On April 23, the fourth season of "Triptych? The first forum of the "New Knowledge Conference" was held in Beijing. The theme of this season's New Knowledge Conference focused on "Our China: Exploring Civilization and Newness", and the first forum was hosted by Qu Jingdong, Professor of the Department of Sociology of Peking University, and four guests, Zhao Tingyang, researcher of the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yin Jinan, professor of the School of Humanities of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Wang Mingming, professor of the Department of Sociology of Peking University, and Wei Bin, professor of the School of History of Wuhan University (online), talked about "Chinese Civilization and the Landscape World".
Group photo of guests
"Triptych? The "New Knowledge Conference" is an annual reading event established in 2018 and has been held for four seasons. Activities by life? study? Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore and its subsidiaries Sanlian Taofen Bookstore, Sanlian Life Media and other sub-brands are jointly built. It aims to promote deep reading and academic popularization, and invite front-line scholars in the fields of humanities, arts and sciences to present new knowledge, new concepts and new methods in related fields in a simple and simple way.
Season 4 "Triptych? The "New Knowledge Conference" plans to invite 16 well-known scholars in the fields of philosophy, history, archaeology, art, science and technology, and hold a total of four theme forums. The forum will mainly focus on the origin and development of Chinese civilization, the origin and development and future of Chinese agriculture, traditional culture and landscape spirit, ancient Chinese construction, and astronomical and humanistic themes in ancient construction systems. The specific arrangements are introduced in more detail on the WeChat, Sanlian Book Andi, and Sanlian Academic Newsletter of Sanlian Bookstore.
"Discuss old learning and cultivate new knowledge." Yin Tao, editor-in-chief of Sanlian Bookstore, said in his opening remarks, "This year, Sanlian Bookstore will turn 90 years old. We've always wanted to build a bridge, or an academic community, so that authors, readers, and our editors can fully communicate. In his view, cultural self-confidence must have a foundation, "this foundation is first of all to conduct in-depth research on our Chinese culture, we must have deep self-knowledge." ”
Yuqiao Q&A, Chinese-style imagery thinking
Zhao Tingyang, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, spoke first. He first recalled a dispute he had with Wang Mingming more than twenty years ago, "At that time, in order to discuss the relationship between history and fishing trees, the landscape was used as one of the bridges, and the three formed a triangular refraction relationship that explained each other. "In his view, the basic setting of the Chinese way of thinking is imagery." Imagery functions as some of the basic categories, and landscapes are one of the most important images. The space of Chinese thought is opened through these basic images, which is very different from the Western way of thinking, which uses concepts as the basic unit. ”
Zhao Tingyang
Where is the higher level of image thinking? Zhao Tingyang admitted that he has not yet obtained a satisfactory answer, "I boldly say a little about the progress of my current thinking. The main function of image thinking is to create increments of meaning. It enables one meaning to produce increments of another, so it establishes not the inevitability between the messages, but the historicity between the messages. ”
In Zhao Tingyang's view, "shanshui" has many synonyms, "such as mountains and rivers, rivers and mountains, but mountains and rivers are political, and people mention them and immediately think of the space where a country and a nation are located." Landscape, on the other hand, is a cultural or ideological image, largely constructed by the literati. "For example, he said that just like the ancients wrote eight strands of writing, writing poetry must pay attention to duality, confrontation, and so on will form some programs, and today's speech is the template." In Chinese landscape paintings, there must be a big mountain, a waterfall, then a small bridge, a donkey or a horse next to it, and a small person. These are all 'templates' or allusions that can be continuously and infinitely appropriated. Each of our paintings can be painted like this, or we can explain something as a format. ”
