Writing in Liu Xie: the principle of variation as logic of literature

Abstract

The antiquity of Chinese writing is well known in the West, to the extent that it constitutes one of the cliches we use in our representation of the big Asian country. But, what does the act of writing mean to China? How has the text been thought of by the civilization who first cultivated it? Liu Xie, one of the greatest scholars from ancient China, a Buddhist monk and a government official during the Liang Dynasty, give us some essential clues in this regard. In his famous work Wen Xin Diao Long, and after establishing the inestimable value of the Confucian canon, this author bumps into the problem of the «new text». Caught between the literary value of originality, and the fault of deviation (in relation to the canon), this scholar develops a particular sense of textual production, which corresponds with the method I call «variation». This same logic of literary production can be found in other Chinese authors and even in other disciplines different from writing, providing a general notion of Chinese thought.