i-Liang style may be found in Shen Yuieh's poem, "Listening to Gibbons at Rock-pool Creek."73 In the following scheme, A = Deflected; B = Level; the Deflected tones are xl = e-entering, x2= r = rising, x3= d = departing; and y 1 Level. ETAX491,11 Tones Pattern

D DdLI L Ll D e D L ID r LDILe D LID d

D D IL e

0 Ax3B y O B y A xl (R) O B y Ax2 O A y B xi (R) O B y AX3

O A y B xl (R)

Yow ! Yow! Night gibbons cry, Soft, soft, the dawn mists mesh. Are their voices far? Nearby? Just see mountains piled up high. Having liked East Hill's song, I now await West Cliff's reply. In this poem, besides the alternation of the second and fourth syllables, there is also alternation between the third and fifth syllables. Considering only the pattern of A's and B's, the second couplet opposes the first, while the third couplet copies the second. This shows that the relationship of A's and B's in successive couplets was undefined in the time of Shen Yiieh; they were free to imitate or oppose each other. The sort of patterning achieved in the above poem is nevertheless rare in Shen Yiieh's surviving corpus. Out of the fifty-five poems by Shen Yuieh that Richard Bodman examined, only one was found to combine so many different kinds of tonal alternation. From the Ch'i-Liang Style to Recent Style Poetry In considering the transition from the Ch'i-Liang style to that of Recent Style poetry, it is necessary to treat odd and even syllables
73

Ting Fu-pao, Shih, p. 1248

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separately. We have already shown that in the Ch'i-Liang style the only odd syllables for which values are defined are the final syllables of each line. Rules 2 and 3 call for a succession of final syllables in the following pattern: xl, y, X2, y, x3, y, xI, y. . . . This is also the pattern for the Recent Style poetry of the T'ang. During the Sung, the pattern was simplified to x, y, x, y, x, y . . . , discarding the avoidance of "crane's knee." Later poets may have experimented with the pattern 0 0 x 0 y-that is, alternating between the third and fifth syllables-but this need not concern us. In the patterning of the even syllables, the main development was the establishment of a fixed relationship between the two couplets of a quatrain and between the two quatrains of an octave. Takagi's study has shown that the poets of the period between 500 and 550 experimented with both repeating and reversing the pattern of couplets and quatrains. He lists examples of two sorts of quatrains, in which the couplet patterns are respectively repeated and reversed: (1) Repeated: OAOBO OBOAO OAOBO OBOAO (2) Reversed: OAOBO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO

There are also two corresponding kinds of octaves, in which the quatrain pattern is either repeated or reversed: (1) Repeated: O A OBO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO OAOBO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO (2) Reversed: O A O BO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO OBOAO OAOBO OAOBO OBOAO

Below we give two examples cited by Takagi, one in which the couplet patterns are repeated, and the other in which the quatrain pattern is reversed.

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$ 0- Oe"4 Tf9MV
RX4X

AOBO 0 BOAO
A OO B O

XSB4ffl

BOAO
O A O BO

O BO AO
0 A O BO O BO AO Hsiao Kang, "A Pheasant on His Morning Flight"74 The dawning sun shines upon the royal wheat fields; A spring fowl crosses the deserted plain; At times raising his plumicorns to elude the falcon, He suddenly wheels aslant to spite the mounds. Young men serve on distant campaigns, Resentful, their thoughts brim with rebellion; Better follow after a profligate courtier, Whose silken sleeves brush the robes of ministers.
W y, H

a Inlov

R El M-Jil

O A O BO O BO AO

W:X;W *O

1StL4Jt1

BO AO O AO BO O BO AO O AO BO O A O BO OBOAO
Yu Chien-wu, "Spring Day"75

Peach blossoms are red, willow catkins white, Shimmering in the sun and swaying in the wind; Their shape emerges beyond the vermilion walls, Their fragrance goes back to the blue hall. Mirrored in the water, parasitic bamboos,
74 7'

Ti, p. 41. Ting Fu-pao, Shih, p. 1103. Compare Marney's translation in LiangChien-wen Ting Fu-pao, Shih, p. 1342

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Lying across the hill, a half-dead paulownia tree; The list of awardees announced, I realize the great bounty; Grasping my writing tablet, I am chagrined by my paltry talent. The eventual result of this experimentation was that the reversed pattern came to be preferred for the quatrain, and the repeated pattern for the octave. By the end of the Six Dynasties, poets were approaching the Regulated Verse of the T'ang more and more closely. One example of such Regulated Verse, as we have seen, is Yu Chien-wu 's "In Attendance at a Banquet. " The pattern for Regulated Verse was recognized early in the T'ang by the critic Yuan Ching t#A (fl. 661). His statement, preserved in BK 15, defines the form for the octave in terms of the sequence of the head syllables of each line. Below we quote first his own poem, which he used as an example, and second his explanation of its pattern.
Af-i i

LX%WSO

111 d e

A A O AO

!mmrm1&
*AK4_5EA oIJa,/_Im .MAi
E;blAfih

d d e ll
r d I Ie 11 e d I ll d e e d r ll e dll d 11 r d I

BBO AO
B A A B B A BO AO A O BO A O BO BO AO B OAO A O BO

RltEXfftWkWMANW

Viewing the Wilds at P'eng-chou How windy, the side of Mt. Tang-ch'ii, How broad the view from the Gate of Shu! The river and I have reached the three gorges, Following the mountains, the eight stone formations come in view. The bridge's arch seems to touch the Milky Way. Rock forms resemble curling smoke; I want to shed tears for another place, But everywhere the gibbons' cries hasten me on.

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In this piece, the first two characters of the first line are level; in the next line the first two characters are departing, rising, or entering; in the next the first two are again departing, rising, or entering; and in the next (4th) line the first two are level. In the next (5th) line the first two are again level; in the next (6th) the first two characters are again departing, rising, or entering; and in the next (8th) line the first two characters are once again level. This sort of alternation, from the start to the end of a piece, is called "changing both heads. " This is the best sort. If you can't do it like this, then make sure that the second character of the first line is level, the second character of the next (2nd) line is departing, rising, or entering; the second character of the next (3rd) line is departing, rising, or entering again; and the second character of the next (4th) line is level again. Alternating in this fashion to the end of the piece, one merely changes the second character. If the first characters of two succeeding lines are level, there is no harm done. This is also called "changing the head," but it's not up to the standard of "changing both heads. "

In other words, the sequence of second syllables of an eight-line poem should be as follows: A B B A A B B A. When this pattern is combined with Rule 5 for the alternation of tones in the second and fourth syllables, the full pattern of A's and B's for Regulated Verse is generated. Historically, Yuan Ching's rule is actually two rules, one defining the relation of A's and B's in the couplets making up a quatrain, and another defining the relation of A's and B's in the two quatrains making up an octave. It was the adoption of these two rules that converted the Ch'i-Liang Style to Recent Style poetry. Rule 7. The sequence of second syllables of a quatrain should be A B B A; that is, the second couplet is the reverse of the first. Rule 8. The sequence of second syllables of an octave should be A B B A A B B A; that is, the second quatrain repeats the pattern of the first.
SANSKRIT INFLUENCE

Among the three innovative ideas of Recent Style poetry mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the formation of the level/deflected distinction is basic. Now that we have traced the Sanskrit ingredients in this remarkable development, it remains to delineate the Sanskrit contributions to the other innovative ideas: the imposition of tonal rules on internal syllables of a line, and the imposition of additional rules on the matching middle syllables of a couplet

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and a quatrain. Having provided an anatomy of Recent Style prosody in the last section, it is now possible to determine the Sanskrit sources with precision, and in particular to substantiate our claim that Shen Yiieh's "Eight Defects" and the list of "Twenty-Eight Defects" preserved in the BK were derived from Sanskrit treatises on poetics. Specifically, we will show that the title "Bunkyo" is virtually identical to that of Dandin's KD, the overall arrangement of the list of twenty-eight defects follows the general scheme of Sanskrit handbooks on poetics, and just about every one of the defects can be traced to Indian forerunners in name, in function, and in spirit. The relation between the two topics to be treated in this section is somewhat complicated. In the first place, the rules defining tonal prosody constitute a subset of the "Eight Defects" and an even smaller subset of the "Twenty-Eight Defects." The relation is made even more complicated because some of the operative rules of tonal prosody (e.g., Rule 5) do not show up in the list of "TwentyEight Defects," and some items in the "Eight Defects" (e.g., "wasp's waist") are irrelevent to the actual operation of tonal prosody. Secondly, the BK is a many-layered work completed in 819, whereas Recent Style prosody was fully formed no later than 551. The upshot of these considerations is that it is far easier to demonstrate Sanskrit influence for the BK than for Recent Style prosody. What is more, the Sanskrit sources relevant to the BK, if late, need not bear upon the formation of Recent Style prosody. To show that the "Eight Defects" of Shen Yiieh and the "Twenty-Eight Defects" in the BK were derived from Sanskrit treatises on poetics, we shall rely primarily on a rather detailed comparison of the defects enumerated by the Chinese prosodists and similar blemishes catalogued by their Indian predecessors. To facilitate this procedure, the reader may consult the abridged translation of twentyeight defects in Appendix I, the first eight of which are the same as Shen Yiieh's octet. Appendix II includes lists of dosa ("defects"), yamaka ("rhymes"), and upama("similes") from the major Sanskrit treatises on poetics. These are the Ndtyasastra(NS) of Bharata, the Kdvydlan?kara (KL) of Bhamaha, and the Kdvyddars'a (KD) of Dandin. Our reasons for choosing these three texts will emerge in the following paragraphs.

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Sourcesof Sanskrit Poetics The relative chronology of Indian literary texts is notoriously difficult. Scholars often differ by hundreds of years when dating written works, even fairly recent compositions. Dating Indian writings on prosody and poetics is no easier. Where the experts differ with regard to the texts we cite, we shall note both the consensus and, where germane, the range of disagreement. Any serious discussion of Indian prosody and poetics naturally begins with the NS. Although it is a dramaturgical treatise, the NS is generally recognized to include chapters that represent the earliest extant systematic treatment of Sanskrit prosody and poetics. In the version of the NS that has come down to us, there are a few interpolated phrases and passages that may date to as late as the sixth century, while some passages go back to the second century B.C. The bulk of the text, however, derives from the period spanning about a century before and a century after 1 A.D. The NS must have been very popular as a handbook for those celebrated dramatists such as Kalidasa who participated in the great flowering of the theater that took place under the patronage of the Gupta kings (fourth to mid-sixth century), since their dramaturgical practice is highly consistent with Bharata's recommendations. The same is true of the famous Buddhist poet and playwright, Asvaghosa, who was re("Horse-whinnying vered in China as Ma-ming p'u-sa An94 Bodhisattva") and lived during the first century A.D. While not himself a prosodist, Asvaghosa evidently subscribed to a set of established rules in his own work. The controversy over the priority (both temporal and qualitative) of Bhamaha and Dandin is one of the most acrimonious in the history of Indian poetics and has enthusiastic partisans on either side. Determined not to become embroiled in it ourselves, we will note only that Dandin is usually held to have flourished in the period between 660 and about 715, while Bhamaha is said by most Indologists to have lived during the last half of the seventh century and the first quarter of the eighth. There are those who firmly insist, nonetheless, that Bhamaha lived as early as the fifth century and they have written whole monographs trying to prove it.76Regardless
76

See, for example, E. N. Tyomkin, Mirovozzrenie Bhamahi i Datirovka ego Traktata "Kav'-

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of the absolute or relative dates of Bhamaha and Dandin, there is no question at all that both authors relied heavily on earlier prosodists. Bhamaha, for example, refers explicitly to both Medhavin, an authority on similes (KL II.40, 88), and Ramasarman, the author of a work entitled Acyutottara (Imperishable Answers) (KL I. 19). Bhatti (fl. c. 590-610), in the tenth and twelfth cantos of his Ravanavadha,illustrates a total of 38 poetic figures. Of these, 23 agree, minor variations excepted, in name as well as in order with those in Bhamaha's KL. The remaining 15 figures correspond generally in name, although they appear in a slightly different sequence. Bhatti himself was not a theoretician, so he must have been relying on some other now lost work. The Indian passion for poetics shows up even in the encyclopedic collections of Hindu religious tales known as the Pura-na.Poetic embellishment is treated extensively in both the and the Agni-puradna(hereafter AP). The Visnudharmottara-purdna former is dated by internal evidence to approximately the fifth century A.D. while the bulk of the latter is probably from about the third century.77 The subject matter of the pura-nais concerned with the events of a couple thousand years before that time and large chunks of them must be based on very ancient sources. Turning specifically to the history of dosa in India leading up to Dandin and Bhamaha, there is a long tradition of cataloguing the defects to be avoided in excellent writing that goes back to at least the fourth century B.C. Already before Bharata, seventeen dosa were enumerated in the Santiparvan chapter (verses 87-90) of the monumental epic, Mahdbharata. The Jain Anuyogadvdra named thirty-two dosa. It is noteworthy that the approximate number and types of defects to be avoided, and even some of the same names for them, persisted for so many centuries. Abstruse discussions of dosa also appeared in the logical disquisitions known as the Nydyasutra, dating from around the third century B.C. In the famous economic,
yalankara"(Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," Glavnaya Redaktsiya Vostochnoi Literatur'i, 1975), p. 22; and Batuk Nath Sarma and Baldeva Upadhyaya, ed. and intro., Kavydlankara of Bhdmaha,The Kashi Sanskrit Series (Haridas Sanskrit Granthamala), 61 (Benares: Jai Krishna Das Hari Das Gupta, 1928), pp. 12-55. 77 Both of these puranias were more or less continuously reworked until around the end of see Ludo Rocher, The the first millenium. On the complexities of the dating of the purainas, Purdanas, vol. 2, Fasc. 3 in A Historyof Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), pp. 18-24 and 100-103.

