This expression is used to describe prose and poetry lacking fluency because they fail to express their authors’ feelings freely, and instead borrow hackneyed allusions or phrases. Such writing is seen to lack flair, and comes across as unnatural and fragmentary. Juluan (拘挛) points to the lack of fluency as a result of artificial, rigid use of allusions. Buna (补衲) describes a failure to use appropriate allusions, often too many and out of keeping with the author’s own tone and style, leaving the writing like “a garment patched together with rags.” Zhong Rong (?-518?), using this term with its concrete image, vividly laid bare how some essayists and poets stifled their own works by alluding to a profusion of events and tales. He argued that prose and poetry should prize free expression of one’s feelings. This yields the questions of how to borrow one’s predecessors’ words flexibly and how to borrow from one’s predecessors’ messages creatively. In Zhong’s view, since many writers lack intellectual and literary talent, they understandably fall back on scholarly knowledge to make up for this inadequacy.

And so, all sentences must contain allusions, and every word and expression has to be traceable to some sources. Allusions are clumsily tacked onto the authors’ own words, severely damaging their works. Zhong Rong: The Critique of Poetry

Some young painters know little about rules that govern landscape painting. They depict and polish human images and scenery in a landscape painting in minute detail to appeal to plebeian tastes. Human images and scenery are all patched together; such works are not true landscape paintings. Li Chengsou: Gists of Landscape Painting