One of the series of drafts of "Nian Wei China": Why is there no Spring Festival league in the West?
China News Service, Beijing, January 29 Title: Why does the West not have the Spring League?
China News Service reporter Wen Longjie
"Thousands of households always exchange new peaches for old ones", peach symbols refer to the Spring League. As we all know, sticking to the Spring Festival is one of the most important customs to welcome and celebrate the Spring Festival. Why doesn't the West have a Spring League? The answer is obviously not the Western Spring Festival. Perhaps it is more accurate to ask: Why did the Spring League originate in China? The answer seems to be based on historical and cultural roots.
Xianmu Red Paper: From Peach Charm to Spring League
According to Kao, chunlian originated from the peach symbol, that is, two rectangular peach wood boards hung on the door in the Zhou Dynasty, on which or painting or writing to descend the ghost god "Shendi" and "Yu Lei" to ward off evil spirits. This custom continued until the Tang Dynasty, "On the first day of the first month, make a peach charm, a name of immortal wood, and a hundred ghosts are feared."
During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the inscription of the couplet on the peach symbol began. According to relevant research, Meng Chang's handwritten "New Year Na Yu Qing, Jia Jie Changchun" is the earliest pair of Spring Leagues in China. Continuing to the Song Dynasty, the Spring League gradually became a fashion, and there was a scene of Wang Anshi's "thousands of doors" and "always replacing the old peach with the old one", and with the popularity of paper, the peach wood board gradually changed to paper of similar color.
The "Peach Symbol" is really called "Spring League" is the Ming Dynasty. According to the Ming Dynasty scholar Chen Yunzhan, "The establishment of the Spring League began with the Ming Dynasty. The imperial capital Jinling, Chinese New Year's Eve before do not pass on the will, the Gongqing Shi Shu family, the door must add a pair of Spring League, the emperor micro line out of the view. The Qing Dynasty's "Records of the Yanjing Chronicle" records: "The Spring League, that is, Tao Fu Ye." "Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, pasting the Spring Festival has become an indispensable Spring Festival custom.
In January 2022, in Wangdong Township, Rongshui Miao Autonomous County, Guangxi, a calligraphy enthusiast was writing the Spring Festival. Photo by Long Tao, China News Service
Word Worship: The Meaning of the Heaven and Earth Saints
Chinese vertically and horizontally in foreign languages, which is the formal reason why there is no Spring League in the West. The deeper reason lies in the view of words.
Whether it is the original peach rune to ward off evil spirits, or the resignation and new greetings that continue to this day, praying for naji, the content of the Spring League has always revolved around the auspicious avoidance of evil, which is a variation of the Chinese character worship tradition.
In China, writing has always had a special cultural and spiritual connotation, rather than a simple written symbol system like the Western view. As hieroglyphs and ideographs, Chinese characters are directly related to "meaning". Ancient Chinese believed that Chinese characters were created by transcendent gods, and the character "shape" composed of strokes and structures was the embodiment of "Tao" and "the meaning of the saints of heaven and earth", with spirituality, divine power and blessing and disaster functions, such as the Taoist fu zhen culture. The Huainan zi benjingxun contains that "the former Cangjie wrote books, and the sky rained and millet, and the ghosts cried at night", and the appearance of words was an earth-shattering event.
With the development of history, after the establishment of the social order of "scholars, peasants, industrialists, and merchants", "everything is inferior, only the reading is high", and the factor of respecting culture has been incorporated into the tradition of character worship. With the support of cultural elites and the beliefs of the general public, the worship of words has been accepted and valued by all walks of life, and has become an important vein of Chinese culture.
In January 2019, a street in Leping City, Jiangxi Province, held the "2019 Spring Festival, Righteous Writing Spring Festival" activity, and calligraphers paved the ground for citizens to write Spring Festival. Photo by Zhu Dingwen, China News Service
The cult of words has even given birth to China's unique tradition of cherishing characters, with the saying that "only words must be cherished, and the roots of yours are also"; in today's Taiwan, we can still see the "Holy Relics of Sending Gifts" for the ceremony of sending paper ashes into the sea for the sake of cherishing characters, and the relics of the Xizi Pagoda, Wenchang Pagoda, Wenfeng Pagoda, and XiziLou used to incinerate paper all over the mainland are also evident evidence.
It is precisely because of the special worship of words that when celebrating the Spring Festival, the first of the hundred festivals of the Chinese nation, the first thing is to paste the Spring Festival: every household writes down their good wishes for the New Year in words on red paper, from the prosperity of the animals, the wide range of wealth, and everything is satisfactory to the prosperity of the country and the people, the prosperity of the world, the splendid scenery of the rivers and mountains, and so on.