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political, and legal treatise, Arthasastra,written by Kautilya between 321 and 296 B.C., Chapter 10 gives "The Procedure of Forming Royal Writs" cautioning against five dosa: akdnti ("clumsiness"), apas'abda punarukta (" repetition"), vydghdta ("contradiction"), Except for ("bad grammar"), and samplava ("misarrangement").78 the first defect, which applies to scribes, all of Kautilya's dosa represent concerns that were still very much alive to Bharata, Bhamaha, and Dan.din. Thus, it is clear that the concept of dosa ("defect, fault, blemish") has been a key element in Indian rhetoric since at least the third century B.C. While we cannot identify the precise Indian texts upon which Shen Yuieh and his followers depended, it is clear that plenty of models were available. In this context we should remind ourselves that before the invention of printing it was not unusual for scholars to commit large quantities of texts to memory. According to the Biographies of Eminent Monks, Dharmanandin (TT 50.328b), Kumarajiva (TT 50.320a), Buddhabhadra (TT 50.334c), Punyatara (TT 50.333a), and Dharmaksema (TT 50.335c) were all known for their feats of memory. The first step in translation was either for the master to read aloud the text or to recite the text from memory. A large portion of Classical Sanskrit texts is in verse, which facilitates memorization. These include the NS, the KL, and the two treatises on Sanskrit metrics, the Pingala-sutra and the Chandoviciti. While a Sanskrit scholar of the time may not have read all these texts, he is likely to have learned selected passages via oral transmission. Such passages, once committed to memory, would be the itinerant monk's portable library, which he could in turn teach his pupils-all without leaving any paper trail. There were even more sources at hand for Kufkai and the other authors of the BK (completed in 819). Mentioning only the better known medieval Indian authorities on poetics, we find the following: Rudrata (ninth century), who also wrote a KL; Srisankuka (first quarter of the ninth century); Lollata (early ninth century); Udbhata (late eighth to early ninth century); Vamana (middle of the eighth to the middle of the ninth century), who wrote the
78 R. Shamasastry, tr., Kautilya's Arthas'astra (7th ed., Mysore: Mysore Printing and Publishing House, 1961), p. 75

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important Kdvydlanikdrasdrasarmzgraha; the so-called Dhavanikara (first half of the eighth century);79 not to mention the numerous poets, playwrights, and novelists who illustrated the prosodic and poetic rules in their creative works. It is perhaps significant that many of the medieval authors on poetics were from Kashmir. (Dandin may have been an exception, although nothing is known for certain about his place of origin.) Together with Gandhara, this was the area whence so much of Indian art and literature passed through Central Asia to China. Given such a plethora of potential sources for the BK list of defects, what grounds are there for focusing on Bhamaha and Dandin? First, they are the most representative and influential of early medieval Indian writers on poetics. The KL and the KD were referred to, directly or indirectly, by nearly every other later authority. Second, the work of Bhamaha and Dandin is a crystallization of the venerable Indian tradition of poetics. They are the best exponents of that tradition during the period between Shen Yuieh and Kuikai. Third, both Bhamaha and Dandin paid particular attention to the various defects that were also a major concern of the authors of the BK. Fourth, Bhamaha deserves special notice for his knowledge of Buddhism and possible association with monks of that persuasion, since it was through them that Chinese prosodists would most likely have become familiar with the Indian rules governing poetic defects. Bhamaha is also arguably early enough, in the views of some scholars, to have had an impact on the first devisers of rules for tonal prosody in China. As for Dandin, practically anyone knowledgeable in Sanskrit who came to China after the late seventh century would almost surely have been familiar with his works, and any Chinese who went to India to learn Sanskrit and progressed beyond a rudimentary stage would have been exposed to his poetics. Conversely, Dandin must have been aware of China because he mentions it specifically by name in his widely celebrated novel, Das'akumara-carita (Tales of the Ten Princes).80 That the KD was capa79 The dates of these six authors are based on the "Tentative Chronology" of Sushil
Kumar De, Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetics, with notes by Edwin Gerow (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1963), p. 117. of Dandin with a Commentary(4th ed., 80 M. R. Kale, tr. and ed., The Das'akumdracarita Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), p. 97 of Sanskrit text.

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ble of traveling beyond India's borders is demonstrated by the copious citations from it that appear in the Siya-bas-lakara, a Ceylonese work on rhetoric by King Sena I, or Silameghavarnasena, dating to no later than 840. Already by the time of the Rastraku-ta prince Amoghavarsa Nrpatuinga (815-75), sizable segments of the KD had been adopted into the Kavirdjamarga, the oldest work on poetics in Kannada. The Tibetans, too, were wildly enamored of Dandin's KD. Having translated it repeatedly into Tibetan and having written numerous commentaries on it, they applied the prosodic and poetic guidelines of the KD to the composition of their own verse. Through Tibetan works such as these, Dan.din's poetics also dominated Mongolian verse. The Sanskrit Origins of the Bunkyo hifuron Considering the series of resemblances between the dosa in the KD and the ping in the BK, Chinese writers on poetics and prosody may well also have been apprised of Dandin's work. There would have been plenty of time for the KD, which was probably completed around 690, to reach China, whether by sea or by one of the many land routes. Other evidence favors such an interpretation, not the least of which is the striking identity between the titles of the two means, quite literally, "A Mirror (i.e., Handworks. Kdvyddars'a book) for Literature," which is precisely what BunkyJ zZk, means.8' Equally suspicious is the second part of the Sino-Japanese title, hifu f41'(--+ ) W, which is an old expression dating back at least to the Han with the meaning "library. " Here in the title of the BK, however, it must be understood in the sense of "Repository of Rare [Verses and Expressions]. " There is a perfect and extremely common precedent for this usage in Sanskrit kosa, which literally means "storeroom, repository, treasury," and, in the context of poetics, signifies precisely "treasury [of fine words, verses, or sentences]." Transcribed in Chinese as chii-she{RX (or 4Iul), this is also the most
51 Visvanatha, writing about seven centuries after Dandin, used the synonymous title Sdhityadarpana(first half of the fourteenth century) for his landmark compendium of poetics. and Tsuji Naoshir6 iAI_ iEI.], eds., Kan yaku taisho Bon-wa daijiten 1 Ogiwara Unrai ("A Mirror as t (Kodansha, 1986), p. 346, translate kavyddars'a (MMIM-) Xfll11km for Poetry"). Kdvya ("literature, fine writing"), like bun/wen I7:, includes both prose and poetry although its best exemplification is held to be the latter. The compilers of BK subscribed to a similar view with regard to bun/wen.

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common Sanskrit word for lexicons, thesauruses, and dictionaries. The most renowned of all Sanskrit kosa is a work that dates to the fifth (meaning a century or earlier, the Amarakosaor Ndmalinganus'asanam work that deals with vocables and their genders) of Amara[simha], who is supposed to have been a Buddhist. Written in anustubh(iloka) meter, the Amarakosawas translated into Chinese as Fan wai-kuoyu M31S1 and Chui-she lunyin-yuan shih %t-=APH** by Kulanatha tX and Tripitakacarya 0 BFPt/ft, also called Paramartha 0F*rt, i (fl. in China 546-66), who hailed from Ujain in western India.82 Dandin's KD 11.57.60, dealing with similes, is in the style of the Amarakosaand may well have been adapted from it. It is no accident that Dandin introduced the term kosa near the start of his own treatise (I. 13), for KD, in a very real sense, is both a "mirror for literature" (i.e., a handbook for writing poetry) and a collection of illustrative verses (some quoted from earlier poets and others made up by the author) to complement the rules. The same is true of the BK, whose full title in translation reads "A Treatise, [Comprising] a Mirror for Literature and a Repository of Rare [Verses and Expressions]. " Ron A is a habitual Sino-Japanese term (comparable to Sanskrit s'astra)appended to a title to signify that the work in question is a treatise. Dosa is only one of many different criteria in Indian poetics, but Chinese prosodists from the mid-fifth century on emphasized it almost exclusively. The incongruity between the close borrowings of dosa and the virtually total disregard for other aspects of Indian poetics is initially disturbing. Upon reflection, however, reasonable explanations can be found for this neglect. It is not surprising, for example, that Chinese prosodists struggling with the crucial issue of how to emulate the "subtle and marvelous sounds" of Sanskrit in their own language would have had little luxury to grapple with such rarefied and esoteric concepts as rasa ("sentiment, essence, taste"), dhvani ("allusiveness"), bhava ("emotion, state of mind"), and mimamsad ("philosophical interpretation"), all of which are vital aspects of Sanskrit poetics. Even the converse of dosa, which is guna ("quality, merit, virtue," rendered as te iM in Chinese Buddhist
Stanislas Julien, "Sur les pays et les peuples etrangers, tirees des geographies et des annales chinoises: V. Thien-tchou, l'Inde," JA, ser. 4.10 (August, 1847): 87-88.
82

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texts), was given short shrift. Actually, when we go looking for it, the Indian delight in poetic excellences is found to have been siphoned off into the bizarre final chapter of the BK entitled "A Record of Imperial Merit" 8.MW Were it not for the central position of guna in Indian poetics, one would be required to pronounce that this chapter is totally out of place in a treatise that purports to be a "mirror for literature. " BK dl 5 ("political taboos") is another loyalist intrusion into poetics that may have been appreciated in the Chinese scene but would have been intolerable to most Indian literary theoreticians. A major preoccupation of the Sanskrit manuals on poetics, logic, is barely touched upon in BK d25. This seeming slight, too, is comprehensible when viewed from the standpoint of linguistic and cultural predilections. Indian authors on poetics, following the logicians and grammarians, focused heavily on the logical and grammatical construction of verse. This tendency became even more pronounced as philosophical systems proliferated and became increasingly elaborate. Such concerns are natural for a highly inflected language like Sanskrit, but they were largely irrelevant for Chinese prosodists. Consequently, the logical and grammatical segment of Indian poetics was transformed into Chinese regulations pertaining to the relationships between the lines of couplets (antithesis, parallelism) and occasionally quatrains. The overall arrangement of the list of twenty-eight defects in BK follows the general scheme of Sanskrit handbooks on poetics, beginning with prosodic and phonological matters, which constitute the assumed basis for all the rest of poetics (or, as Dandin would have it [KD I.12], "a ship for those who wish to cross the ocean of poetry"), moving through the figures of speech (alamkdra,"embellishment, ornamentation," chuang-yen : in Buddhist Chinese), and ending with stylistic, semantic, syntactical, and logical structures. Even the format of the BK list of twenty-eight ping and the typical coverage of the dosa in Indian books dealing with poetics are congruent. The ping or dosa is named first (alternative designations, if any, are also given), then described and commented upon, and finally illustrated with one or more short verses, usually sloka or pentasyllabic quatrains. As we remarked when discussing the titles of the KD and the BK, the illustrative verses are sometimes made up for the nonce, sometimes quoted from well-known authors. On occasion, a