In this regard, the host Qu Jingdong commented that in the Chinese concept of art, there has never been a separate, unique, and self-existence. "Because the 'existence of the self' has always been in this civilization system, it is always nested. Without the ancients, there would be no ourselves, and without the ancients there would be no us and our descendants. Therefore, 'ancient and modern' is an image relationship constructed between the comings and goings, which is my understanding of Teacher Zhao, which is really very inspiring. ”
From "Only this green" to "ink landscape"
Yin Jinan, a professor at the School of Humanities at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in a subsequent speech that shanshui as a concept was developed in the ancient Chinese cultural circle, "for example, in ancient China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and vietnam, basically in the past in the ancient Chinese circles, the concept of landscape did not appear in the West." Landscape painting, including calligraphy, is a particularly unique presence in ancient Chinese civilization and has not occurred in the same and simultaneous manner elsewhere. At the same time, the development of early Chinese landscape painting and figure painting was not synchronized. The figure painting system was first developed, and the recent Tang Dynasty was basically a model of figures and landscapes, and the Song and Yuan Dynasties were the model era of flowers and birds. ”
Yin Ji Nan
"Judging from the early Chinese poetry, the characters, landscapes, history, including cities, and various themes are actually relatively balanced. But painting is not like this, the early stage of painting is the figure, and then the landscape slowly rises, which is still closely related to the Sheng Tang and late Tang, after all, there are some green traditions and ink painting traditions, especially in the late Tang Dynasty. After the middle and late Northern Song Dynasty, landscape painting became a very powerful genre. Almost all of the most prominent painters were landscape painters. Portrait painters slowly faded. After that, figure painting was basically compressed inside the court, and this was the case until the Qing Dynasty. Portraiture is not the mainstream in the vision of the literati, so it is difficult for us to see the portraits of the literati. ”
In Yin Jinan's view, figure painting has a lot to do with the theory of aristocratic descent, and the aristocratic class pays attention to the theory of bloodline, both in the East and the West. "The Hongnong Yang clan, the Lang evil Wang clan, the Taiyuan Wang clan, and the Jingzhao Wei clan must have recounted their ancestors in this way, and the ancestors of these warriors were very capable of fighting. Now it is basically proved that Europe is the same, once you go to a castle hall, the ancestors of the past, the grandfather, the grandmother, it can be said that the walls are hung with portraits. The same goes for our visit to the Louvre, which is full of statues of kings. This is an important manifestation of the theory of descent. ”
"In addition to the emphasis on blood, the aristocratic class is also concerned with the city. The nobility attached great importance to the city, and the first six volumes of the Selected Writings of Zhaoming were all about the city. In addition, it is the praise of famous buildings, and Du Mu's "A Fang Gong Fu" is to praise high-rise buildings. And many of the poems with the theme of 'looking back at Chang'an' are reluctant to leave the big city. Leaving the capital is not unhappy, which means being 'in the opposition' and alienated from the center of power. In Yin Jinan's view, this change was not changed until the gradual decline of the great aristocratic class in the late Tang Dynasty, and the rise of the small landlords in the lower class, "Where does this class live?" Don't live in the city, live in the countryside. Small and medium-sized landlords live in the countryside, and the landscape is the reality in front of them, the most familiar landscape. Xie Lingyun has landscape poems, and Tao Yuanming has descriptions of landscapes. Yin Jinan said.