Although the cult of words is not unique in the West, it is indeed difficult to say. This is because the Western epiphonic script has no direct connection with the "meaning", but only a record of the sound of speech, as Aristotle said, "The spoken language is the symbol of the experience of the mind, and the written word is the symbol of the spoken language". Therefore, the West attaches more importance to speech, and the first sentence of the New Testament, "In the beginning there was a Way, the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God", and the English translation used "Word".
Therefore, as the famous French sinologist Wang Demai said, writing, as the most powerful tool for revealing the super-phenomenal meaning of things, originated from the inventions of Fuxi and Shennong, "In China, this sublimeness involves all writing. Writing is pushed to heights that are not seen in any other culture." To paraphrase Wang Demai, in the West, it is the sublime language that is sublime, so Derrida believes that one of the western philosophical and cultural traditions is "speech-centrism". This kind of verbal worship produces a developed culture of mantras.
In January 2019, the Shiyan Lake Glass Bridge in Changsha, Hunan Province, was plastered with Spring League, and two foreign tourists learned to write Spring League on the Glass Bridge. Photo by Yang Huafeng, a reporter of China News Service
Yin and Yang Ping: The Aesthetics and Philosophy of Order
Tao fu to ward off evil spirits and the worship of words have contributed to the emergence of the custom of the Spring Festival, but its wide spread and acceptance have benefited from the unique aesthetic form of confrontation and the yin and yang philosophical connotations it carries.
Chunlian characters use dual sentences, the so-called "literature of the battle", the upper and lower sentences correspond according to the pronunciation of the word and the meaning of the word virtual reality, in the form and sense to create a neat and symmetrical beauty, is the Chinese as a unique artistic means of ideograph. Although other languages also have symmetrical expressions, they are mostly limited to "sounds".
In the Chinese literary tradition, "literature is also great for virtue", and writing has never been a simple skill, but a body that carries the Tao. The "Great Literary View" represented by Liu Xun believes that Chinese literary creation is not the subject's depiction and understanding of the object, but the "divine thought" produced by the fusion of the self and the universe, that is, "silent contemplation, thinking for thousands of years; quietly moving, seeing through thousands of miles".
Under the guidance of this philosophical concept of the unity of heaven and man, Chinese writing and literature are considered to be a manifestation of the order of all things in the universe, that is, "the text of words, the heart of heaven and earth".
The reason why the form of confrontation is unique to China is derived from the cosmology and ideological concept of "Tai Chi Sheng Yin Yang Two Instruments". As Liu Xun pointed out, "The yuan of humanity, the origin of Taiji, the praise of the gods, the yixiang weixian". The Yi Chuan says that "one yin and one yang is the Tao", Lao Tzu said that "all things bear the yin and embrace the yang, and the breath thinks that it is harmony", Xunzi pointed out that "the heavens and the earth are combined and all things are born, and the yin and yang are combined and change", and the "Book of Huang Lao" says that "the way of heaven and earth, there are left and right, there are yin and yang".
This view of cosmic order is widely infiltrated into the ancient Chinese's understanding and practice of everything in nature and human society, from political order, etiquette, literature, to architecture, utensils, and clothing, it can be described as ubiquitous and far-reaching, and its important feature is the admiration of "two", "zhongzheng", "symmetry", "good things into pairs", "four flat and eight stable" and other forms.
According to the functionalist view, a custom can only survive and spread when it meets the biological and social needs of human beings. "Sky to earth, rain to wind." The continent to the long sky", the rhythmic aesthetics of the flat and the gentle chant add to the pleasant experience of the festival and are widely accepted by the general public. The concept of cosmic order gives chunlian "essence", which allows it to continue to this day, and is also a philosophical support that once spread to Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other places.
In January 2022, the Zhonghua Gate of Nanjing Ming City Wall held the unveiling ceremony of "City Gate Hanging Spring League, Nanjing Open Door Red", and the big red Spring League with a length of 15 meters and a width of two meters was unveiled. The picture shows the guests unveiling the huge Spring Festival. China News Service reporter Yang Bo photographed
"Two lines of text, supporting the heavens and the earth; a pair of couplets, commenting on the past and the present." Of course, today's Spring League has a new meaning, as a collection of Chinese culture that integrates the Yang Lian, calligraphy and Spring Festival cultural symbols, there is no doubt that it is an excellent business card to show the soft power of Chinese culture. In 2006, the customs were included in China's first list of national intangible cultural heritage, and their dissemination in the Chinese-speaking world and even the world is of great value in promoting Chinese culture. (End)