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similarity of illustrative verse may be observed. BK d23 cites a pentasyllabic quatrain that mentions chrysanthemums in connection with a spring day, while Bhamaha quotes a sloka that describes mango blossoms in winter (KL d' 1Ob). Both in Sanskrit and in Chinese, the commentators use such judgmental expressions as "highly reprehensible," "huge defect," "not a defect," and so forth (in Chinese: chung-ping VM, chui-pingfA, fti ping 4VA, etc.). Whole categories of Indian poetical figures have been incorporated into one or another of the twenty-eight defects. For instance, upama ("simile," literally, "proximateness," or "matched") is the most likely source of BK dl I. The list of seven upamd-dosagiven in the KL by Bhamaha (citing his predecessor, Medhavin) or some similar Indian text was assuredly the source of eight types of comparison (tui V) mentioned in BK d 1i (since the "eight types" are not specified, the number seems to be arbitrary; compare the long lists of twenty-nine types in the "East" section of the BK). Superficial disparities between Indian and Chinese poetics, the latter as seen in the BK, often reveal themselves upon closer scrutiny to be virtually non-existent. Where there are genuine discrepancies, they are usually explainable in terms of the social and political realities of China. In spite of the vast differences between Sanskrit and Classical Chinese, it is astounding that several of the names for defects are functionally identical in the two languages. For example, one of the dosa given by Bhamaha and Dandin is vyartha (KL d12, KD d2) or "contradictory." whose meaning in poetics is "inconsistent,' This is exactly the same as BK d26. Even Bhamaha's explanation of the rule is similar to that given for the equivalent Chinese rule:
The dosa known as vyarthais one with conflicting meanings. What conflict is shall be

explained. It is where the first meaning being opposed to the second, a contradictory effect is produced.83

Or take Bhamaha's stipulations against tautologies (KL d13, cf. KD d3, NS d5):
Where two statements convey the same meaning, it is a case of ekdrtha. Some call this "Repetition" (punarukta), and repetition may be of words and meanings. 84
Adapted from P.V. Naganatha gastry, ed. and tr., Kdvyalan?kdra of Bhdmaha (2nd ed., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), p. 76. 84 Adanted from Sastrv- tr.- Kdvvylantkdra, n. 77.
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This surely must have been the model for the twelfth defect in the Chinese list. Another of Bhamaha's and Dandin's prohibitions is that against apakrama("inversion," KL d15, KD d5), presumably the inspiration for BK d18. And there can be no reservation concerning Bhamaha's and Dandin's censure of kdlavirodhi("unseasonableness," KL d lOb, KD dlO) as the immediate source for BK d23. Likewise, Bharata's ninth poetical defect, visandhi ("disjointedness," NS d9; compare KL d19 and KD d9) was the origin of BK 21. The second defect on Bharata's list, artha-ntara,usually translated in English as "superfluous expression,"85 may be more literally rendered as "antithetical meaning" and was quite likely the origin of BK d26. There are still more instances where the Indian names differ somewhat from those on the BK list of defects but the functions are the same or nearly so (e.g., BK d24 and AP 347.17-18). Some of the twenty-eight defects are identical to Indian poetical defects, which are so distinctive that the former could hardly have been invented independently (e.g., BK dl6 and dl7, which even appear in the same sequence as the prototypes, KL d7 and d8, on Bhamaha's list). A glance at Appendix I ("Twenty-Eight Poetic Defects" from Kiukai's BK) and Appendix II ("Ten Defects" from Bharata's NS, two other sets of "Ten Defects" from Bhamaha's KL together with a list of "Seven Defects of Simile" from the latter work as well as two sets of ten defects and seven types of yamaka from the KD of Dandin) reveals unmistakably that every one of the Chinese defects from the eleventh on can easily be traced to Indian forerunners in name, function, or spirit. It will be noted that all these defects except BK d13 deal with errors of grammar, semantics, syntax, diction, or logic. How, then, does one account for the first ten (actually thirteen, because BK d9 is doubled and BK dlO is tripled) defects and BK d13? These are all rules governing the phonetic aspects of Regulated Verse. We will defer our discussion of BK dl-4 until the next section, since these tonal rules bear upon the making of Recent Style prosody. Instead, we now turn to the complicated origins of BK d5-8, two pairs of defects concerned with alliteration and internal rhyme that have their roots in the Indian phonological concepts
-na

`AT

A-

h
and B. Jha, Conceptof Poetic Blemishes in

85 M. Ghosh, tr., The Ndtyasastra, p. 313, XVIII.88 Sanskrit Poetics, p. 17.

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The two terms yamaka and bandha are often confused in Indian poetics. Yamakaliterally means "doubled, twofold, tied together, linked as a pair" and derives from yama ("rein, bridle"), which comes from yam ("restrain, control, hold back"). Bandha literally denotes "bond, fetter" and has as its root bandh ("to bind, tie"). Given this closeness of etymological derivation, it is small wonder that some overlap may have occurred in their usage. The vagueness surroundingyamaka and bandhais further intensified by their common function as key elements in citrakdvya, that is the "picturesque" phonetic aspects of poetry. Bharata defines yamaka as the repetion of syllables similar in sound at the beginning of feet and elsewhere (NS XVII.60). In KL IL.17, Bhamaha definesyamaka as "the repetition of syllables differing from each other in meaning but similar in sound." His next verse states that yamaka are acceptable only when they have wellknown signification, are full of power, closely knit, conjoined, clear, and euphonic. Bhamaha clearly harbors reservations aboutyamaka. According to Dan din, yamaka is the repetition of a group of letters or sounds (varna, i.e., syllables). Dandin's attitude toward yamaka is especially ambivalent since its effect to him is not always graceful or pleasant (KD I.61). Yamakamay occur at the beginning, middle, or end of a line or any combination thereof. They may also occur in the first, second, third, or fourth pdda of a stanza, as well as any combination thereof (KD III. 1-2). The meaning of bandha is even harder to grasp. Vamana states that it is the "arrangement of words" (padaracand).86 Yamaka and bandha are often confused with anuprdsa,where one or more consonants are repeated, sometimes but not necessarily always with accompanying vowels. Anuprdsamust occur in adjacent words or in words that are close enough to keep alive the perception of the previous letter sounds (Dandin, KL I.55). Withyamaka, the repetition of accompanying vowels is obligatory and can occur at a farther remove than anuprasa. The Agni-purdnalists ten kinds ofyamaka and eight varieties of bandha. They are included in one of its eleven chapters on poetics that
86 In his Kdvydlanikdrasatra, as cited by V. Raghavan, Bhoja's SrigdraPrakdia(Madras: Punarvasu, 1978), p. 278.

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may date from as late as the middle of the ninth century,87 although large portions of the AP are probably still older than the NS. While the AP borrows flagrantly from many different sources and is not known for its elegance, its definitions ofyamaka and bandhaare worth citing because they are relatively transparent:
Yamaka is that which consists of the repetition of many sounds signifying different

meanings. It is of two types, namely, contiguous and non-contiguous. The contiguous arises from the immediate sequence and the non-contiguous from intervention. The twofold division becomes fourfold according to the distinction of the position (of sounds) and of metrical foot in respect of these two kinds.... The diversified and skillful composition of the forms of various well-known objects by means of arrangement of sounds represented in many ways is called bandha.88

Having examined what reliable Indian sources say about these rather obscure poetic terms, we shall attempt to provide working English equivalents. Yamakamay be thought of as "rhyme," with the proviso that it be internal since there was no end rhyme in early Sanskrit. Its Chinese counterpart isyuin. Specifically, defects pertaining to internal rhyme-BK d5, ta-yuintln ("major rhyme"), and 'i'' ("minor rhyme")-useyuin in the sense ofyamaka. d6, hsiao-yuin For bandha, the most essential aspect is the repetition of sounds in certain positions, or patterns, within a poem.89 A contemporary Indian student of figurative language describes it as "poetic designs.. depending on the skill of the poet in the arrangement of letters" or collocations of sounds that yield underlying pictures.90 We therefore recommend the adoption of "ligature" as an etymologically exact translation for bandha. Its Chinese counterpart is niu, which according to the Shuo-wen means "to tie; a knot that can be untied," the same as bandha.It should also be noted that, even though niu in later usage refers to the initial of a syllable, at the time of Shen Yueh it was a collective term, as shown in the following passage from BK 29:
87 Suresh Mohan Bhattacharyya,ed. and tr., TheA1lamkara-Section (Calcutof theAgni-Purdaa ta: Firma KLM, 1976), pp. 127-128. 8 AP 343.11-12, AP 343.31 Translation modified from that of Bhattacharyya, AgniPurdna,pp. 209 and 212. (Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 1975), 89 Kalanath Jha, Figurative Literature in Sanskrit Poetry p. 67. 90Jha, Figurative Poetry,p. 24.

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Chen Shen (ca. 477), the governer of Ting-chou in the Wei dynasty, was a great man of his age. He felt that Shen Yiieh's chart of the four tones did not rely on the ancient models and was absurd and forced. So he selected some points in Shen Yiieh's youthful compositions that violated tonal rules, in order to find fault with him. He also said, "If you take four tones as the classifying principle of a niu, then of all the multitude of sounds in the world, there are none that will not fit a niu. There are a myriad sounds, a myriad niu; they can't be limited to four" (;tvg-i
AMR, X1Jtt X,4XAff, TSS

What Shen Yueh meant is preserved in BK 4:

The charts by various authors for harmonizing the four tones are all arranged as follows, where level, rising departing, and entering tones are matched with the four directions: On the east, the level tone: d cbjwDng, 14-cbjwDng, r bjwDngD, AIJbjcikD On the south, the rising tone: g czjang, ? czjang, Mj zjang', t1 zjakD On the west, the departing tone: M ckhjwo, 9 ckhjwo, A khjwo', Iq khakD On the north, the entering tone: -fi c?zjam, Ef Cfizjvf, fE nzjam', A ?#japD Each group of four syllables comprises a niu. Or else six syllables converge on one entering-tone syllable: 0 cywang, A cywang, * ywang', A ywakD, c cyua, Mj cyua, f11yua' iy cbwang, a cbwang, ' bwang', X bakD, D cbua, it cpua, Qi phua' The upper and lower three syllables belong to the same niu as the middle one. That's why it's called "all converging on one entering tone."