In his view, landscape painting in the Tang Dynasty with a high degree of aristocratic temperament, "green (the name of the color, in the Chinese painting pigment of stone blue and stone green, also refers to the coloring method with these two pigments as the main color) has a high degree of decorative, but such a kind of aristocratic decorative to the Northern Song Dynasty only in the court and continue to retain, the whole world of literati is rejected." The late Tang Dynasty ink painting factor was developed separately - ink painting is a necessary kung fu for all painters. To paint green, you must use ink to base, and then add color after the bottom. This is in contrast to the European painting method, and the European painting is also sketched first, and then colored, so it appears thicker. ”
"In the late Northern Song Dynasty, the rise of small and medium-sized landlords, bureaucrats, and literati led to a unique aesthetic approach and endowed with high values. This is most typical of Su Dongpo, who opposes deliberate realism. In this way, the concept of landscape gradually transitioned to a freehand view of landscape, which in turn formed a unique cultural landscape in China. Yin Jinan pointed out that with the change of dynasties and the shift of the center of power of the Han people, the concept of "Jiangnan" was fully established after the Eastern Jin Dynasty and until the Southern Song Dynasty. "In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, a lot of southern landscapes began to enter poetry, but did not enter painting. In the Southern Song Dynasty, the most contribution of Southern Song Painting was the southern landscape, which gradually made the southern landscape become the mainstream of Chinese landscape painting. I have been to Zhenjiang, and the mountain I saw here is the mountain in Dong Yuan's painting, and the mountain in that place is the mountain in Mi Fu's painting. ”
"Dimensionality reduction" anthropology, "requires us to constantly expand our horizons"
Wang Mingming, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, laughed first when he spoke, from Zhao Tingyang to Yin Jinan, from philosophical thinking to art history retrospection, "Now I am going to fall to the 'slope' of anthropological fieldwork." He first shared with the crowd a picture he took in a village in Anxi County, Fujian Province in 1991, "The first thing I saw was a piece of farmland with three types of things in the middle, the stage, and opposite the stage was a village temple, and the deity (local gods) offered in the village temple was offered." The whole village is built around the village temple and cultivated fields in the middle. The local people used this field to feed the temple, and through this temple, they formed a relationship with a mountain around them that was repeated every year. When it comes to landscapes in Chinese culture, these are actually related to each other, and we need to constantly expand our horizons. ”
Wang Mingming
Later, Wang Mingming gave an example from his own anthropological teaching practice, and the historian Gu Jiegang went to the northwest in the 1940s to investigate, and in 1950 wrote a series of articles about Kunlun Mountain. Mr. Gu actually examines the origins of Chinese philosophy and literature in these articles. He cites two characters, Zhuangzi and Qu Yuan. The works of these two figures will talk about 'shanshui', and the resources behind the shanshui discourse are the two mythological systems that Mr. Gu believes have formed in the two-week period, with Kunlun in the west and Penglai in the east as the core. In the concept of the ancients, myths are not a joke, because their main belief is god, the immortal god. The so-called 'there are gods in the west, and immortals in the east'. Immortals are different from gods, and my own understanding is that god is a descending system, while immortals are immortals who can attain eternal life through cultivation. ”
"Zhuangzi is a native of the Song Dynasty, near the east, and Qu Yuan is in the Chu State. They are all 'southern' people in the eyes of Liang Qichao in the later generations. These two southerners, when creating their own ideological and cultural systems, will be influenced by the Kunlun system and the Penglai system that their country has been closely exposed to during the Warring States period. Liang Qichao believes that the Penglai system is an ocean system, and Zhuangzi's thought is closely related to the ocean and to the understanding and belief of Yanqi Wuyue about the ocean. In Qu Yuan's time, his Chu Ci achievements were very high, but most of what Qu Yuan wrote himself involved Kunlun and did not have Penglai. "In this regard, Wang Mingming pointed out that the birth of civilization must establish interaction in order to generate a larger system." On the one hand, we cannot fail to look at what is behind philosophy, and on the other hand, we cannot fail to look at the mythological system as a regional system, and the connection between them. ”
Finally, Wang Mingming used Wang Guowei's "Human Words" to put forward "there is me" and "no self", and re-examined the classic view of Western anthropology on the "relationship between things and me". "I understand the formulation of Wang Guowei to mean that there is no shadow of oneself in the nature we are looking at, in the nature we know, which is called 'no self'. And the Western view of the universe will tell us that this nature is not human. Although Wang Guowei's "Words and Sayings on Earth" says that there is a 'realm of no-self' in Chinese words, this 'realm of no-self' is also related to people, but it is only described without putting yourself into it. "He went on to propose that placing people in the wider world to understand is the reason why we revisit landscapes today." Otherwise, there is no value in the study of social science, which is of course for social researchers, not philosophy. Humanistic landscapes still need to be studied, but we cannot limit our vision to man's own social organization, nor can we view the natural world and the humanistic world in a binary and antagonistic way. ”
Shanshui Spirit, "A Spirit of the Individual"
Professor Wei Bin of the School of History of Wuhan University gave a speech entitled "The Emergence of Landscape and Water". "In fact, landscapes can be divided into two levels, one is natural, spontaneous landscapes - including mountain people, people living in mountains or waterside nature. Landscape is their living space, where they engage in agriculture, fishing, hunting or chopping firewood, and the original beliefs of the mountain gods and water gods that accompany them. ”
"The second level is the cultural landscape. It has three aspects: the first is the cultural person who has fled the state and social order — it can be divided into two kinds of people, one is secular, that is, what we usually call hermits, and the other is religious, like monks and Taoists. Their mountain dwellings also experienced a distinction from individual to group.
