Han Yu

Names
Xìng 姓 :	Hán 韓
Míng 名 :	Yù 愈
Zì 字 :	Tuìzhī 退 之
aka:	Chānglí 昌黎
Shì 謚 :	Wén 文

Han Yu
depiction from the Song era

Han Yu ( Chinese  韓愈  /  韩愈 , Pinyin Hán Yù ) (* 768 ; † 824 ) was a Chinese poet and essayist .

Life

After the early death of his parents, Han Yu was an orphan from the age of three and grew up in the family of his 30-year-old brother Han Hui. In 786 he went to Chang'an and passed the Jinshi exam there on the fourth attempt in 792 . In the years that followed, Han Yu began building the literary circle to which he would later owe his extensive influence.

In 802 he obtained his first official post in the central government, but was soon exiled. Possible reasons for this are his lack of loyalty to the heir to the throne, his criticism of the behavior of imperial servants and his advocacy of a tax cut during a period of famine.

From 808 to 809, Han Yu et al. a. worked as an imperial court inspector in Luoyang , as governor of Chaozhu , and finally in the capital Chang'an as president of the state university , capital city prefect and vice-president of the civil service ministry. During these years he campaigned for a forced pacification of the rebellious north-eastern provinces. In 819 he was exiled to the then relatively uncivilized extreme south of the empire because of a submission to the throne that was badly received by the emperor. After returning to the capital a few years later, he died there of the consequences of exile.

plant

Han Yu is considered a rigorous advocate of Confucianism and particularly fought vehemently against the two other dominant currents of thought, Daoism and Buddhism . He was particularly concerned with the writings of Menzius , whose thoughts he explained to a wide audience and thus laid the foundation for the strengthening of Neo-Confucianism during the Song Dynasty . Han Yu also always advocated strong central political power and the unconditional supremacy of the emperor.

The submission to the throne, which led to his exile, was a diatribe against the influence of the Buddhist clergy. The occasion was a ceremony at which every thirty years an alleged fingerbone of the Buddha, venerated as a relic , was brought in a solemn procession to the imperial palace and kept there for three days. Han Yu argued that Buddha was of barbaric origin, that his language was different from that of the Chinese and that one should therefore throw the bone into the fire or water. The writing ( Chinese 諫 迎 佛骨 表 , Pinyin Jiàn yíng Fó gǔ biǎo ) was viewed as disrespectful, if not a personal attack on the emperor.  

Han Yu is considered to be the greatest prose writer of the Tang Dynasty . Contrary to the flowery and overloaded manner of the previous centuries, he advocated a revival of the clear and straightforward writing style of the Han dynasty and thus became the leader of the conservative Guwen movement ( Chinese  古文 運動 ), which had a considerable influence on Chinese literature down to the Modern times should have. Even Mao Zedong trained on Han Yu's writings and claimed to be his disciple. He was also able to make a certain name for himself in the field of poetry, in which he did not come close to the luminaries of the dynasty, namely Li Bai and Du Fu .

literature

• Charles Hartman: Han Yü and the T'ang Search for Unity . Princeton University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-691-06665-5 .
• William H. Nienhauser (Ed.): The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature . Indiana University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-253-32983-3 .
• Stephen Owen: An Anthology of Chinese Literature. WW Norton , 1996, ISBN 0-393-03823-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Han Yu in the catalog of the German National Library