A niu, then, is the figure formed by a syllabic theme (e.g., ywak) and its variations. If so, it seems appropriate to render the names of BK d7-8, cheng-niu IE; and p 'ang-niu 50H, as "frontal ligature" and "lateral ligature," where "ligature" is intended to have the same sense as bandha. The semantic evolution of niu as a technical term thus parallels that of p'ing + and tse {11in that their earlier usages and their Sanskrit forerunners all refer to figures or overall features in a verse. What, then, have the prosodists who wrote on ping wrought with the dosa-stuff they inherited from Indian theoreticians of poetics? In terms of their prescriptions BK dl -4, 9-10, and 13 may technically be considered as prosodic rules. Their concern for a balanced distribution of contrasting "light" and "heavy" ("long" and "short" or "level" and "deflected,' as the case may be) syllables

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is comparable to that displayed in metrical manuals for Sanskrit verse. Insofar as these defects may be considered equivalent to particular Sanskrit dosa, they all fall under visama ("uneven," NS d8)9" or bhinnavrtta("fractured meter," KL d18, KD d8). From their descriptions, their names, and their very classification as varieties of ping instead of elaboration in a separate treatment on metrics, however, it would appear that several of these defects have been confused with variousyamaka and other types of poetic ornaments. BK d5 and d6 are manifestly Chinese counterparts of the many types of yamaka ("rhyme," usually internal). BK d7 and d8 represent even more clearly a Chinese distillation and adaptation of Sanskrit bandha ("ligature"). BK d9 and dlO are to be grouped with the first four rules governing "metrical" symmetry. Three characteristics reveal a rather clumsy attempt to create the appearance of an indigenous prosody: their names (based on the five phases [wu-hsing iD]); duplication (BK d9a and dlOa, for example, may be subsumed under dl while dlOc fits under d2); and inexplicitness. BK d13, whose name is an old bisyllable in Chinese, is probably also due to the same motivation. We may observe that the term occurs with its J on BK usual signification in the comments of Liu Shan-ching d8. BK dl 1 is unmistakably derived from Sanskrit rules concerning upama ("simile"). BK d12, d14-d18, d21-d23, and d25-26 are typical concerns of Sanskrit dosa, and it is easy to find their prototypes among the various standard lists that would have been available to the devisers of Chinese poetics from Indian, Southeast Asian, and Central Asian monks who were living in China during the Six Dynasties, Sui, and T'ang periods. BK d19-d20 and d24 represent the closest approach in Chinese poetics to what Indian theoreticians would treat extensively under the rubrics of grammar (sabda, "word"), syntax (vakya, "statement"), semantics (artha, "meaning"), and logic (nyaya; cf. KL, Chapter V). The two remaining defects in BK, d27-d28, reflect typical preoccupations of Indian authors on poetics that are ironically repetitious of dl2, d22, and d25. At least we may say that they are insufficiently differentiated from these three defects. Their chief inspiration seems to have been
91 Bharata also mentions a "forsaking of rhythm and meter" (chando-vrtta-tydga) in Chapter 27 of NS.

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similar to that for d9, dlO, and d13, although in this case the source of the colorful names "Extra Fingers" and "Joined Toes" is the Chuang Tzu. Chinese stipulations concerning literary defects, including the concept of ping itself, arose under the impact of Indian expositions of dosa. However, despite all of the remarkable correspondences, the codifiers of Chinese prosodic rules were not translating verbatim from any single text or set of individual poetic defects. Though they may well have consulted a particular Indian treatise on poetics such as KD through their Indian, Central Asian, or Southeast Asian colleagues, their chief emphasis was always on the creation of what they hoped would be a genuine prosody of their own instead of a Sanskrit poetics in Chinese dress. Sanskrit Contributions to the Making of Recent Style Prosody Before returning to the topic of specific Sanskrit contributions to the making of Recent Style prosody, we should mention another source on Sanskrit metrics that could have influenced Shen Yiieh and his followers. This is the Chandoviciti(Examination of Meter),92an elaborate treatise, in verse, on Buddhist Sanskrit metrics. It was discovered in the summer of 1956 during restoration work among the birchbark fragments of the Berlin collection of Turfan manuscripts that had been recovered by German archeologists from the Central Asian desert in the early part of this century. In effect, the Chandoviciticonstitutes a systematic text for learning the rules and aims of Sanskrit metrics. Aside from presenting a general discussion of prosodic rules (manipulation of syllables, possible combinations, etc.), it introduced the names and characteristics of a wide variety of Sanskrit meters. Among the fragments, no less than sixty different meters are named or described. As might well be expected, in the text of the Chandovicitiproper, the first meters mentioned are trstub-jagaty-anustup (i.e., s'loka) and gdtha (6V3, p. 34). Close parallels with the Pingala-satra or Chandah-siutra (the earliest extant Indian treatise on metrics, dating to around the beginning of mark this our era) and the chapter on metrics from the Ndtyas'astra
92 Dieter Schlingloff, ed. and intro., Chandoviciti:Texte zur Sanskritmetrik, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Institut fiir Orientforschung, Ver6ffentlichung Nr. 36. Sanskrittexte aus den Turfanfunde, V (Berlin: Academie-Verlag, 1958).

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treatise as being squarely in the mainstream of Sanskrit metrics. The existence of the Chandovicitiduring the fourth century at a key Silk Road site frequented by Chinese pilgrims and Indian missionary-translators is significant. It suggests that explicit knowledge of Sanskrit metrics was available through foreign monks bilingual in Chinese to those who were responsible in succeeding decades for the establishment of Chinese Buddhist metrical conventions. Adding the Chandovicitito the sources mentioned earlier, we may remark that Shen Yueh and his followers had potential access to examples of Buddhist verse in s'loka meter, treatises on Sanskrit metrics, and the NS in some version. To make our comparisons more concrete, we will occasionally cite passages from the NS and the BK, not because we believe any Chinese had necessarily read the NS itself, but because the NS is a standard reference for Indian poetics. Let us begin with two general prosodic principles. The first, placing tonal restrictions on internal syllables, is one of the three major innovations instituted by Shen Yiieh and his cohorts. There is a general sense in which Sanskrit meter is responsible for this innovation; any Sanskrit meter, simply by being a quantitative-syllabic meter, must place some restriction on some internal syllables. There is in addition a specific sense in which the sloka encouraged the Chinese devisers of Recent Style prosody to pay particular attention to internal (i.e., the second, third, and fourth) syllables of a pentasyllabic line. All authorities agree that in a s'lokathe first and eighth syllables (i.e., the first and last syllables) of each pdda are free. This tradition goes back to the Vedas, for as Mukherji has noted, "In all Vedic metres the quantities of the first and the last syllables are indifferent. "93 This license translated into Chinese means that the first and last syllables of a pentasyllabic line should be free. But before Chinese poets became interested in trying to reproduce the euphonic effects of Sanskrit meter, the native prosodic tradition had already established a rule requiring that the final syllables of even lines be rhymed (Rule 1), and hence be in the same tone. Consequently, only the first syllable could be free. This is indeed what happened; the major development was Rule 5, which
93

A. Mukherji, Sanskrit Prosody. Its Evolution (Calcutta: Saraswat Library 1976), p. 33.

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called for alternation of the second and fourth syllables, with sporadic attempts to introduce a similar alternation of the third and fifth syllables. The result is that, by 550, the prosodic pattern had become: 0 A (y) B xi / 0 B (x) A y (R), leaving the first syllable of every line free. The second general principle informing the s'lokais that of balanced contrast. Commenting on the development of the sloka, Lin Li-kouang has this to say:
There is a simple and infallible principle that determines the structure of the first two ardhapdda[half pdda] of the hemistich of the iloka, namely that among these two elements, there must be contrast. This tendency, as remarked by Jacobi, goes all the way back to the Vedic period. All the varieties of the pathya and vipuld [regular or irregular varieties of the iloka] can be explained by this principle of contrast.94

Specific instances of this principle of contrast include "to avoid monotony, there should never be a succession of more than two iambic or anapestic feet"; "a succession of three trochaic feet or of two trochees and a dactyl must also be avoided for the same reason"; and "a succession of four consecutive brevia is also to be avoided. "95 Or consider the following conditional rules for the sloka, as formulated by Felix Lacote: when the third syllable of the first demi-pdda of a sloka is heavy, the second must be light; in odd-numbered pddas, the third syllable is heavy if the second is light, and the fifth syllable is light when the fourth is light; when the sixth syllable is heavy then the seventh does not have free value, and when the sixth is light then the seventh may be either heavy or light.96 The aim of these rules is obviously to achieve both contrast and balance. This is also the principle informing Recent Style prosody. For example, among the class of second and fourth syllables, the total number of level syllables is balanced by an equal number of deflected syllables, and the overall pattern is governed by the principle of maximal contrast within the quatrain. The same applies to the final syllables. The aesthetic ideal of balance and contrast was of course not entirely new to Chinese poetry. But the application of that principle to the phonetic features of language in a systematic and predetermined
9

p. 232. Lin Li-kouang, L'Aide-Memoire,

p. 90.

95 A. Mukherji,
96

Felix Lacote, "Sur la forme metrique du rloka epique, "JA 209 (July-September, 1926): 102-106.

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way was India's gift to China. And once the Chinese by trial and eropposition in ror discovered how to simulate the "light"/'heavy" Sanskrit, it became possible simultaneously to achieve maximal contrast for the patterns in Recent Style poetry and maintain a distribution of the four tones approximating that in natural speech. Aside from the influence of these general principles, Sanskrit prosody also helped to shape Recent Style verse in more precise ways. For example, there is ample reason to believe that the first four of Shen Yiieh's "Eight Defects" are all in some fashion modeled after Sanskrit forerunners:
No. No. No. No. 1 2 3 4 "Level Head" "Raised Tail" "Wasp's Waist" "Crane's Knee" ("Foot-initial Yamaka") Paddadi-Yamaka :: Samudga-Yamaka("Rising-together Yamaka") :: Kdfic-Yamaka ("Girdle Yamaka") Samudga-Yamaka("Rising-together Yamaka")

Below we cite the relevant passages from the BK and the NS to illustrate the similarity.
No. 1 "Level Head" (BK 86): In five-syllable poetry, the first and sixth syllables should not share the same tone, nor should the second and the seventh syllables share the same tone. "Sharing the same tone" means that the two syllables should not share any one of the four tones: level, rising, departing, and entering. A poem that violates this rule is called "level head." A level head poem goes: IMV%*
TXwiL1-

11 e d 1 111 d 1

In blossom-time, the weather's fine and clear, I carry the wine-jug up the terrace to pour.

Padadi-Yamaka (NS XVII 76-77): 76. When the same word occurs at the beginning of each foot, it is [an instance of] Padadi-Yamaka. Example: 77. visnuh srjati bhiitdni visnuh samharateprajda I visnuh prasiutetrailokyamvisnur lokddhi-daivatamll Visnu creates all living beings; Visnu destroys all creatures: Visnu creates (lit. gives birth to) the three worlds and Visnu is the overlord of [all] the worlds.97

"Level head" is the prototype of our Rule 4. Pddddi means the beginning of a foot. Clearly, the overall presentation of "level head" and padadi in Sanskrit are similar. The main difference is that, whereas the Sanskrit defect is about the repetition of a word,
9

Translation by Ghosh, p. 311.

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the Chinese defect is about the repetition of one of the four tones.
No. 2 "Raised Tail" (BK 87): In five-syllable verse, the fifth and tenth syllables should not be in the same tone. (If they are), this is called "raised tail." NALh. i, hFI 1 e r 11 d r 111 In the northwest there is a tall tower, High up on a level with the clouds.

Samudga-Yamaka (NS XVII 68-69): 68. When the same hemistich by its repetition completes the verse, it is [an instance of] Samudga-Yamaka. Example:
69. ketakf-mukulpdndara-dantah sobhatepravara-kanana-hasti-I ketakf-mukul-pdndara-dantah s'obhate pravara-kHnana-hastI11

The very big wild elephant with its tusks as pale-white as Ketaki buds looks beautiful; and the elephant-like large forest looks beautiful with Ketaki buds as its pale-white tusks.98

Samudgameans "going up, rising together," corresponding to shang "raised" in shang-wei LM "raised tail." The Chinese terms for tonal defects contain anatomical references, e.g., "head," "tail," 'waist, and "knee" in "level head," "raised tail, "wasp's waist, and "crane's knee. " These are absent from the corresponding terms in Sanskrit. Several scholars of comparative Buddhism have remarked that when Sanskrit terms are imported into Chinese, they are made concrete. We find the same phenomenon in collating Sanskrit and Chinese prosodic terms. There is in addition a basic ambiguity in the way speakers of Chinese and Sanskrit view the organization of poetry. A Sanskrit hemistich (half a verse) is equivalent to one line of a Chinese quatrain. To put the matter in another way, what the Chinese see as four lines of verse, the Indians see as two lines consisting of two pdda each. Given a Sanskrit example such as the one cited above, a Chinese familiar with the Sanskrit convention would see "Samudga-Yamaka" as calling for avoidance of repetition in adjacent lines. The Chinese analogue would be "raised tail." But a Chinese less familiar with the Sanskrit convention, viewing the same example from the Chinese perspective, would see "Samudga98

Ibid., p. 310.