After there are some people in the mountains who either live or visit, the resulting writing and painting of the natural beauty of the landscape also has two levels: one is the writing of the tourist, and the other is the writing of the occupants. On this basis, through the dissemination of the audience, through the acceptance of all levels, the landscape as a cultural spiritual space began to appear. ”
Cultural landscapes can be divided into two levels, one is the actual landscape, including the two levels of swimming and living. There is also the inner landscape. Wei Bin's first question is why is there a cultural landscape? "In fact, this is also divided into two levels: the first is the cultural elite, in fact, this is mainly related to them. They feel a sense of absurdity under the pressure of political insecurity or political and social competition, frustration and failure – and of course for another reason – that life is like a theater, and they feel absurd in the theater. Driven by these aspects, they found scenery in the mountains, in nature, quiet or alone. But I would like to remind that as a historian, one of my own concerns is that they have to build villas, manors, fields or external economic support, so that they can live better in the mountains. ”
"The second level is another cultural elite, a local religious elite. In order to cultivate into the mountains, their landscapes are mainly instrumental. As they went from individual to group cultivation, they formed a fixed belief culture space in the mountain, and the formation of this belief and cultural space played a key role in promoting the formation of the overall cultural landscape space. These people of faith with intellectual attributes have objectively become an important shaping force for the formation of cultural landscapes. Its formation dates from the third to the sixth centuries, especially in the south. ”
Wei Bin stressed that no matter what kind of person, after entering the mountain, they need certain material conditions. "Liu Xiaobiao, a famous hermit in the Liang Dynasty, when he lived in seclusion in Jinhua Mountain, he actually lived in a small basin in the mountain, with farmland, and many people lived with their companions. I think there will be officials from outside who will give him some supplies, so that he can stay in this place as a cultural person in a better way. Of course, more famous is Wang Wei's Renchuan Beiye, where he lived and lived with land and villas. And the ultimate significance of cultural landscape may lie in a passage that Ge Hong said, "'Only far away from the noise, so that the heart is not chaotic.'" 'You can escape from the social order and let the spirit get a certain sense of relief and freedom. In other words, the practitioner's spirit can be single-minded, less disturbed by the outside world, and better complete the practice of the self.
From the perspective of people today's thinking, what is the significance of cultural landscapes in contemporary society? "The social space we are in now has changed a lot from the spatial environment in which the ancient landscape appeared, modern people have mobile phones, in the network society, no matter where they hide, they can be quickly located, so do we still have the mountains or mountains and rivers that the ancients recognized?" From this, we talk about how to create the inner landscape, which is actually our state of mind when we see the landscape. What should the true spirit of landscape represent? I think it should be a kind of individual spirit, or the society that is supported by it. I am also thinking that escape is also very common in modern society, the so-called home culture, young people are not willing to change or simply 'lie flat', which is different from the landscape that the ancients longed for, and escaping from the world, the fundamental difference lies in the sense of inner simplicity. Wei Bin said.