An Explanation of xiang and jing

In ancient China, the concepts of xing and xiang have different meaning. The former refers to the shapes of the actual matters, while the latter the human feelings of the matters that appear with strong subjectivity. The view description, in the poetry creation as a mediation of the expression of feelings, can not be regarded as a pure objective matter isolated from people's subjective feeings. It would rather be a very spiritual realm coming from the views in the poets' mind. This is the reason why the xiang is used for describing the views in the Chinese poetry. From the viewpoint of the literary creation, the xiang is the subjective images in the poets' mind. From the viewpoint of appreciation, the xiang the subjective feelings of the readers, which is illusory without objective counterparts. The Chinese poetics replaced the xiang with the jing borrowed from the Buddhist cannons, which is more illusory than the former.