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Yamaka" as calling for repetition in alternate lines. Avoiding tonal repetition in the final syllables of even lines is, of course, impossible, because these syllables, carrying the rhyme, must be in the same one of the four tones. Avoiding tonal repetition in the final syllables of odd lines is the only possible analogue to this interpretation. The result is "crane's knee, " defined as follows:
No. 4 "Crane's Knee" (BK 89): In five-syllable verse, the fifth syllable should not be in the same tone as the fifteenth syllable. That is to say, when the heads are fine and the middle is thick, it resembles a crane's knee; there is a defect in the midst of the poem. A poem goes: 90!1RM e d 11 r We punt along the Chin-ling riverbank,

M;1
Pffiw; 11*AM,

11 d 1 e
d e 11 r 1 d 11 e

Following the streams, with our backs to the city

gates; Over the wrinkled waves flies our boat's reflection, A mountain hangs upside down in the water, suspending the wheel-like moon.

The explanation says: (In the above example) the two syllables in question (i.e., the rhyme words) are separated by a crane's knee. Since the fifth syllable 'tsjwo (j) is a rising tone, the end syllable of the third line 'ivng (f) should not use rising tone again. No. 3 "Wasp's Waist" (BK 88): As for "wasp's waist" poems, within one line of five-syllable poetry, the second and fifth syllables should not be in the same tone. That is to say, when the two ends are thick, and the middle is thin, it resembles a wasp's waist. One poem goes.... Another one goes: R1Rtk: M1A1M 11 d r 1 e e d 1e I hear that you love me sweetly, All by myself I put on ornaments.

. . .The explanation says: Whenever one discusses "wasp's waist" in regard to five-syllable verse, then from the very first "waist" one should urgently avoid (this defect), and to repeat it would be a grave error. If one examines poems according to the rules of tonal prosody, then there are no ordinary ones that avoid this defect. Someone has said: ckjuan (E) and ckam (X) cannot be considered as faults, whereas dukD (l) and sj3k, (M) are in fact faults. The reason is that when the second and fifth syllables are both departing, rising, or entering, they are all faults, but level tone is not a fault. This defect is lighter than that of "raised tail" or "crane's knee," is on a par with "level head," and is more severe than the other four defects. Kafici-Yamaka (NS XVII 66-67): 66. Two similar words occurring at the beginning and at the end of each foot

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constitute Kanici-Yamaka. Example: dravatinadm 67. yamadya-mas-candravatinadm rajantnamI sdra-jantindm vyaktavyaktd va pulle phulle sa-bhramareva-'bhramare rdma'rdmavismayateca smayate call The length of hours (yama) of the moon-lit nights, passing swiftly in the company of women are scarcely perceived. Flowers having blown whether with or without bees, the lady looks at them admiringly, and has a beautiful smile.99

The meaning of "wasp's waist" has always been obscure. As the commentary in the BK indicates ("the explanation says," "someone has said"), T'ang prosodists were equally baffled. "Kdiici" means girdle in Sanskrit, which invites association with "waist" in Chinese. If a Sanskrit foot (pdda) is taken to be the equivalent of one line in the Chinese quatrain, then the second syllable (at the beginning of a foot) and fifth syllable (at the end) can be regarded as "two similar words occurring at the beginning and the end of each foot. " There are several instances in the Chinese phonological tradition where Middle Chinese phonetic facts were distorted to make them conform to the Sanskrit phonemic framework. We suspect that "wasp's waist" is a failed attempt to imitate Kaiici-Yamaka. The prosodic pattern of the sloka probably also influenced tonal prosody at higher levels of organization, that is, for units larger than a couplet. Earlier we saw that during the process of experimentation which led to the establishment of the patterns for the second and fourth syllables of Regulated Verse, there appeared two variants, (A) and (C): (A) Repeated couplet pattern: OAOBO OBOAO OAOBO OBOAO (B) Reversed couplet pattern: OAOBO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO

(C) Reversed quatrain pattern: (D) Regulated Verse: OAOBO OAOBO OBOAO OBOAO OBOAO OBOAO OAOBO OAOBO
99 Ibid., pp. 309-310.

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OBOAO O A OBO O A OBO OBOAO

OAOBO O BO AO O BO AO OAOBO

These two variants did not survive long into the T'ang. The eventual result of experimentation was that the reversed pattern was preferred for the quatrain, and the repeated pattern for the octave, giving rise to the standard pattern of Regulated Verse, as illustrated in (D) above. How did these patterns come about? The first source is the poetry immediately preceding Shen Yiieh, especially the work of Hsieh Ling-yun, a poet profoundly influenced by Buddhism. In his use of alliterative and rhyming bisyllables and in his manipulation of lines describing landscape, he was trying out the principle of pattern reversal. On p. 393 we saw that in a couplet from his "I Follow the Chin-chu Torrent," the phonic pattern is AA-BB / BB-AA, where AA represents alliterative syllables and BB represents rhyming syllables. Consider now the pattern of semantic categories in lines 3-10 and lines 13-16 of the following poem by Hsieh Ling-yun:100 &XllltxikS NE Pr. *A ?1RWW
X :1Ik

On My Way from South Mountain to North Mountain, I Glance at the Scenery from the Lake At dawn I set out from the sunlit cliffs, At sunset I take my rest by the shaded peaks. Leaving my boat, I turn my eyes upon the distant sandbars, Resting my staff, I lean against the lush pine.4 The small mountain paths are far and deep, The ring-like islets are beautiful and pleasing. I view the twigs of tall trees above,

@41ULtX ";X1tiK @8Jffi%W V1_3 9at*t@

{fPkpttw
A'53W1t

I listen to the torrents in the deep valley below.8

The rocks lie flat, and the river divides its flow. The forest is dense, tracks are buried and lost. What is the effect of Nature's "deliverance" and "becoming?"

#Mm *m 1f'A1J S,

100 Lin Wen-yiieh, Shan-shui yii ku-tien, p. 41; Kang-i Sun Chang, Six DynastiesPoetry, pp. 51-53. The translation is Chang's.

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*FfiWSM e_,In VM9W iSC ikW5i VJA

12 All things growing are lush and thriving. are in bamboos sheaths, green wrapped Young Fresh rushes embrace their purple flowers. Seagulls play by the springtime banks, 16 Wild pheasants sport in the gentle breeze.

Lines 3-10 alternate between mountain scenes and water scenes: line line line line line line line line 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: 9: 10: water scene mountain scene mountain scene water scene mountain scene water scene water scene mountain scene

The semantic pattern anticipates and is isomorphic to the tonal pattern of Regulated Verse, as shown in (D) above. Arranging lines 310 by couplets, we have: lines lines lines lines 3-4: 5-6: 7-8: 9-10: water mountain mountain water mountain water water mountain

The semantic pattern is isomorphic to the tonal pattern of a Recent Style quatrain, as shown in (C). Lines 13-16 embody a two-dimensional pattern constituted by topographic features and their inhabitants: line line line line 13: 14: 15: 16: mountain plant (bamboos) water plant (rushes) water bird (seagulls) mountain bird (pheasants)

The mountain-water-water-mountain sequence has a reversed pattern similar to the tonal pattern governing the second and fourth syllables in a quatrain, while the plant-plant-bird-bird sequence has a repeated pattern echoing that of the last syllables in the quatrain. As Lin Wen-yuieh has observed, these symmetric patterns are not

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limited to the poetry of Hsieh Ling-yfin."'? For example, the first eight lines of "Going up Lu Mountain" (RI [Ii) by Pao Chao (41266), Hsieh's younger contemporary, also alternate between mountain scenes and water scenes: lines lines lines lines 1-2: 3-4: 5-6: 7-8: water mountain mountain water mountain water water mountain

The first source of tonal patterns of Recent Style prosody is therefore clear: once the quatrain and the octave become the dominant forms of pentasyllabic verse, all that is necessary to create the canonical models (B) and (D) above is to transfer the patterns for semantic categories and alliterative and rhyming bisyllables to tonal features. The second source is the iloka, whose two lines with two pddas each would appear to the Chinese as consisting of four lines each. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons behind Hsieh T'iao's preference for the quatrain and the octave; the latter may be thought of as two slokas in succession. The sloka consists of four pddas or quarter-verses of eight syllables each, with the following basic scheme: Odd pdda: x x x x - (-) (-) (-) Even pdda: x x x x - - - x Earlier we saw that Wang Jung, Hsieh T'iao, and Hsiao Kang all wrote octave poems with a repeated couplet pattern: 0 A 0 B 0 / 0 BOAO//OAOBO/OBOAO///OAOBO/OBOAO// 0 A 0 B 0 / 0 B 0 A 0. Given that there was no precedent for such a regular form in the Chinese poetic tradition, one might well ask what prompted them to adopt it. Recalling that "raised tail" had been established before these poems, the answer is that they were emulating the alternating pattern of the sloka. The tonal pattern for those octave poems may be stated simply as: Odd line:
Even
101

O AO Bx
C) R C) A v

i;ne

Lin Wen-yuieh, Shan-shui,p. 44.

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Finally, there is another way the iloka might have influenced the making of Recent Style prosody. From the very beginning, the polysyllabic rhythm of Sanskrit sounded verbose and cumbersome to the Chinese ear, which was accustomed to hearing the more concise rhythm of a monosyllabic language. Sanskrit verse, being devoid of end-rhyme, would be difficult to parse into lines according to Chinese convention. It would not be surprising for some Chinese, especially those who did not know Sanskrit well, to regard half a pdda as the equivalent of a five-syllable line of Chinese verse. The result of this way of viewing the sloka would be as follows (with line numbers placed above each demi-pdda): (1)
x x x x

(2)
HH- H-

(3) xxX/x (5)

x x x x

(4) - -x (6)
HH- H-

(7) xxxx

(8) - -x

Two corrollaries immediately obtain. First, line 4 has a different pattern from line 2; presupposing Rule 5 (which gives 0 A 0 B 0), this leads to the following pattern: 0 0 0 0 0 / 0 B 0 A 0 // 0 0 O O 0 / 0 A 0 B 0. Since "level head" is already in force, the result is the reversed couplet pattern as illustrated in (B): 0 A 0 B O /0 B 0 A 0//0 B 0 A 0/0 A 0 B 0. The second corollary is that lines 5-8 repeat the pattern of lines 1-4. The two together yield the tonal pattern of Regulated Verse for the second and fourth syllables.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

The theme of this paper is the coming of Sanskrit poetics and Sanskrit meter into China and the effect of this contact on the subsequent development of Chinese prosody. In the concluding section we would like to discuss only one question among the many that occurred to us in the course of our study. "In speaking frankly from the heart," to borrow a phrase from Shen Yiieh, we are surprised

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by the fact that prosodic principles and poetic theories could be transmitted across the linguistic and cultural boundaries between India and China. So the question is, are there parallel cases? This in turn contains two sub-questions. Are there other instances illustrating the transmission of the theory of poetic defects across cultural and linguistic boundaries? The answer is yes. No later than 772, the Chinese theory of poetic defects had already made its way across the sea to Japan, where it spawned similar poetic codes for waka and renga, not to mention Chinese poetry written by the Japanese. Can prosodies or prosodic principles be transmitted across linguistic boundaries? The answer is again yes. The most interesting case is found in the literature based on Tai languages, in which there is not only a Pali-inspired type of versification called chan meters, but also a Chinese-inspired prosody used in the Wuming dialect of Kwangsi. According to Konishi Jin'ichi, Japanese poets writing Chinese poetry in the tenth century tried to avoid tonal defects.102One candidate taking the civil service examination was disqualified because he failed to avoid "wasp's waist." When he protested, learned debate ensued concerning whether "wasp's waist" should be considered a fault at all, and if so, how serious the offense was. The authoritative source cited for the definition of "wasp's waist" was none other than BK 88, the very same passage quoted on p. 449. Evidently the Japanese of the tenth century were still very much exercised by the "Eight Defects" of Shen Yiieh, at a time when "wasp's waist" was totally irrelevant to the standardized tonal patterns of Recent Style poetry. hyodshiki More interesting is the appearance of the Kakyod (Vt A) by Fujiwara no Hamanari *iliglMZ in 772,103 a poetic code written in Chinese listing seven defects to be avoided in waka. Since Kakai was only two years old when this work appeared, we may surmise that the Chinese theory of poetic defects had already made its way to Japan before the BK. This is not surprising in view of the brilliant was derived demonstration by Konishi that the style of the Kokinshut
102

ko, 2:72. Konishi, Bunkyjhifuron taikei E ed., Nihon kagaku Sasaki Nobutuna MEE*-, ko, 2:80-3. hifuron 1963), 1:1-17; Konishi, Bunkyo
103

