Category: China

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Zhuangzi on identity

Aeon presents an essay by Alexander Douglas titled “Essence is fluttering,” with byline:”As Zhuangzi saw, there is no immutably true self. Instead our identity is as dynamic and alive as a butterfly in flight.” Alternative title: “How to be yourself when you have no self — lessons from Zhuangzi.”

The article contrasts Confucius and Zhuangzi, the former representing the societal insistence on conformity and the latter opposing it. While the Western philosophical tendeny — from Romanticism to existentialism — has emphasized identity with the individual, fashioning the self subjectively and contrasted with societal authority, the tradition of Zhuangzi argues, in effect, that “The ethical ideal is not to replace a conformist identity with an individual one. It is to get rid of identity altogether.” The article does not explore the Taoism represented by Zhuangzi and the many built-in elements of eremitism that give substance and context to how Taoism shapes identity.

URL: https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-be-yourself-when-you-have-no-self-lessons-from-zhuangzi

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Shan Shui: Mountain and Water Painting

An important aspect of eremitism in historical China is the evolution of eremitical thought into aesthetic expression as poetry, then painting. Chinese hermit thought is embedded in the historical context of reclusion, wherein officials at court consciously left employment to seek anonymity in distant rural and mountainous settings. By the tenth century Song dynasty era, the poetics and philosophizing associated with eremitic life evolved into painting. The highlight school of painting is the “waters and mountains,” school, sometimes referred to in the West as the “rivers and mountains” school.

Shan Shui is a rich web-based resource, a semi-annual journal of essays and articles by Chinese and Western contributors. Shan Shui describes itself as “Mountain and Water Painting Magazine.” Studies of historical Chinese painting are featured, but the editorial goal is wider and more ambitious:to bring Chinese art, culture, and aesthetics into communication with Western counterparts, broadening the perspective of Chinese art to in order to address nature, philosophy, and understanding.

For more detail see Thatch entry for the same date.

URL: https://www.shanshuiprojects.net/magazine/

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Red Pine film

“Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation” is an 84 min. film featuring author Bill Porter (“The Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermitss” and other titles on China, poetry, and eremitism). The film is available for ticketed viewing on the site, with a 2 min. trailer. The film was released in Oct. 2024. From the Seatle International Film Festival:

“A master of ancient Chinese poetry and the search for a lost tradition. Bill Porter, who goes by the pen name Red Pine, is recognized as a living gateway to ageless Chinese history and culture. He has published over thirty books, including Road to Heaven, his quest to find hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains that reignited a movement in modern China to seek enlightenment through poetry and mountain solitude.”

URLs: https://redpinemovie.com/; SIFF: https://www.siff.net/cinema/in-theaters/dancing-with-the-dead-red-pine-and-the-art-of-translation; film trailer, 2:24 min.

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Two Chinese historical hermits

Two short articles in Shanghai Daily‘s SHINE news site describe historical hermits of China.

The first article describes the book collecting work of the 14th-century hermit Sun Daoming.
URL: https://www.shine.cn/feature/district/2309138605/.

The second article is titled “Chen Jiru: the hermit scholar of Ming Dynasty,” Chen Jiru abandoned the imperial court of his era to live as a hermit on Sheshan Hill in the Songjiang District. He was a poet and painter whose impressive works inspired schools of followers.
URL: https://www.shine.cn/feature/district/2310186993/

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“Paradise Found” – Wen Zhengming

China Daiy offers a comprehensive essay on the painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) titled “Paradise Found.” Wen Zhengming was noted for “the public perception of him as a man of high moral standards who disavowed the seedy side of politics in favor of a secluded existence in the garden abode he built for himself.” In the tradition of reclusion, however, “Wen Zhengming’s self-imposed exile, as those orbiting around him might wish to call it, was lived out not in sheer harshness, but amid the many enjoyable things that Jiangnan had to offer, including its spring.” Jiangnan was a region of the southern Yangtze River Delta.

A clear inspiration for both Wen Zhengming’s artistic depiction of this paradise but also of the life of deliberate reclusion is the famous hermit Tao Chien or Tao Yuanming (365-427). In a fable, Tao Yuanming described Peach Blossom Spring as an idealized paradise . Wen Zhengming evokes this paradise in paintings of contemporary Xiaoxiang, as the region came to be known. In his paintings, he, too, presents “a place of reclusion and longing in view of its natural beauty.”

URL; https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/06/WS6598b0b9a3105f21a507adcd_1.html