Abstract Shao Yong was not only a poet but also a scholar of Yi-ology in the Song Dynasty. He wrote a book named Huangji Jingshi Shu about the Yi-ology. Yichuan Jirang Ji is his collection of poems. At present, on the relationship between Shao Yong’s Yi-ology and poetics, researches usually lack holistic views and pay more attention to the consistency than the differences. In fact, there is a tension between Shao Yong’s Yi-ology and his poetics, which is manifested in three levels: Firstly, from his Yi-ology thought, one of the important contributions of Shao Yong’s Yi-ology is to put forward and define the concepts of Congenital Yi-ology and Acquired Yi-ology. Acquired Yi-ology are the books of Yi-ology that were handed down, while Congenital Yi-ology is the truth of Yi-ology before it was written on paper. The distinction between them has not only the significance of time, but also the philosophical significance of essence and use. Congenital Yi-ology is the root, Acquired Yi-ology is the implementation, and the two also show the characteristic difference between the Spontaneous and the Assiduous. Secondly, Shao Yong’s thought includes two parts: theory of physics and theory of life. The theory of physics corresponds to the objective world, while the theory of life corresponds to the subjective world. The objective world observed and explained by Shao Yong shows a sense of order in which he divided everything in the world into four parts. However, for the subjective world, Shao Yong thought about how to realize the happiness and leisure of individual life in Confucianism. The Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming Dynasties has two personality tendencies of reverence and comfort. The Neo-Confucianism of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi focuses on rigorousness and advocates moral heteronomy. People check themselves in this reverence and improve their personality realm. The Neo-Confucianism of Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming emphasizes the freedom of the mind, advocates moral self-discipline, and cultivates human nature in a state of peace and leisure. Shao Yong not only likes to call himself an idler, a happy man and so on, but also likes to find a safe place for individual life. Shao Yong believes that the doctrine of Confucianism is not only about restraint to make people afraid, but also about freedom to make life useful and settled. Thirdly, from the perspective of Shao Yong’s poetry creation, there is a tension between the form of holism and the content of individualism. Shao Yong created some unique forms of poetry, such as the orderly form of a group of four poems that is in line with his world view, and the closed-loop form of end-to-end poetry. These forms all show the characteristics of holism, and the theme of poetry is mainly to express the personal feelings of ease and leisure. These three levels are isomorphic, because order represents the rationality of thought, ease and happiness represent literature and human sensibility. So, Shao Yong is a Neo-Confucianist who walks between rationality and sensibility, the world of thought and the world of poetry. Starting from the separation between Shao Yong’s theory of physics and theory of life, Acquired Yi-ology and Congenital Yi-ology, this paper explains the tension between his Yi-ology and poetics, the tension between the form and content of his poems, and especially the ideological roots of his unique poetic form, which have not been paid attention to by other researchers.
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