(Kazama shobo,

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from Chinese poetry of the Six Dynasties.104 It is also evidence that, upon reachingJapan, the Chinese theory of poetic defects had been adapted and then applied toJapanese classical poetry. The proscription for the first defect in the KakyoI is as follows: hyodshiki
No. 1 "Head Tail" (M%): The final syllable of the first line and the final syllable of the second line should not share the same sound. A poem that violates this rule is the "Spring Song" (Haru no uta) of Yamabe Akahito UtE,k:
Shimogareno / shidariyangi no No is the final syllable of the opening line, and also the final syllable of the second line. The two no's share the same sound and express the same word, which is rare in waka. It is therefore called "the Head Tail defect."105

There are also many other lists composed after the Kakyo hyoshiki. In all these lists, whether the subject matter is waka or poetry written in Chinese, the format is exactly like that in the section on "Twentyeight Poetic Defects" of the BK. Each defect is concerned with the need to avoid a certain type of repetition for syllables occupying certain positions in the verse. The same is on the whole also true for lists developed for renga, though the concern there is more focused and d24, on defects similar to BK d23, "Unseasonableness," "Disorderedness," which affect the order and coherence of renga.106 The proximate model for these lists is Shen Yiieh's enumeration of eight defects as it appears in the BK. The ultimate source is Indian treatises on poetics such as the NS. There is, however, one important difference between the transmission from India to China and the next transmission from China to Japan. In the Indo-Chinese case, the coming of Sanskrit theory of poetic defects stimulated the creation of a new type of prosody in Chinese, which was to dominate the world of poetry for centuries to come. In the Sino-Japanese case, the Chinese theory was merely applied by the Japanese to poetic forms already in existence, perhaps refining the prosody, but without generating new forms. The Japanese, of course, also practiced thoroughly Chinese verse, whereas the Chinese did not use Sanskrit directly.
104 Konishi Jin'ichi and Helen McCullough (trans.), "The Genesis of the Kokinshul Style," HJAS 38.1 (1978): 67-170. 105 Sasaki, Kagaku taikei, p. 1. 106

hifuron Konishi, Bunkvo ko. 2:116-30.

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This naturally leads us to the second question: "Can prosodies or prosodic principles be transmitted across linguistic or cultural boundaries?" The most illuminating example comes from the litergroup of languages that has both ature based on Tai languages-a the long/short opposition in the vowels and a tonal system very much like that of the Chinese. Among the various types of Tai versification, there is both a Pali-inspired type of meters called chan based on the "light" and "heavy" syllables, and a Chinese-inspired prosody based on the opposition between "level" and "deflected" tones. Below we cite the opening paragraphs of Thomas Hudak's account of chdn meters.
The chan meters, introduced into Thai literature during the Ayuttaya period (1350-1767), are Indic meters which had their origin in Sanskrit and Pali counterparts. With the widespread influence of Pali in Thailand, the Thai poets probably obtained the meters from Pali sources rather than Sanskrit ones, although it remains unknown whether the poets first encountered these meters through the classical Pali treatises on metrics, the Vuttodaya[Exposition of Meter], or through oral recitations. Certainly both ways were possible in the flourishing Pali culture of these early centuries. Like the other Thai verse forms the chan meters are syllabic. Unlike the other forms, however, these meters do not depend solely on syllable number to define a line. In addition to syllable number, each chan line consists of syllables designated as light (Thai lahu') and heavy (Thai kharu'). A light syllable in Thai consists of a short vowel followed by no final consonants. The glottal stop [9], which optionally follows a short vowel in spoken Thai but has no final consonant in written Thai, is ignored. A heavy syllable, on the other hand, consists of a final long vowel, or any vowel followed by a final consonant.107

This development in Thai literature is in many ways a replay of what happened in Chien-k'ang during the fifth and sixth centuries. In both cases, knowledge about Indic meters came either through oral recitation or through some Indian treatise on metrics. The first step in the imitative process is to develop the analogue to the distinction in Sanskrit or Pali. The second step is "light"!'heavy" to superimpose the analogous distinction upon the native tradition of syllabic verse. The Thais evidently had an easier time since all they had to do was to codify the long/short opposition already in their language. The Chinese, on the other hand, had to use the long/short distinction in Sanskrit as a clue for finding something
107

Thomas Hudak, "Poetic conventions in Thai chanMeters," JAOS 105.1 (1985): 107.

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similar in the phonetic features of the four tones. There are two other differences. The Thais simply took over the terms lahu9 and kharu9from Pali for "light" (Skt. laghu, Pali lahu) and "heavy" (Skt. guru, Pali garu), whereas the Chinese adopted the Sanskrit prosodic terms via translation. In Thai, syllables ending in -p, -t, -k (and -m, -n, -ng) accompany long vowels; in Middle Chinese, if Ting Pang-hsin is right, syllables ending in -p, -t, -k, are either short or not prolongable. In the Tai dialect spoken in Wu-ming, Kwangsi, there is a type of folksong based on tonal prosody.108Unlike the Recent Style poetry composed by T'ang literati, these are genuine folksongs often serving a utilitarian purpose, as the following question-and-answer pair of quatrains illustrate: Where do the wild ducks come from / to spread their feathers here? Where do you guys come from / to poke around at this place? The response: We are men of Pin chou / going down to ply our porcelain trade. Swaying this way and that way with our loads / we can sharpen razors too. There are six tones in the Wu-ming dialect: (1) mid level [3-3], (2) low falling [3-1], (3) mid rising [2-4], (4) low rising [1-3], (5) high level [5-5], and (6) high falling [5-1].1"9 For the purpose of prosody, the mid level and low falling tones belong to the level category; the other tones and words ending in -p, -t, -k belong to the deflected category. The justification for using the Chinese prosodic terms level and deflected is that in Chinese loan words, the mid level tone and the low falling tone respectively correspond to Chineseyinp'ing and yang-p 'ing, with the other tones of Wu-ming corresponding to the other three tones in Chinese. In the folksongs, level
108 Li Fang-kuei 40 (Native Songs of Wu-ming), An, "Wu-ming t'u-ko" A99+S 3 (1956): 215-20. The description of the tonal system Sinica 4 nalsof Academia fR1:lf R Tai (Honolulu: Hawaii Uniof Comparative of Wu-ming is based on Fang-kuei Li, A Handbook versity Press, 1977), pp. 20-21. 109 Li Fang-kuei, "Wu-ming t'u-ko."

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words can only rhyme with level words, and deflected words can only rhyme with deflected words. All songs are in the five-syllable line, with two lines forming a couplet. While both the four-line song and the eight-line song are present in the corpus collected by Li Fang-kuei, for the sake of brevity we will only describe the prosody of the quatrain, whose rhyme scheme for one verse is as follows (with X and Y representing rhymes):

00 OO X OOXOY
OOOOY OOYOO

(FirstCouplet) (SecondCouplet)

The internal rhyme in the second line of each couplet is movable, that is, not limited to the third syllable; but it may also fall on the second or the fourth syllable. The tonal scheme is as follows, with A and B opposed with respect to the level/deflected distinction: OOOOA OOOOB OOAOB OOBOA (First Couplet) (Second Couplet)

The prosodic principles underlying the Wu-ming quatrain are as follows: (1) Raised tail: the fifth and tenth syllables should not be in the same category. (2) The 3-5 rule: the third and fifth syllables of the second line of a couplet should not be in the same category. This rule is similar to Rule 5 of Recent Style poetry but defines different positions. (3) Reversal Rule: the pattern of the first couplet is reversed in the second. All three rules, including the level/deflected distinction, are obviously modeled after the tonal rules of Recent Style poetry. From this limited survey, we may conclude that the theory of poetic defects is eminently exportable. The Indian theory of dosa first went to China and thence to Japan, where it spawned derivative theories of poetic defects for the waka and the renga. While the Tai speakers of Wu-ming have never heard of Shen Yiieh's "eight defects" or the "twenty-eight defects" of the BK, their poetry is also indirectly influenced by them. What is the relation between linguistic typology and the transmissibility of prosodic principles? The answer is far from clear. It may be thought that having the same phonetic features is a sufficient condition for the adoption of a foreign prosodic system. After all, the reason why the Tai languages are hospitable to both

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Indian meters and Chinese tonal prosody is that these languages have both the long/short opposition in the vowels and a tonal system. Vietnamese is also a tonal and, on the whole, a monosyllabic language whose Sino-Vietnamese component shows regular tonal correspondence with Middle Chinese. In terms of linguistic typology, then, there was nothing to prevent the Vietnamese from developing a Wu-ming type of prosody. And indeed, they did so in exceedingly intricate ways, directly borrowing the concept of level (bang) and deflected (trac) tonal categories for vernacular poems written in the Nom script."' Tibetan, on the other hand, which is genetically and phonologically even closer to Chinese than are Vietnamese and Tai languages, never developed a Wu-ming style of prosody, perhaps because it fell more within the Sanskritic cultural orbit than the Sinitic. Likewise, it may be thought that typological similarity in the respective languages is a necessary condition for the transmission of prosodic principles. Yet this is also not always the case. Classical Sanskrit and Middle Chinese are typologically as different as any two languages can be. Yet, if we are right, prosodic principles were transmitted from India to China via the great vehicle of Buddhism. If typological affinity between two languages is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the transmission of prosodic principles, we have to deal with intangibles. Among the intangibles, religious fervor, which permeated every facet of society during the Southern dynasties, must be one of the key factors that made the Chinese elite so receptive towards Indian ideas. There is also the extraordinary conjunction of circumstances that brought the second generation of experimental poets, at the most crucial moment, into positions of influence so that they could complete the task left unfinished by the first. The contributions made by geniuses is another intangible which historians have to contend with. To be blessed with one genius is already extraordinary luck, but the movement to develop tonal prosody had two, Hsieh T'iao and Yu Hsin. And although Hsiao Kang was not a great poet, he was certainly a great experimental prosodist. Were it not for these three individuals, Shen Yiieh's efforts to codify Chinese prosodic practices
"1 Hu'ynhSanh Thong, ed. and tr., TheHeritage of Vietnamese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. xxvii-xxxvi, esp. xxix-xxx.

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along Sanskritic lines might have been no more than an eccentric quirk in the history of ideas. Had the program of Shen Yuieh and his associates failed for lack of talented poets to gain it credibility and respectability, one can only imagine how vastly different the subsequent evolution of Chinese verse would have been. Thus, having enumerated the various factors connected with the rise of tonal prosody, we remain as puzzled as before by this truly remarkable event in the history of cultural borrowing. Had it not actually happened, we would be inclined to deem such a massive, momentous transfer between two such highly dissimilar languages an improbability if not an impossibility. By our argument, the formation of Recent Style prosody should join the transformation text (pien-wen CZ) of the T'ang and the Southern drama (hsi-wen fzZ) of the Southern Sung as the major legacies of Indian influence upon Chinese literature."' The Sanskrit doctrine of poetic defects, its technical and exotic terminology notwithstanding, is actually about the distinction between felicitous and infelicitous repetitions. Gerard Manley Hopkins has defined verse as "speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound. " Accordingly, the coming of the Sanskrit doctrine may also be said to have introduced the Chinese to one of the central questions of universal poetics. Finally, let us note that the tonal patterns of Regulated Verse are not only famous for their intricacy but also essential to the function of this verse form as an instrument of lyrical expression. Commenting on the Regulated Verse of the T'ang, Kao Yu-kung has said: "The concise form and precise structure helped enormously to consolidate the two pillars of support in this new aesthetics: internalization of the external and formalization of the internal.' '12 What Kao means is this: with only four couplets at his disposal, the poet cannot merely describe what is outside of him but must internalize the world and express his inner state of mind, including his internalized impression of the world. This he must accomplish in the highly formalized middle coupets-formalized both by the tonal patterns and by the requirement of antithetical
Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge Popular "' Victor H. Mair, tr. and intro., Tun-huang University Press, 1983), "Introduction," pp. 1-28, esp. pp. 15-20. 112 Kao Yu-kung, "Aesthetics of the Regulated Verse," in Lin and Owen, eds., The Vitality of theLyric Voice,p. 364.

