Herndon High School

The parallel passage applied to lyrics with “lodging” states that if it is too easy for the reader to make the connections between the lyricist's life and the lyric (“the inner and the outer illuminate each other”), although the reader reconstitutes a “splendid work” in his mind, the lyricist has still not reached the highest level. When there is no “lodging,” in contrast, the lyric still contains events (shih) and “aspects” of events (note that ch'ing means “manner of being” and can be applied to both feelings—the active mode of our human being— and the way in which events and objects present themselves to us) to which the reader responds by finding analogs in his own experience. Lei, translated here as “find categorical correspondences,” is an important concept in Chinese cosmology. One theory to explain the tides, for example, held that the ocean responds to the moon because both the moon and water are yin (in the familiar yin-yang categories); they are of the same lei, or category. Chou Chi's idea seems to be that certain feelings and experiences (which differ from reader to reader) are aroused in the mind of the reader of the lyric in correspondence to what the lyricist puts into the text, but ideally these feelings and experiences will not be limited by what inspired the lyricist originally.