On Ancient Prose Creation of Confucians in the Song Dynasty

The prose in the Song Dynasty has a kind of characteristic of the time. This trait and its idea are to realize the external forms of literature returning to the ancients by the internal thought of writing for conveying truth. In fact, the prose originated from identical ideas and cultural atmosphere. Though scholars who researched Confucian school of idealist philosophy of the Song and Ming Dynasty concentrated their efforts only upon Dao(in Chinese) or doctrine to the neglect of the prose, they still thought that the prose from the tradition both realizes the sages' sense and expresses the thought of theirs by the ancient prose. On the one hand, the Confucians' thought influenced their ideas; on the other hand, they were involved in tidal trends of the movement of the ancient prose and were also unconsciously influenced by writing advocacy of the writers. Therefore, the ancient prose of the Confucians in the Song Dynasty had their own special characteristics and always had a hand in advancing process of the prose in the Song Dynasty.