Author: Peng Lin (Chief Expert of the National Social Science Foundation Major Project "Research on the Restoration of Rituals and the Reconstruction of Contemporary Daily Etiquette", the first batch of senior professors of liberal arts and school of humanities of Tsinghua University)
The premise of academic research is to grasp the particularity of the research object, avoid blindness, and fall into the lost path of research for research's sake. The biggest feature that distinguishes the Rites from other classics is its distinct practicability, so correctly understanding the two "transformations" of the Rites in the process of writing and research is the logical starting point for our restoration research.
Gate School
From living inheritance to condensed solid text: the first transformation of the Lile civilization of the Zhou Dynasty
The Zhou metric system of ritual music created a Chinese ritual music civilization with "morality" as the core connotation and "depressed and literary". From the "Poems", "Zuo Zhuan", "Chinese" and other documents, it can be seen that the ceremonies of crowning, marriage, funeral, sacrifice, feasting, shooting, dynasty, and appointment have become important contents of the social life of the Zhou Dynasty, and the way of life of the Chinese nation has been standardized, and cultural identity has gradually become.
The rituals of the Zhou people originally belonged to the living lineage and did not need to resort to writing. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the ceremonies collapsed and were broken, and the "Records of Rites and Miscellaneous Records" recorded that after the death of Yi Yu, Lu Guo, who had the reputation of "Zhou Li was all in Lu", did not know how to mourn for the act, so he had to send his children to consult Confucius, and made a record, and the "funeral ceremony of the soldiers" was written in bamboo. Confucius was shocked by this, and Zhou Li was either abolished or usurped, and could be annihilated at any time, and needed rescue protection. The seventeen surviving Rites of Rites are the result of Confucius and his disciples transforming living rituals into condensed texts. In order to highlight the main clues and avoid branches, many details such as the shape of the palace, the cutting of costumes, and the use of ceremonial utensils were often omitted, which did not cause reading difficulties for readers at that time. This transformation is the origin of the book of the Rites, which, like the Kongbi Zhongjing, aims to preserve the culture and hope to pass it on to future generations in the form of texts.
The Ritual of Restoring texts to a living state: the second transformation of the Lile civilization of the Zhou Dynasty
Since the "Rites" are transformed from the living rites, the posterity will study the "Rites", and then restore the text form to a living ceremony to achieve the second transformation, which is the proper meaning of the title, so that Fang does not live up to the original intention of Confucius's disciples. However, time has changed, social lifestyles are constantly changing, and it is not easy for posterity to read through the "Ritual Rites", even Han Yu, as an ancient Chinese master, bluntly said that this "Ritual" written in the pre-Qin language is "difficult to read"; the well-known Yi, Gui, Gui, Zhen, 觯, 斝, 盉, 匜 and other ceremonial instruments in the Zhou Dynasty are "useless" in society; however, why can this book be absolutely not abandoned? Because "the legal system of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou is in this", the spirit of Zhou Li is contained in it, and the roots of Confucian culture are contained in it.
Later generations of scholars have tried to show local rituals and draw ceremonial diagrams, and Song Yangfu's "Ritual Diagram" and Qing Zhang Huiyan's "Ritual Diagram" can be called among the best. However, it is needless to say that the two thousand years of research on the "Ritual Rites", including the Qianjia scholars with outstanding achievements, have almost indulged in pure textual research, which is missing the original intention of Confucius to save etiquette.
The liturgist Shen Wenkuo, who immersed himself in the Ritual Rites all his life, was the earliest fan of this path, and he criticized the Qing people's ritual drawings as "too sloppy", "such as the palace room, only a few thick or thin lines, indicating that this is the hall and this is the room". He goes on to say: "The description of the living conditions of the ancients is difficult to express by words alone, and it is also dull and unrelated to rely solely on 'physical' photographs or pictures"; he categorically points out that the study of the Rites "must find another way". He also believes that the study of "rites" belongs to the study of the history of life in ancient society, which is "an important proposition in the study of history", and textual research is not superfluous, but "only by expressing the results of the study in a continuous picture, then the house utensils can be clearly seen; and the activities of people - entering the church, sitting and eating, are all as historical as in the present". Shen Wenkuo had a sober concept of returning the text to the living ceremony, so as early as 1951, he formulated the "Zhou Dynasty City Life Map Compilation Plan", which divided the content of the "Ritual Ceremony" into twelve doors such as the palace, clothes, diet, transportation, crown and dusk, funeral, etc., and planned to draw more than forty frames per door, a total of five hundred frames, hoping to use the form of comic strips to restore the "Ritual" to a living ceremony, because it was always impossible to find a painter who could cooperate, so he had to regret it. Subsequently, under the leadership of Mr. Li Ji and Mr. Kong Decheng, Taiwan scholars made an "experimental restoration" of "Ritual Rites and Rituals" and made it into a black-and-white film, taking a key step in the secondary transformation. It can be seen that the scholars of the previous generations on both sides of the strait have completely consistent understanding that the study of "Ritual Lyom" must eventually take the road of living restoration.
