取號를 통해 읽는 唐代 문인들의 自我意識 - 王績과 白居易, 그리고 元結을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the hao (號, alias) as a reflection of an individual’s philosophy of life in the Orient. Unlike the ming (名, name) or ji (字, a name given at the age of twenty by which a man is sometimes called) given by someone in the family, such as a person’s parents, an alias, especially a self-given alias, sums up an individual's own exploration into the symbolic significance of life based on a self-identity that he or she has established. An alias is a valuable resource for examining a person's philosophy of life and their view of the self. The history of aliases goes back to olden times, evidenced by the fact that they appeared in the Discourses of Confucius, and even in literature before Confucius’s time. It was not until the Jin Dynasty, especially after the publication of the Biography of Wuliuxianshengzhuan (五柳先生傳) by Tao-yuanmin, however, that the Chinese created their own aliases through reflections on their own characters and life stories. The use of aliases has become almost universal since the Song Dynasty, even to the extent that a person held multiple aliases. The Tang Dynasty played a bridging role in the history of alias development. In particular, names falling under the category of Wuliuxiansheng's, symbolizing the image of Tao-yuanming as a transcendent hermit, were widely handed down. Aliases were also added to the names of people’s residences, as if a place of residence was part of the individual, including such nouns as 居士 (scholars living away from the world), 散人 (people who choose to live freely without worldly titles), or 野老 (country old people). Differentiated from aliases that showed the Tao-oriented view of values, focusing on the individual 's life, these aliases lead us to discover a new level of self-perception as people take their views from nature, placing significance on the effect of the location upon their life and the traces of life that are in harmony with the location. The third type of alias is meant to reveal how individuals orient themselves in life by taking a new alias at each life stage; these serve as an example of the proof that retrospection and perception of the self reached maturity in the Tang Dynasty.