What is "Ge Tan" in "The Book of Songs"?

The previous article was written on Valentine’s Day in 2019, and it was about “Nymphoma”. Confucius placed the jagged watercress in the first chapter of the Three Hundred Poems, and it is said that he took great pains to describe it.

Later, Confucius said a saying in a gathering that has been passed down through the ages: "Three hundred poems can be summed up in one sentence, and the thoughts are innocent."

Shu Qiu in "Guan Ju" "We can see the harmony between man and nature: the animals are related to each other and the chirping doves, the plants are like the jagged water plants, and the characters are like the gentleman who plays the piano, the harp, the bells and the drums.

However, after reading Three Hundred Poems, I feel that there are relatively few mentions of animals, but many mentions of plants. The animals are mainly birds such as yellow birds, and then there are sacrificial objects such as cattle and sheep. On the other hand, plants, starting from the variety of waterweed, are written in a variety of ways and in a grand way.

The second chapter of "The Book of Songs" is "Ge Tan". If the title of the first chapter is still called "Guan Ju" and uses a bird with endless love words to cheer up, then the second chapter directly uses the common kudzu common in ancient China as its title and repeated chanting content.

Today, Shuqiu came to pull the "Kudzu Vine". Haha, when people in our hometown say "pulling wild kudzu", it means talking about people or things that have nothing to do with us. First look at the beautiful flowers of kudzu, which are a bit like the flowers of sword beans.

However, there are really many unclear connections between Ge and our lives. Below is a new kudzu vine.

Let’s talk about the ancient Chinese first.

. The second stanza is again "Ge Zhi Tan Xi, applied to Zhonggu, its leaves are Momo." The general idea is the same. Qiqi and Momo both mean lush.

After the poet sang about the kudzu vines spreading in the valley in the first stanza, he focused his attention on a group of yellow birds flying up and down and stopping one after another in the bushes. One of the reasons is that the yellow birds The second is the chirping of birds and the birds flying around.

In this way, two scenes appear: one is the continuous kudzu vines planted in Zhonggu, which was an important raw material for textiles in ancient times, and the other is the flying yellow birds singing happily, they are like a big family. The happy life together evokes the poet's longing for his relatives and parents.

This leads to harvesting the kudzu vines all over the valley, boiling them in a large pot, and finally weaving them into kudzu cloth of varying thicknesses, making clothes that you can never tire of wearing. This is "the harvest is the harvest, the harvest is the harvest, and the service is without mercy."

It can be seen that the ancient ancestors' demand for Ge was mainly to solve the problem of dressing.

Let’s talk about the usefulness of kudzu vine to people today.

With the rapid development of the chemical industry, the clothes we wear, the quilts we cover, and the bags we use today mainly come from something called chemical fiber. Although they look shiny when worn, they may be hit by static electricity from time to time, and may cause serious fires, and they cannot be degraded for hundreds of years, but they are low cost, indestructible, light and warm, windproof and waterproof, and we fell in love with them deeply. . As for kudzu or kudzu, people basically don’t like it very much.

Therefore, today the valley and even the hillside are already dominated by kudzu vines.

Fortunately, after people eat and drink too much, their blood lipids agglomerate, their blood pressure rises, they suffer from indigestion, etc. Someone else discovered a large piece of kudzu root growing underground under the kudzu vine. After repeated tests and experiments, , repeated tests have shown that kudzu root actually has multiple health care functions. Such as reducing blood pressure, relieving hangover, clearing heat and detoxifying, etc.

So, now, there are arrowroot companies all over the country, and arrowroot powder is sold everywhere.

Nature is really good to humans. When we were in ragged clothes, kudzu and vines provided us with materials to resist the cold wind. When we ate too much delicacies from the mountains and seas and drank too much wine and syrup, they cleared away heat, detoxified us, lowered blood pressure, and kept fit.

From the wild watercress to the golden grass, from the dove to the flying yellow bird, all human love, hate and hatred ultimately rely on the selfless gifts of nature.

If this continues, one day humans will really have to wander the earth with them.