Composition
The Thousand Character Classic is composed of 250 phrases of 4 characters each from "天地玄黃" (jyutping: tin1 dei6 jyun4 wong4, pinyin: tiān dì xuán huáng) to "焉哉乎也" (jyutping: yin1 zoi1 fu1 jaa5, pinyin: yān zāi hū yě). It was selected among the calligraphies of 王羲之 (Wang Xizhi), one of the finest calligraphers in China, and composed by Zhou Xingsi, who lived from 470 to 521 in the Liang dynasty. The characters of the poem were sometimes used to represent the numbers from 1 through 1000 (as the standard numbers could more easily be altered with an extra stroke or two), as described in this link for students: Qianziwen.
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Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
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“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)