The term refers to an individual’s inner mind vis-à-vis the outside world, which consists of two aspects, namely, temperament and talent. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, xingling (inner self) became widely used in literary writing and criticism. It refers to the combination of a writer’s temperament and talent, other than his social e…
The term means achieving overall harmonious co-existence on the basis of respecting differences and diversity. Uniformity and harmony are two different attitudes to treating and accommodating social groups. Uniformity means obliterating differences in everything while harmony is to keep and respect the differences. Allowing different things to compl…
This term originally referred to the absence of a universally accepted interpretation or explanation of The Book of Songs. It was first put forward by the great Han Dynasty Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BC). Later, it came to be used as a general term in literary criticism, which suggests that as the result of the changing historical cond…