Nature and Landscape in the Chinese Tradition
In the Chinese tradition, the concept of nature 自然 is predicated on its difference from or contrast to whatever belongs to the sphere of human effort, thus the nature-culture relationship needs to be explored to appreciate the artistic idea of natural sce
- PDF / 231,913 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 56 Downloads / 210 Views
Nature has left its mark on the very writing system in China if we accept the myth of Cangjie creating Chinese written characters by observing the traces left by birds and beasts on the ground, which obviously follows an earlier myth of the creation of hexagrams by Fuxi as recorded in the appended phrases in the Book of Changes: “In ancient times when Pao Xi ruled all under heaven, he looked upward to observe the forms in the sky and looked downward to observe the models on the earth, and he also observed the pattern of traces left by birds and animals on the ground and the configurations of the earth. By taking hint near at hand from his body and farther away from external things, he then created the hexagrams to make the virtue of gods comprehensible and the nature of all things known in signs.”1 This passage was quoted by Xu Shen (58–147 c. e.) of the Eastern Han dynasty when he compiled Shouwen jiezi or Explanation of Written Scripts, the first dictionary of Chinese characters, and gave a mythological explanation to the origin of Chinese writing by continuing the myth and saying: “Having seen the traces left by the claws and hoofs of birds and beasts and understood how their patterns could differentiate them from one another, Cangjie, the Yellow Emperor’s historian, first created the written characters.”2 In such a description, Cangjie created Chinese scripts by taking hint from patterns
A slightly shorter version of this chapter was presented as the 35th Annual Freeman Lecture at Wesleyan University on April 15, 2010. I would like to thank Professor Vera Schwarcz for inviting me to deliver the Freeman Lecture and for providing the opportunity for a most helpful exchange of ideas with my audience and friends. Zhouyi zhengyi 周易正義[The Correct Meaning of the Book of Changes], in Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849) (ed.), Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏[The Thirteen Classics with Annotations], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1980), 1: 86. 2 Xu Shen 許慎, with annotations by Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735–1815), Shouwen jiezi zhu 說文解字 注 [Annotations to the Explanation of Written Scripts] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1988), p. 753. 1
L. Zhang (*) Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] P.-k. Cheng and K.W. Fan (eds.), New Perspectives on the Research of Chinese Culture, Chinese Culture 1, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4021-78-4_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2013
1
2
L. Zhang
and shapes suggested by nature itself and, like the creation of hexagrams, he made abstract signs out of the concrete shapes and forms in the natural world. Chinese writing thus seems to have a particularly close relationship with nature; so much so that in the first chapter of the famous treatise Literary Mind or the Carving of Dragons written at the end of the fifth century (496–497), the literary critic Liu Xie (465?–522) was able to declare that wen—pattern, design, writing, and literature—“was born together with heaven and earth,” that is, having a cosmic origin. Liu Xie continues to say:
Data Loading...
