The plan of the year lies in the spring. The Spring Festival is the most solemn and lively festival of the Chinese nation. Every Spring Festival, people express their inner hopes through the Spring Festival couplets, so as to please a good fortune in the new year, looking forward to personal health and progress, family happiness, social harmony and stability, and national prosperity. Of course, this is only general. People are generating new ideas all the time, and the language expression of the "Spring Festival couplets" that arises from this also maintains the appropriateness, freshness, vitality and vitality closely related to daily life.
The formulation of the Spring Festival couplets needs to be "to the point" to express the inner appeal. The relevance of the topic has two meanings: one is the angle and method of cutting, as a specific operational measure to solve the problem of "what to start with", which is the explicit significance of the topic; Second, it is appropriate and fit, as a standard for measuring operational measures to solve the problem of "why start here", which is the implicit significance of the topic. To put it simply, the relevant topic includes six aspects: cutting people, cutting things, cutting places, cutting time, cutting things, and cutting feelings. Of course, the drafting of the text is only the script for the formation of the Spring Festival couplets, and the Spring Festival couplets also need to have a realistic display space.
According to legend, the Spring Festival couplets originated from the story of the gods and ghosts under the peach tree in ancient mythology. Zong Yi of the Northern and Southern Dynasties said in "Jing Chu Years Chronicles": "The peach, the essence of the five elements, is disgusted with evil spirits, and controls a hundred ghosts." "The folk have long had the custom of hanging peach charms. Due to the pattern of traditional Chinese architecture, the gate is often set in a symmetrical shape, so the peach charm often has two pieces, which are hung symmetrically on the left and right. "Painting two gods sticking to the left and right, the left god, the right Yu Lei, commonly known as the door god. "Shuowen" interprets the "door": "Wen also, from the second household, pictogram." According to the record of "Song History, Shu Shijia", during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Meng Chang once ordered the scholar Xin Yinxun to inscribe the peach wood board, "with his non-work, pretentious pen inscription: 'New Year's Yuqing, Jiajie Changchun.'" From the statement that "it is not a work" and "pretentious pen", it can be seen that there has been an exploration of replacing "Shendi" and "Yulei" by writing couplets, but because the couplets are still written on the peach board, the name of "peach symbol" is still used. In the Song Dynasty, people gradually replaced peach boards with red paper, and it became popular in the Ming Dynasty, and the concept of "Spring Festival Couplets" was truly produced.
In order to match the decoration of the doorway in traditional buildings, the complete Spring Festival couplets are usually composed of three parts: one is a single-row vertical couplet posted on both sides of the door, called a "frame pair"; the second is to post the couplet in the middle and upper part of the two doors, called "door center"; Third, the four-character auspicious language posted on the lintel. According to the traditional arrangement of Chinese characters, the characters are from top to bottom, and the lines and lines are from right to left, so the couplets on both sides of the door and the center of the door are placed on the right side and the lower ones on the left, and the four characters in the horizontal batch are also arranged from right to left. With the development of modern society, buildings in urban areas usually replace double doors with single doors, and the couplets in the center of the doors have also become "Fu", "Chun", "Xiang" and other auspicious pictures of single characters. At the entrance of some units, due to the installation of telescopic courtyard electric doors, only the couplets on both sides of the door are retained. In short, the posting of Spring Festival couplets needs to be arranged according to the specific situation.
We are engaged in the creation of Spring Festival couplets, and we need to determine the expression content of Spring Festival couplets according to the location of each portal, such as schools, banks, shops, dormitories, etc.; At the same time, it is necessary to determine the length, width and width of the paper according to the shape, location, and environment of the portal, and then determine the number of words and the size of the words, and then draw up the specific words of the Spring Festival couplets. In actual writing, the Spring Festival couplets generally use official script, regular script or regular script, and less often use seal script and cursive script. The main reason for this is that the Spring Festival couplets need to be easy to read, relatively neatly arranged, and symmetrical in form. For the sake of aesthetics, calligraphers also need to fold the squares according to the arrangement and the specific number of words, write in a relatively independent way between words, and take proper care of the posture, size, weight and contrast, echo and expectation between the upper and lower couplets of each word, and finally create a Spring Festival couplet with upward thinking, proper expression, elegant rhetoric and exquisite form.
In the Spring Festival couplets practice class for graduate students majoring in calligraphy, we encourage every student to make their own Spring Festival couplets, and the specific requirements are five-word couplets, and they must use their own names as the starting angle. Ma Chong's work "Sunny and Spring, Chong Su Wins the Heart of Heaven", Zhao Qian's "Green Onion and Spring, Gurgling Asking the Water Chief", and Jin Shiyi's "Poetry Adds Elegance, Wen Chang Writes Spring", all of which have achieved good results. Wang Anshi has the poem "Yuan Ri": "In the sound of firecrackers, the spring breeze sends warmth into Tusu." Thousands of households always replace the new peach with the old one. This poem reflects the grand occasion of hanging Spring Festival couplets in every household during the Spring Festival. On the occasion of the advent of the New Year, there will inevitably be more excellent Spring Festival couplets to reflect and praise the harmonious development of society, the prosperity of the motherland and the great rejuvenation of the nation from all aspects!
Author: Sun Xuefeng, professor of the Institute of Chinese Calligraphy and Culture, Capital Normal University).