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construction. If successful, the outcome is a concentrated expression of the lyrical voice. In summary, Shen Yueh and his followers, under the influence of the Sanskrit theory of poetic defects, invented tonal prosody between 488 and 550 in an attempt to reproduce, in Chinese, the same euphonic effect achieved by meter in Sanskrit. In particular, (1) Sanskrit laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy") gave Shen Yueh both the terminology and the idea of a binary opposition in prosody, (2) the sloka with its sacramental significance caused the Chinese prosodists to develop a meter or meter-like structure in their poetry, and (3) the doctrine of dosa ("defect") in Sanskrit poetics provided them with the theoretical framework to formulate the prosodic rules governing tones.

Appendix
"TWENTY-EIGHT POETIC DEFECTS"

I
FROM THE BUNKYO HIFURON

OF KUKAI (ABRIDGED).113

dl . Level Head (p 'ing-t 'ou +,M; cf. NS y7). In a pentasyllabic poem, the first and the sixth syllables may not share the same tone, nor may the second and the seventh syllables share the same tone. "Sharing the same tone" means that the pair of syllables in question may not share any one of the four tones: level, rising, departing, and entering. d2. Raised Tail (shang-wei L%; cf. NS y3, KL d5b; sometimes also called the "Collapsed Earth [t'u-peng ?*!] Defect"). In a pentasyllabic poem, the fifth and the tenth syllables may not share the same tone. d3. Wasp's Waist (feng-yao a;; cf. NS y2). The second and the fifth syllables within the same line of a pentasyllabic poem may not share the same tone. Should they do so, the line is said to be thick at the two ends and thin in the middle like a wasp's waist. d4. Crane's Knee (he-hsi Z; cf. NS yl). In a pentasyllabic poem, the fifth and the fifteenth syllables may not share the same tone. Should they do so, the poem is said to be thin at the two ends and thick in the middle like a crane's knee; hence there is a defect in the middle of the poem. d5. Major Rhyme (ta-yiin ikffi; sometimes called the "Fracture [ch'u-chuehN] Defect"; cf. KL d18, KD d8). In a pentasyllabic poem, if csjen X is used as a rhymeword, then one may not use syllables such as cnizWen A, ctsjefn it, cljen A,
113 For a complete translation of examples, commentaries, and explanations, the reader may be referredto Bodman, "Poetics and Prosody in Early Medieval China," pp. 271-360.

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c sjen ', or cdjen P from the same rhyme-category among the preceding nine syllables of the poem. Should one do so, it is called violation of the rule against "Major Rhyme." d6. Minor Rhyme (hsiao-yiin iJY9; sometimes called the "Imperfect Sound [shang-yin -E'] Defect"; cf. NS y, KD y). If there are syllables in a couplet other than one in the proper rhymeword position that clash with each other by rhyming, the poem is said to be in violation of the "Minor Rhyme Defect." d7. Lateral Ligature (p'ang-niu 'W; also called "Major Ligature" [ta-niu MEk]; sometimes called the "Defect of Lapse" [shuang-chiiehA*f]; cf. KD v4a). If the syllable ng)wDtj A occurs in a given line of pentasyllablic verse, one may not use syllables such as cfngJwo A, cfnglwOn t7U, 'cngwDn G, or ng,wDnD' W in the same line, for this is alliteration which is a violation of the rule agaist "Lateral Ligature." It is also said that to violate this rule within five syllables is most serious, while violation of it within ten syllables may be viewed somewhat more leniently. d8. Frontal Ligature (cheng-niu TEA; also called "Minor Ligature" [hsiao-niu dJ, AR]or "Defect of Breach" [shuang-ch'ieh AJ]; cf. KD v3). If the syllable ciZijamf ?13 occurs in a given line of pentasyllabic verse, one may not use syllables such as n,izj3m' f, and nizj3p, A, together in the same line, for they conc,nj3m af (-[), stitute a niu [a group of syllables bound together by the same initial sounds]. Such usages are termed violations of the rule against the defect of "Frontal Ligature." d9a. Muddy Water (shui-hun AX). Refers to a violation of the rules concerning the first and sixth syllables. dlOa. Extinguished Fire (huo-mieh!kiX). Refers to a violation of the rules concerning the second and seventh syllables. d9b. Withered Wood (k'u-mu *t). Refers to a violation of the rules concerning the third and eighth syllables. dlOb. Broken Metal (chin-ch'iieh !&V). Refers to a violation of the rules concerning the fourth and ninth syllables. dlOc. Collapsed Earth (t'u-peng +M). Refers to the use of the level tone in the fifth position without repetition of the rhyme. dll. Unmatched (ch'iieh-ou MA; cf. KL ul). This means that all eight types of comparison are missing and that none of the words in the poem are matched with each other. d12. Verbosity (fan-shuo IO,; cf. NSd5, KL d'3, KD d3). This means saying the same thing twice, thus having a profusion of words with little meaning. It is sometimes called "similitude" (hsiang-lei t M) or "tumor of tautology" (yu-chui K
V)

dl3. Malocclusion (chii-yui fl0f; cf. KL y5a; also called Dissonance pu-t'iao TIM; cf. KL dlO). Apart from the first and fifth syllables in a line, if any two adjoining syllables of the remaining three syllables share either a rising, departing, or an entering tone, it is an instance of this defect. d14. Cluster (ts'ung-chii T; also called "Clump" [ts'ung-mu t*]; cf. NS yl4). If one line has "clouds" and the following line has "mist, " that may be considered

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normal. But if the next line after that has "wind" and the one following it has "moon,") since these are all meterological phenomena drawn from the weather, it is a defect to clump them all together in a series. di 5. Nonavoidance of Taboos (chi-hui 21M). If a poem contains a sentiment that runs afoul of the taboos of the state, it is an instance of this defect. dl6. Suggestiveness (hsing-chi JIM; cf. KL d5). This defect arises from suspicions about an idea's resemblence to something else. di7. Tangential Allusiveness (p'ang-t'u 'V.; cf. KL d8). This defect occurs when the purport of a line has some untoward tangential association. d18. Inversion (fan-yu A cf. KL d15, KD d5). Though a bisyllabic expression may be excellent in itself, if it has unwanted connotations when the initial of the first syllable is combined with the final of the second or vice versa, its use is an instance of this defect. d19. A Succession of Cinches (ch 'ang-hsieh-yao IAM;; sometimes called "Tightness" [shu A]; cf. NS y6, KD vl). If every line of a poem has the second and fourth syllables cinched in the middle by the third syllable and no "Loose Stirrups" [see next defect] intervene, it is an instance of this defect. [Note: the "cinch" is a single syllable verb in the middle of a line linking two bisyllabic noun phrases that come before and after it. Cf. AP 347.13, kriyd-bhrarps'a ("dropping the verb. ")] d20. A Succession of Loose Stirrups (ch'ang-chieh-teng-AM, sometimes called "Looseness" [san ut]; cf. NS y4, KD vl). When the meanings of the first and second syllables are linked and likewise that of the third and fourth, while the fifth completes the sense of the line by itself, it is known as a "loose stirrup." If several "loose stirrups" occur without any intervening "cinches," this is known as the defect of "A Succession of Loose Stirrups." [Note: no explanation or commentary is prod2l. Disjointedness (chih-li . vided but, from the two sample poems cited, it would appear that this defect refers to the use of lines which do not follow each other in sense or sentiment. Cf. NS d9, KL d19, KD d9.] d22. Excessiveness (hsiang-lan tWM;sometimes called "Verbosity" [same as d12]; cf. NS d6). This refers to the mention of the same type of allusion twice within a poem or repetition within a couplet. It is called "Excessiveness" because of the profusion of words and the piling up of ideas. [Note: the commentary is particularly opposed to the use of such bisyllabic vernacular terms as shu-mu ("tree + wood = tree"), chih-t'iao ("branch + twig = branch"), nao-ni ("slush + mud = mud"), etc. ] d23. Unseasonableness (luo-chieh fii; cf. KL dl IOb, KD dI 0). Whenever a poem tells of spring, it should adopt the imagery of spring; when it tells of autumn, it should treat of the affairs of autumn. Some poems tell of living men, and others of ancient emperors. When it comes to pieces that tell of miscellaneous matters, the whole must stick to a deeper meaning and not stray from the sense. d24. Disorderedness (tsa-luan *AL). All poems are hard to begin and difficult to conclude. Some poets force what should be at the start of a poem to come at its end or they transpose what would make a suitable close to the front. Therefore, this

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("confused defect is called disorderedness. Cf. AP 347.17-18, vyasta-sambhandhatd connection"). d25. Superfluity (wen-chui 1;1;, sometimes called the "Defect of Vulgarity" [shesu W6]; cf. KD v4). In a pentasyllabic poem, if there is a single superfluous syllable, then all the cleverness of the rest is for nought; if a single phrase is suspect, people will rush to criticize it. Nowadays, some authors do not work carefully enough nor do they thoroughly examine what they have written. They quickly spew forth their clumsy creations, committing many blunders as they do so. While their logic and sense may not be at fault, their writing is neither pure nor fresh. Their allusions may be nicely matched, but their diction ranges from sharp to dull. Cf. NSd2. d26. Contradiction (hsiang-fan tCFa; cf. KL d'2, KD d2). This refers to the defect which occurs when the words and the logic of a poem are at odds with each other. d27. Reptitiousness (hsiang-ch'ung tVI; sometimes called "Extra Fingers" [chihchih tW't]; cf. KL d13). This refers to the defect which occurs when the ideas of a poem are repeated. d28. Joined Toes (pien-mu Pf41). When there is no essential difference in the contents of two lines of a poem, it is called "Joined Toes."

Appendix IIA
"TEN KINDS OF YAMAKA" FROM THE NATYASASTRA (XVII.61-85) OF BHARATA.114

yl. Pdddnta ("extremity of the leg or foot [metrically and literally speaking]"). Similar words or syllables occurring at the end of all four feet. Cf. BK d4. y2. Kdaicf("girdle"). Similar words or syllables occurring at the beginning and end of each foot. Cf. BK d3. y3. Samudga ("rising up"). Completion of a verse by the repetition of a hemistich. Cf. BK d2. y4. Vikrdnta("taking broad strides"). Similarity of two alternate feet. Cf. BK d20. y5. Cakravdla("[surrounding] assemblage"; cf. BK d14). Similarity of a word or syllable at the end of a foot of the word or syllable at the beginnning of the next foot. y6. Samdasta (" compressed"; cf. BK d19). Similarity of two succeeding words or syllables at the beginning of a foot. y7. Pddddi ("beginning of a foot"). Occurrence of a similar word or syllable at the beginning of two successive feet. Cf. BK dl. y8. Amredita ("reduplicated"). Reduplication of the final words or syllables of a foot. y9. Catur-vyavasita ("quadruple completion"). All the feet consist of similar syllables.
114

For fuller translations of explanations and examples, see M. Ghosh, NS, pp. 309ff.

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yl 0. Mala ("wreath"). Occurrence of a single consonant with different vowels in various words or syllables. Cf. BK d7, BK d8.

