The song ‘picking weeds’ (cai ge) is one of the oldest known Chinese folk songs. It was probably composed some 3,000 years ago during the Zhou dynasty (1122-256 BC). For almost 500 years, these songs were not compiled in a single volume. Then, the great sage Confucius (551- 479 BC) entered the scene, who besides his mission to change the Chinese society and its worldview, wanted to compile the existing good poems and songs in an anthology as a way to preserve them for eternity because these poems/songs described the daily lives and feelings of the people in the Zhou dynasty. It is believed that Confucius chose 300 best poems out of a corpus of 3,000 poems. Maybe Confucius was intrigued with the simplicity in which these songs/poems express the daily lives and feelings of the common people. For example, there is a poem that is about “Big rat”. The unknown poet is asking the rat not to eat his share of rice, which can be decoded as a poor serf complaining against his lord who did not leave him with enough grains to eat. Thanks to the great sage’s efforts, the Shi Jing (Book of Odes) is one of the oldest anthologies of Chinese poems that contains 305 poems, half of which are considered songs. Later, the book became one of the five Confucian classics, alongside classics such as Yi Jing (Book of Changes) and his followers studied it religiously. The poems of Shi Jing became so popular that even when the first emperor of unified China, Qin Shihuang (259-210 BC) burned and or destroyed all books belonging to earlier eras, the poems survived, thanks to the Asian tradition of memorization, and in the succeeding Han dynasty (206-220 BC), the poems, except three which got lost, were compiled again. Shi Jing is credited to have played an important role in the development of poetry in China in later days.
Shi Jing is divided into four chapters, dealing with various topics—folk songs (guo feng), minor odes (xiao ya), major odes (da ya) and songs (song). Each chapter is further divided into sub–chapters. The first chapter is divided into many sub-chapters and one of the sub-chapter Kingdom’s Customs (wang feng) contains the song ‘picking weeds’ and other folk songs, which even the proponent of strict moral codes in the Chinese society found so intriguing that he made sure that the songs were included in the anthology.
The song is written in a very simple language. Like mentioned earlier, it beautifully expresses ones longing for lover, however, instead of directly addressing her boyfriend, the unknown poet uses the plants/herbs as metaphors to address her lover. The poem is translated as:
There he is gathering the dolichos!
A day without seeing him,
Is like three months!
There he is gathering the oxtail-southern-wood!
A day without seeing him,
Is like three autumns!
There he is gathering the mugwort!
A day without seeing him,
Is like three years!
(Translation: Arthur Waley)
However, the three autumns in the second line does not mean three autumns. One logical interpretation of this line is, autumn here refers to seasons. Therefore, it means, a day without seeing him feels like nine months.
Shi Jing contains other love songs too, and unlike the later day, especially the famous Tang (618-907 AD) and Song (960-1279 AD) songs and poems, they are more direct and express the emotions, sufferings and daily lives of people in a plain and simple language and as such they offer a firsthand account of the common citizens. And for this reason, despite being almost 3,000 years old, they are still widely read in their originals even today in China.
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