Confucian Prophet: Political Thought In Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) ...

prompt a return to the moral and political culture embodied in the classical texts of the Warring States and earlier periods.

Although these three contain some differences between them, the ideas they share in common would seem to represent the mainstream of the reform movement. The two perennial issues common to virtually all of the fugu reformers were literary form and style on the one hand and moral content on the other. Form was to be less concerned with surface appeal and beauty and more concerned with vigor and direct expression. Content was to draw less from the trivial pursuits of court life and more on the moral and political teachings of the classical canonical texts.

This trend in literary culture was an integral part of the larger Tang reform movements in intellectual and political culture that emphasized not only the classics but the entire textual tradition.²² The study and promotion of a return in writing and in political thought to the norms of antiquity, as transmitted by way of the textual tradition, was seen as the way to recover a lost golden age of culture and politics. One could find embodied in the textual tradition the patterns of Heaven and earth and their corresponding patterns in the political practice and historical legacy of the early sage-kings. Thoroughly imbibing that tradition and re-creating its culture and literature in the present were seen as the crucial enterprise of the times, the way, as Peter Bol puts it, “to save This Culture of Ours” after its long era of decline.²³ What was a general movement before 755 to restore ancient moral and political ideals and to reform literary style by the standards of the textual tradition became, after 755, a more refined and urgent effort to restore literature to its proper place in Tang morality and politics. The earliest figures in this movement, as noted earlier, were exact contemporaries of Du Fu: Xiao Yingshi, Li Hua, Jia Zhi, and Dugu Ji. According to Bol, Chen Zi’ang’s ideas were a major influence on Xiao and Li in particular. Both men, along with Chia and Dugu, developed Chen’s call for a return to antiquity in ways that they thought would lead to a restoration of the dynasty to its former glories. Although there are some differences between the