On November 19, 2021, the Jimo Ancient City Lecture Hall, as a private practical project in Qingdao City and a key project (activity) of the International Fashion City Construction Offensive, invited Lin Shaohua, a famous translator and professor at the School of Foreign Chinese of Ocean University of China, to give a special lecture on the theme of "Japanese Aesthetics and Chinese Zen". The event was hosted by Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Qingdao Jimo District People's Government, Qingdao Publishing Group, Qingdao Jimo District Culture and Tourism Bureau, Home Media, Business Weekly, and co-organized by Qingdao Jimo District Library.
Professor Lin Shaohua introduced the relevance of Japanese aesthetics to Chinese Zen Buddhism from eight aspects: the beauty of cleanliness, the beauty of purification, the beauty of simplicity, the beauty of timing, the beauty of group, the beauty of femininity, the beauty of sentimentality, and the beauty of symbolism, and at the same time compared the concepts of Chinese and Japanese aesthetics.
Japanese Zen thinker Daisuke Suzuki once said: "Haiku is the most handy form of poetry grasped by the Japanese mind and language, and Zen has done its best in the process of its development." ”
Professor Lin Shaohua believes that Zen is essentially a philosophy of insight into life itself, believing that eternity is every moment of the present moment, emphasizing the sudden perception of a certain moment. The haiku is precisely to pinch the head and tail, convey a momentary peace and freedom of the soul, convey the pure pleasure of all things being empty, and can be said to be the poetic expression of the Zen flower smile.
Professor Lin Shaohua pointed out that Japanese aesthetics also has something beyond the norm, even terriblely destructive. The violent beauty of the suicide of Yukio Mishima and himself is a case in point. These aesthetic tendencies also require us to remain awake and alert.
Share some of the highlights
Cleanliness is a prerequisite for Japanese beauty. The Japanese scholar Shin Ono has researched that the Japanese word for beauty and good-looking, "美しい", originally meant clean, clean, and free of dirt. Later, the frequent use of "綺麗" (きれい), which was also used frequently later, also meant clean and clean, but still means this. Unlike the West and China, which are still good, still big, still li, and still rich in beauty, the Japanese are even cleaner. The aesthetic consciousness of "cleanliness is beauty" has penetrated almost all aspects of Japanese life.
Compared with the Pursuit of Fine Carving in the West, China likes to be magnificent, and Japan prefers simple beauty, natural beauty, primitive beauty, simple and humble beauty, lonely beauty, unbalanced beauty, and even mutilated or regrettable beauty and ruined beauty. The imperfect beauty in the Japanese context is the defect in the pursuit of perfection, but the imperfection of perfection, the simplicity of ingenuity, and the simplicity of washing away the lead, which is different from the mainstream of Western and Chinese folk aesthetic tastes.
The beauty of timing is evident in the Haiku verses. It can be said that without the timing of the four seasons, the Japanese poetry array has almost collapsed. The most typical is the season in the haiku, each of which has a bit of the season, such as rape flower is the season of spring, without this can not become haiku, can not become poetry. The degree of strictness is probably second only to the requirements of Chinese grammar poetry, such as grammar, rhyme, flatness, and confrontation.
In terms of the object of attention, compared with the vast universe, the dark world, the vast sea, and the majestic mountains in the eyes of Chinese, the Japanese are concerned about the microscopic world and weak life. In the field of painting, Japanese landscape painting rarely collects the landscape from a wide field of view in composition, and mostly captures a natural corner. In the literary world, it is characterized by its beauty, delicacy, softness and gentleness.
Influenced by the literary and artistic fashion of the Wei and Jin dynasties to the Sui and Tang dynasties in China, the main singing of Japanese wing flowers is plum blossoms. After 1200 AD, the status of plum blossoms gradually took over by cherry blossoms. From admiring the tenacious plum blossoms of Ling Han Douxue to appreciating the fragile cherry blossoms that bloom for three days, and more than when they bloom and bloom, they are more sincere about the time of the flowers, I don't know how many Japanese people use this to express their feelings of sadness, loneliness, sadness and helplessness. Compared with the sunrise, the sky is full of flowers, and the broken wall under the sunset is full of flowers, and the dead grass and flowers under the sunset can deeply touch the heartstrings of the Japanese people. This also reflects the three major aesthetic concepts of Japan, namely mourning, mysteriousness, and silence.