Confucius commented on poetry: "Poetry is 300. In a word, it says' thinking naively'. " (The Second Ruler of The Analects of Confucius) What primitive Confucianism pursues is not "having no life with one heart" or "having no thoughts and no worries", nor is it only joy and no worries, but returning to the purest state of people's hearts.
"Evil" means crooked, framing people and slandering talents, which is unnecessary. It is evil to have distractions in your heart. For example, it is inevitable to be sad after breaking up, but you hurt yourself or others because of your sadness. This is a deviant distracting thought.
Confucius attached great importance to The Book of Songs, and the emotions revealed in it are all the original and natural responses of people's hearts to all the encounters in life, which are frank and true. But at the same time, there is a kind of "gentle and sincere" ("Book of Rites"). How can you blame people sincerely, sadly and gently?
This requires restraint, so that emotions can stop in the original state and can be expressed without distractions; Sometimes we can't control ourselves properly or don't know how to control our discretion, which requires "ethical" norms.
Later, scholars in the Han Dynasty commented on the Book of Songs, saying that Guan Ju was talking about the virtue of empresses and used it to correct the relationship between husband and wife. Zhu even attached it to his concubine. These are of course understandable, but back to the original text, what we are actually talking about is a man's longing for the woman he loves and his desire for her to marry and go home, which is very practical and moral.
The whole poem begins with pairs of waterfowl by the water, saying that you are my good companion; Then talk about picking water plants, I think you can't sleep, picking water plants, I chase you, picking water plants, I marry you.
For another example, "women cry, scholars say ignorance" means that boys can't afford to get sleepy, "having plums" means that girls are eager to fall in love, and "protecting themselves" means that women are abandoned by men at the beginning of chaos. The emotions presented in these poems are simple and natural, and the form is only simple repetition. Unlike epic, opera or novel, it has no specific details, but it just conveys the deep feelings of human beings.
This is the greatest feature of China's traditional literature and art-not pursuing complexity, but taking this light, ethereal and transparent emotion and form as the highest realm.