Appendix IIB
"TEN DEFECTS" FROM THE NATYASASTRA (XVII.87-93).115

dl. Giidhdrta("circumlocution," lit. "hidden meaning"). Mention of a thing by means of a manufactured synonym. d2. Arthdntara("superfluous expression," lit. "antithetical meaning"). Mention of anything not to the point or stating something expressly that is implicitly contained in the essential nature of the subject. Cf. BK d25. d3. Arthahfna ("want of significance"). a. asambaddha("unconnected, incoherent") b. s'avas'esa ("incomplete") or aiesdrtha ("multiplicity of meaning"). An expression which is irrelevant or without a clear reference to the context. d4. Bhinndrtha("defective significance," lit. "broken meaning"). An unrefined expression or one worthy only of a rustic. Also change of the intended sense to an unintended one by insertion of a subordiante element. d5. Ekdrtha ("tautology"). Indiscrimate use of many words for a single purpose. Cf. BK d12. d6. Abhiplutdrtha("want of synthesis," lit. "overflown, overrun"; cf. BK d22). Completion of sentences within each foot of a verse while failing to connect them into an organic whole. d7. Nyayddapeta("lapse of logic"). An expression devoid of reasoning. d8. Visama ("unevenness"). A lapse in the metrical structure causing an absence of symmetry. Cf. BK dl-d4, d9-d10, and d13. d9. Visamdhi ("disjointedness"). Separation of words or sounds that should be combined. Cf. BK d21. d10. Sabdacyuta("grammatical impurity," lit. "word divergence"). The addition of a vulgar word.

Appendix IIC
"FIVE [-SEVEN] KINDS OF YAMAKA" FROM THE KAVYALAN1KARA (II.9-10) BHAMAHA.116 OF

yl. Adi ("beginning"). y2. Madhyanta ("middle and end").

115 For fuller translations of explanations and examples, see M. Ghosh, NS, pp. 313ff.; Poetics (Calcutta: K. L. Mukopadhyay, 1960), of Sanskrit in theHistory Sushil Kumar De, Studies in Sanskrit Blemishes Poetics,pp. 16ff. The commentaries are of Poetic 2: 1Of.;and B. Jha, Concept extracted from those of Abhinavagupta (writing around 1000-1030) as rendered by Ghosh and Jha. 116 Following the edition of S?stry, pp. 24-25.

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y3. Pdddbhydsa("repitition of a foot"). y4. Avali ("a series of repetitions"). y5. Samastapdda("repetition in all [four] feet"). Bhamaha claims to have included in the above classification under ddiyamakaand two other kinds: madhyantayamaka a. sandastaka ("compressed," lit. "a fault in pronunciation from keeping the teeth pressed too close together"). Cf. BK d13. b. samudgaka ("a round box or casket," of doubtful derivation, but probably related to NS y3 [samudga, "rising up"]). Cf. BK d2.

Appendix IID
TWO LISTS OF "TEN DEFECTS" AND "SEVEN DEFECTS OF SIMILE" (I.37-53, IV.1-49, II.39-40) OF BHAMAHA.117 FROM THE KAVYALANKARA dl. Neydrtha ("farfetchedness"). The proper meaning does not follow from the logical order of the words but has to be forcibly extracted (neya, lit. "led, guided") by clever persons according to their own desire without reliance on the laws of language. d2. Klista ("obscurity," lit. "distressed, tormented"). The comprehension of intended meaning is remote and the composition is labored. The meaning being obstructed, it puzzles the mind of the hearer. d3. Anydrtha ("opposite meaning of that intended," therefore "vagueness"). The accepted meaning of a word is absent or disappears through changes worked upon it in the context of the defective verse. An expression that is not universally accepted d4. Avacaka ("inexpressiveness"). or connected with the intended meaning. lit. "concealed diction", cf. BK d5. Giidha-s'abddbhidha-na ("suggestiveness," d16). Use of a difficult expression with a hidden meaning. Poetry with such an expression fails to appeal even to a learned reader who finds it difficult to appreciate the beauty on account of it. d6. Ayuktimat ("impropriety," lit. "disjunction, unfitness"). Making the cloud, the moon, the wind, the bee, the bird Harita or Cakravaka the messenger in a poem. How can creatures without speech or with indistinct speech perform the duty of a messenger? Such delineations are not in accord with reason. This is considered a great defect. d7. Sruti-dusta ("offensive to the ear"). Where words that normally convey good sense in the context of the poem suggest a possible vulgar meaning. Bhamaha gives eleven examples of double-entendre which, even though unintentional, are to be avoided. Cf. BK d16. d8. Artha-dusta ("implicitly indecent"). When a statement that is uttered also gives an idea of improper significance. Cf. BK d17. d9. Kalpanddusta("difficult of conception"). Juxtaposition of two words in such a way that a new combination suggesting an indecent meaning results.
117

Based on the treatments of De, 2.11f.; B. Jha, pp. 29ff; and gastry, pp. 13ff.

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d10. Srutikasta ("unmelodious"). Words that are harsh in sound. Cf. BK d13. d1 1. Apdrtha ("absence of collective meaning"). That combination of words which, taken as a whole, has no meaning. d12. Vyartha("inconsistency"). Contradiction of one meaning by another. Cf. BK d26. d13. Ekdrtha ("tautology"). Two statements that convey the same meaning. which may be of words or of meanSome call this punarukta ("repetitiousness"), ings. Cf. BK d12 and d27. d14. Sasamsnaya ("ambiguity"). The state of mind which arises from hearing attributes common to several objects that have no differentiating quality applied to them. d15. Apakrama ("inversion"). Reversal of the proper syntactical order of a statement. Cf. BK d18. d16. Sabdahina ("ungrammatical"). Grammatical usage not sanctioned by authority (the rules of Panini and Katyayana). d17. Yatibhrasta ("lacking a caesura"). Deviation from the rules governing metrical pause. d18. Bhinnavrtta("fractured meter"; cf. BK d5). Improper distribution, absence, or abundance of long and short syllables. Cf. BK dl-d4, d9-d10, and d13. d19. Visamdhi ("disjointedness"). Disjunction of requisite euphonic combination. Cf. BK d2 1. d110. Virodhi ("inconsistency") with regard to: a. deia ("place, region, or country"); b. kdla ("season"), cf. BK d23; c. kald ("crafts", both fine arts and mechanical skills); d. loka ("world[ly usage]," i.e., the nature of the real world; reality), includes gross hyperbole; e. nyaya ("logic, science, learning"); f. agama ("scripture") Upama-dosa ("defects with regard to simile") ul. hIzatd ("absence"), cf. BK dli; u2. asambhava ("impossibility"); u3. liiigabheda ("disparity of gender"); u4. vacobheda ("incommensurability of number"); u5. viparyaya("transposition, perverseness"); u6. upamanddhikatva ("redundancy of simile"); u7. asddrsjya ("dissimilarity") [Note: Four of these are mentioned by Dandin in KD (II.55).]

Appendix IIE
"TEN KINDS OF DEFECTS," THE "OPPOSITES OF THE TEN MERITS," AND "SEVEN TYPES OF YAMAKA" FROM THE KAVYADARSA (III.128-166, I.43-102, III.51-77) OF DAND.IN.118 dl. Apdrtha ("absence of collective meaning"). the natural expectancy of words. The result of non-satisfaction of

118 For fuller translations, commentaries, and examples see the German-Sanskritedition of (Leipzig: Haessel, 1890). Poetik(Kdvjdadarfa) the text by Otto B6htlingk, Dan.din's

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Incongruity with the context either in a sentence d2. Vyartha("inconsistency"). or in a compostion. Cf. BK d26. d3. Ekdrtha ("tautology"). A repetition of sound or sense. Cf. BK d12. d4. Sasams'aya("ambiguity"). The result of the presence of doubt. d5. Apakrama ("inversion"). Violation of the syntactical order. Cf. BK d18. The use of words in violation of grammatical d6. Sabdahina ("ungrammatical"). rules and with unacceptable meanings. d7. Yatibhrasta("lacking a caesura"). Neglect of proper caesura in a meter. d8. Bhinnavrtta ("fractured meter"; cf. BK d5). Deviation from the prosodic rules; the use of syllables more or less than the required number and of long and short syllables in the wrong place in a meter. Cf. BK dl-d4, d9-d10, and d13. The absence of required euphonic combinad9. Visamdhika("disjointedness"). tion. Cf. BK d21. ("inconsistency with regard to place, time, d10. Desakdlakaldlokanyayagamavirodhi the arts, worldly usage, logic, and script-re"). Cf. BK d23. vl. Sithila ("loose"; cf. BK d20), the opposite of slesa ("the qualtiy of being smoothly knit"; cf. BK d19). This feature consists of the exclusive employment of vowels, soft consonants (e.g., k, c, t, t, p, g, j, 4, d,), nasals, unaspirates, semivowels (y, r, 1, v), and other sounds that require only minute breathing (alpaprdna) as opposed to those that require hard breathing (mahdprana, usually interpreted as aspiration) for enunciation. Alliterative techniques are acceptable so long as they " show "dignity or gravity in the use of ligatures (bandhagaurava). explanaabstruse etymological v2. Vyutpanna or anatiru.dha ("requiring tion"), the opposite of prasdda ("lucidity"). The use of words in their derived, unconventional meanings which makes them difficult to understand. v3. Visama ("uneven, oblique, slanted, deflected"; noun form vaisamya), the opposite of sama ("level, flat"). A verse is said to be "uneven" when there is not a proportional combination of soft [mrdu, pronounced with slight effort], harsh [sphuta, requiring distinct, lit. "open," enunciation], and neutral [madhya, lit. "middle," neither soft nor harsh] ligatures (bandha = niu i). Many authorities refer only to "soft" and "harsh" ligatures. A typical definition of the desired quality of samatd ("equal mixture of ligatures"). Its opposite, ("evenness") is avisama-mis'rabandha vaisamya ("unevenness") signifies the disproportionate or exclusive use of "soft" or "hard" ligatures that makes a verse seem phonologically imbalanced. Cf. Raghavan, p. 272. lit. v4. The implied but unnamed opposite of mddhurya ("elegance," 'sweetness"), which is divided into two sub-types: ("repetitious alliteration of the same sounds"), the opa. varnzdvrttiranuprasa (" partial alliteration consisting in the repetition of conposite of sirutyanuprasa sonants belonging to the same class or organ of utterance [i.e., point of articulation, e.g., the palatals, etc."]). Cf. BK d7. b. gramya ("rustic"; cf. BK d25), the opposite of agramyata ("absence of vulgarity"). or krcchrodyatva v5. Dfpta ("shrill," lit. "blazing"), nisthura ("expectorative"),

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("labored"), the opposite of sukumarata("softness, tenderness" as an overall effect arising from the commingling of soft and harsh vocables). The exclusive use of harsh sounds that are difficult to pronounce. v6. Neyatva ("having a recherche quality"), the opposite of arthavyakti ("explicitness"). Ambiguity or imprecise expression that requires the hearer to guess at an implied cause. v7. Dandin does not provide uddratva("elevation") with an opposite. This guna consists of the expression of high merit or the use of excellent epithets. v8. Nor does Dand.in mention an opposite for ojas ("vigor"), which is due to the presence of compounds, especially long ones, and is considered to be the lifeblood of prose in particular. v9. Atyukti ("exaggeration"), the opposite of kdnti ("grace, ageeableness"). Mention of the unnatural, the exaggerated, or grotesque in dialogues and laudatory speeches. v10. No opposite is given for samadhi ("transference of the attributes of one object to another"). As a literary figure, this may be thought of generally as metaphorical expression. yl. Samdasta ("compressed"; cf. BK d13). Repetition occurs at the end of the first line and is then followed in the second and third lines both at the beginning and the end as well as at the beginning of the fourth line, thereby giving the verse the shape of a pair of tongs or pinchers. y2. Samudga ("rising up"). Repetition of a hemistich. y3. Pdddbhyasa("repetition of a full line"). y4. Slokdbhyasa("repetition of a stanza"). y5. Mahdyamaka ("major rhyme," cf. BK d5). The repetition of the same sequence of sounds in each of the four lines of a stanza. Dandin's examples for this and the previousyamaka indicate only that sequences of sounds are being repeated. The sense may well differ quite markedly through different syntactical and grammatical interpretations in accordance with the context. v6. Vfdtoya ("hybrid"). A combination of the other types ofyamaka. y7. Pratiloma ("in inverse order"). A palindrome, though not necessarily with the same meaning when read backwards (see comment at y5 above). [Note: Dandin probably inherited these seven yamaka from the tradition. In III.4-50, he illustrates nearly forty other types. A chapter in the "Heaven" section quite likely was inspired of BK entitled "Seven Types of Rhymes" A (-) by the traditional sevenyamaka.]