The poetic meaning of "Reading a Book Part I" is:

A square pond half an acre in size is displayed like a mirror, in which the brilliance of the sky and the shadow of floating clouds move together. Why is the water in that square pond so clear? It is because there is an inexhaustible source that continuously delivers living water for it.

Two Thoughts on Reading Books is a group of poems by Zhu Xi, a Neo-Confucianism scholar in the Song Dynasty. These two poems describe the author's feelings of "reading books" and reveal profound philosophy with vivid images. The first poem uses the scenery as a metaphor, and with the help of the phenomenon that fresh water is injected into the pond, it means that we must constantly accept new things in order to keep our thoughts active and progressive.

creation background

when, where and why this group of poems was written has always been puzzling, and scholars are unclear, and there are many differences. Some people think that this poem was written one year after the meeting of the Goose Lake, that is, in the spring of the third year of Chunxi in the Southern Song Dynasty (1176). Zhu Xi visited Sanqingshan as the tomb of Wuyuan Province, and when he was relaxing in Sanqingshan Sanqingshan, he had an epiphany and felt this poem.

according to Zhu Xi's letter to Xu Shunzhi, Answering Xu Shunzhi (volume 39 of the Collected Works of Zhu Official Documents, the first edition of four series), it is inferred that these two poems were written in the second year of the Southern Song Dynasty (1166), when Zhu Xi lived in Wufuli, Chong 'an, northern Fujian.