Challenges and solutions to restoration research
Over the past few decades, the new achievements of the text research and archaeological excavations of the "Rites" have continued, and they need to be summarized in a timely manner; the emergence of multimedia technology far exceeds the expression methods such as comic strips and black-and-white films, and is widely used in cultural dissemination; the conditions for further promoting the second transformation of the "Rites" research are becoming more and more mature. In 2014, we submitted the topic of "Research on the Restoration of "Ritual Rites" and the Reconstruction of Contemporary Daily Rituals", and determined that the four articles of "Ritual Ceremony" of "Ceremony" would be restored, "Ceremony of Shi Duan", "Ceremony of Shi Jie", and "Ceremony of Rural Shooting", which were approved as major projects of the National Social Science Foundation.
The most significant difference between the pure text study of the "Rites" and the restoration study is that the former has a large selectivity, and the parts that are not understood or not interested can be avoided or vaguely expressed; the restoration study must be carried out in the whole process and in all directions, and any details must be intuitively displayed and given academic explanations, and there is no escape. Pressure can be transformed into motivation, motivating us to study the literature more deeply and absorb as much as possible the results of archaeology, antiquarians, ancient architecture, costume science and other disciplines. Practice has proved that if there is no restoration, many problems in the text are difficult to find, and many of the right and wrong cannot be judged, which makes people truly appreciate the principle of "it is shallow to finally feel shallow on paper" and "it is better to believe in books than to have no books", the following are a few examples.
The first is to find fallacies in the process of use. The shape of the crown in the "Shiguan Li" is unknown, and the Song Ren Nie Chongyi's "New Ding San Li Tu" starts from the cold function of the hat of later generations and paints it in a large cylinder shape, because the research results are presented in the form of text, no one in the academic community questions. When we recovered, we found that a crown of such a shape could not be worn on the head unless the hairpin passed through the middle of the brain door. "Sayings": "Crown, silk also, so hair." Duan Yujie said that the function of the crown is "so it restricts hair", and has no cold function. Reading the "Ceremony of the Crown of The Soldiers" again, the ancients pulled the bun together, covered it with a crown, and fixed it horizontally with a hairpin. The size of the crown is limited to covering the bun. From this, we found that Nie's large cylinder crown miao was incomprehensible, so we sought a reasonable shape.
The second is to determine academic disputes through the restoration of the actual scene of the building. For example, there are juku on the left and right of the gate of the temple in the "Rites", known as "one door and four schools", Zheng Xuan called it a hall, and the later generations of the Shu family attached the shape of the school to the church: there are separations of the front hall and the back room in the school, and Zhang Huiyan's "Rites and Rites Diagram" is based on this, and the academic circles regard it as a stereotype. There are even wooden walls, doors, and steps on the outside of the four schools. However, there is no record of ceremonies in the "Rites of Worship" at the gate, so it is doubtful that the school has a hall. We found that the two Zhou Dynasty building sites of Fengchi and Fengxiang Yuntang in Qishan, Shaanxi, were very small, 4 meters wide and 3 meters deep. After restoring according to the actual dimensions, we found that such a small place could never be divided into an antechamber and a back room.
The third is to judge right and wrong through the restoration of the ritual section. To the north of the courtyard of the Zhou Dynasty, there are rammed earth platforms that rise above the ground, covered with "five frames" of roofs, and Zheng Xuan notes: "The middle of the yue dong, the second yue lintel, the front yue yu." "The roof ridge in the middle becomes a building, and the north and south slopes of the building are lintels and friezes in turn, and the friezes are close to the eaves, and the frieze is between the building and the building. To the north of the base there are rooms and chambers, and its southern wall is directly below the back lintel, and the place between the south and east and west orders of the chambers is called "hall", but the history of the church has diverged about the exact scope of the hall. Jia Gongyan said "Tang Lian north to the wall of the room", Lian is the edge of the southern end of the Taiji; Zheng Xuan said "The south of the middle is called the hall", referring to the part south of the middle ridge; Huang Yizhou believes that it refers to the south of the middle to the middle, excluding the part from the middle to the tang lian. All three are famous scribes, but each has one end, and there is no difference. Through restoration research, we found that in many ceremonial festivals, there are priests who deliver things, walk up the last step and then stand firmly, and no longer go forward, that is, "the steps do not ascend to the hall", indicating that the area between the hall and the lower hall does not belong to the hall, which shows that Huang Yizhou has judged people and is worthy of being a master. This area is also a place where the musicians sit and play, and after communicating with the experts of ancient architecture, we widened this area to 70 centimeters, so that the musicians and the counterparts passed in parallel, which was in line with the meaning of the text.
The fourth is the application of multimedia technology. There are more than seventy characters in "Township Shooting Ceremony", with different roles, position changes, and it is not easy to grasp pure text research. On the basis of in-depth study of the literature, we drew six hundred frames of ritual drawings, and then drew the layout of the palace with white lines on the ground, and the real people repeatedly practiced. On this basis, the software is used to make animated pictures, construct three-dimensional space, and incorporate the annotations of the successive liths, establish a comprehensive database, and then do "wargame deduction", compare paragraph by paragraph with the literature, and distinguish, compromise and cut in the overall planning of macroscopic and detailed, thus discovering and correcting many problems and creating a lot.
The modern significance of the restoration of the Rites
The "Rites" is the yuan canon of the Axial Era, and the adult ceremonies, weddings, funerals, sacrifices, archery ceremonies, diplomatic ceremonies, etc. recorded in the world are rare in the world, and their academic value should not be underestimated. The restoration of the "Rites of Rites" will enable people to witness the social life of the Zhou Dynasty nearly three thousand years ago, and its cultural influence will become increasingly prominent. Take "Township Shooting Ceremony" as an example. According to the statutes of the International Olympic Committee's International Archery Federation, the world's earliest archery competition was invented by the British aristocracy in the 16th century. The "Township Shooting Ceremony" proves that at least in the 8th century BC, Chinese had invented the "Wen Archery" with the main purpose of self-cultivation and morality, which not only had strict competition procedures, but also had humanistic connotations, so Japan and Korea called it "Bow Road". After the International Archery Federation learned about it, it broadcast our "Rural Shooting Ceremony" on the field many times, which played a positive role in the spread of Chinese culture.
The restoration of the Rites also plays an important role in the interpretation of Chinese culture. At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, the Manchu Qing nobles duanfang collected a set of bronze ceremonial vessels of the Zhou Dynasty, which became a sensation, and this set of bronzes later flowed into the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States and was displayed in a special room. Unfortunately, most viewers did not know its use, nor their value, and turned away after a glance. In recent years, the museum has excerpted six minutes from our "Township Shooting Ceremony" film and played it on a loop in the ring screen of the exhibition hall, and the audience suddenly realized after watching it: it turned out to be a Zhou Dynasty ceremonial instrument nearly 3,000 years ago!
The two transformations of the "Ritual Rites", the Zhou Dynasty Lile Civilization from "dehydration" and "preservation", to the "resurrection" of the twenty-first century, are of great significance. As a result of the restoration, we have solved many questions, and also found many difficult problems that have not been raised before, such as the east and west pillars of the arrow target erected in the "Township Shooting Ceremony", the left and right oblique insertion, the upper and lower narrow, violating the principle of mechanics, how to fix? For another example, the "Jing" used for target reporting is as high as 4.58 meters, the center of gravity is too high, how to lift it and shake it left and right? And so on, always tugging at the heartstrings of our exploration, stimulating a stronger desire for research. After years of hard work, the road to the restoration of the "Rites" has been opened, the experience accumulated by many parties is gathering, and we are doubling our confidence, vowing to "hold fast to the green mountains and not relax", make more achievements, and form a new situation.
Guangming Daily (15th edition, December 16, 2020)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily