On April 23, the first forum of the fourth season "Sanlian • Xinzhi Conference" was held in Beijing. The theme of this season's New Knowledge Conference focuses on "Our China: Exploring New Civilizations". The first forum was hosted by Qu Jingdong, a professor of the Department of Sociology of Peking University. Ji Nan, Wang Mingming, professor of the Department of Sociology of Peking University, and Wei Bin (online), professor of the School of History of Wuhan University, shared the theme of "Chinese Civilization and Landscape World".

Group photo of guests

"Sanlian·New Knowledge Conference" is an annual reading activity founded in 2018, and has been held for four seasons so far. The activity is jointly created by Life·Reading·Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore and its sub-brands such as Sanlian Taofen Bookstore and Sanlian Life Media. The purpose is to promote in-depth 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 way.
The fourth quarter "Sanlian·New Knowledge Conference" plans to invite 16 well-known scholars in the fields of philosophy, history, archaeology, art, science and technology to hold a total of four theme forums. The forum will mainly focus on the origin and development of Chinese civilization, the origin, development and future of Chinese agriculture, traditional culture and landscape spirit, ancient Chinese construction, and astronomy and humanities in the ancient construction system. The specific arrangements are described in detail on the WeChat, Sanlian Shuqing, and Sanlian Academic Newsletter of Sanlian Bookstore.
"Discuss old knowledge and cultivate new knowledge." Yin Tao, editor-in-chief of Sanlian Publishing, said in his opening remarks, "Sanlian Publishing will turn 90 this year. We have always wanted to build a bridge, or build an academic community, so that authors, readers, Including full communication with our editors.” In his view, cultural self-confidence must have a foundation, “This foundation must first be in-depth research on our Chinese culture, and we must have a deep self-knowledge.”
Q&A with the Fisherman, Chinese Imagery Thinking
Zhao Tingyang, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made the first speech. He first reviewed a debate between himself and Wang Mingming more than 20 years ago, "At that time, it was to discuss the relationship between history and the fishing woodcutter. Landscape was one of the bridges, and the three formed a relationship of triangular refraction and mutual explanation." In his view, the basic setting of the Chinese way of thinking is imagery. "Images serve as the functions of some basic categories, and landscape is one of the most important images. The space of Chinese thought is opened up 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 advanced imagery 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 imagery thinking is to create an increment of meaning. It can make one meaning produce another increment of meaning. , so what it establishes is not the inevitability of information, but the historicity of information.”
In Zhao Tingyang's view, "Shanshui" has many synonyms, "For example, mountains and rivers, rivers and mountains, but mountains and rivers and rivers and mountains are political. When people mention them, they immediately think of the space where a country and a nation are located. And landscape is a cultural Or ideological images, to a large extent, are constructed by literati.” He gave an example that just like the ancients wrote eight-legged prose, writing poetry must pay attention to antithetical and antithetical, and so on will form some formulas, and today’s words are the template. "In Chinese landscape paintings, there must be a huge mountain, a waterfall, a small bridge, a donkey or a horse, and a small person. These are all 'templates' or allusions, which can be repeated over and over again. , infinite appropriation. Each of our paintings can be drawn like this, or it can be used as a format to explain something.”
In this regard, the host Qu Jingdong commented that in the Chinese-style art concept, there has never been a single, unique, self-existing existence. "Because the 'existence of the self' has always been in this civilization system, and 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 constructed between exchanges. This is my understanding of Teacher Zhao, which is really inspiring."
From "Only Blue and Green" to "Ink Landscape"
Yin Jinan, a professor at the School of Humanities of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in his subsequent speech that Shanshui, as a concept, was developed in the cultural circle of ancient Chinese, "For example, in ancient China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and Vietnam, it was basically in the past. In the circle of ancient Chinese, the concept of landscape did not appear in the West at all. However, landscape painting, including calligraphy, is a very unique existence in ancient Chinese civilization, and it did not occur in the same and synchronized way in other places. At the same time, the early Chinese landscape painting, figure painting The development is not synchronized. The figure painting system was first developed, the late Tang Dynasty was basically a model of figures and landscapes, and the Song and Yuan Dynasties were a model era of flowers and birds.”

Yin Jinan

"From the perspective of early Chinese poetry, figures, landscapes, history, including cities, and various themes are actually relatively balanced. But painting is not like this. In the early stages of painting, people were figures, and then landscapes slowly developed. This is still similar to the prosperous and late Tang Dynasty. After all, there are some blue-green traditions and ink-wash traditions, especially in the late Tang Dynasty. After the middle and late Northern Song Dynasty, landscape painting became a very powerful type of painting. Almost the most outstanding painters are landscape painters. Portrait painting The painters gradually weakened. After that, figure paintings were basically compressed inside the palace, even in the Qing Dynasty. In the field of literati, portrait painting is not the mainstream, so it is difficult for us to see the portrait paintings of literati.”
In Yin Jinan's view, figure painting has a lot to do with the aristocratic lineage theory. "The Yang family of Hongnong, the king of Langxie, the king of Taiyuan, and the family of Jingzhao Wei must describe their ancestors in this way. The ancestors of these warriors are very good at fighting. It is basically proved that the same is true in Europe. In the castle hall, the statues of ancestors, grandfathers, and grandmothers of all dynasties can be said to be covered with portraits on the walls. The same is true of our visit to the Louvre Museum.
"In addition to the importance of blood, the noble class also pays attention to the city. The aristocracy attaches great importance to the city. The first six volumes of the "Selected Works of Zhaoming" are all about the city. The other is the praise of the famous buildings, Du Mu's "A Fang Gong Fu" is In the praise of high-rise buildings. And many poems with the theme of 'Looking back at Chang'an' are reluctant to leave the big city. Everyone is unhappy when they leave the capital, which means 'in the wild' and alienated from the center of power." In Yin Jinan's view, This kind of change was not changed until the great aristocratic class in the late Tang Dynasty gradually declined, and the rise of small and medium-sized landlords in the lower class was not changed. "Where does this class live? They do not live in the city, but in the countryside. The reality in front of you is the most familiar landscape. Xie Lingyun has landscape poems, Tao Yuanming has landscape descriptions." Yin Jinan said.
In his opinion, landscape painting had a high aristocratic temperament in the Tang Dynasty, "Cyan green (color name, azurite and stone green in Chinese traditional painting pigments, also refers to the coloring method with these two pigments as the main color) has a high degree of decoration. , but such a kind of aristocratic decorativeness was only retained in the palace in the Northern Song Dynasty, but was rejected by the entire literati world. In the late Tang Dynasty, the ink and wash factor was developed independently - ink and wash was a must for all painters. Painting. For blue and green, ink is used as a primer, and then the color is applied after the primer. This contrasts with the European painting method, where the sketch is first laid out, and then the color is applied, so it looks thicker.”
"In the late Northern Song Dynasty, the rise of small and medium-sized landlords, bureaucrats, and literati strata led to a unique aesthetic approach, with high values in it. This is the most typical of Su Dongpo, who opposed deliberate realism. The concept of landscape is so Gradually transitioned to the freehand landscape view, and then formed a unique cultural landscape in China." Yin Jinan pointed out that with the change of dynasties and the transfer of the power center of the Han people, the concept of "Jiangnan" was adopted after the Eastern Jin Dynasty until the Southern Song Dynasty. completely established. "In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, many southern landscapes began to enter into poetry, but not into paintings. In the Southern Song Dynasty, southern landscapes contributed the most to paintings in the Southern Song Dynasty, which gradually made southern landscapes become the mainstream of Chinese landscape painting. I have been to Zhenjiang. , I saw that the mountain here is the mountain in Dong Yuan's painting, and the mountain there is the mountain in Mi Fu's painting."
"Dimensionality reduction" anthropology, "requires us to constantly expand our horizons"
Wang Mingming, a professor at the Department of Sociology of Peking University, said with a smile, from Zhao Tingyang to Yin Jinan, from philosophical thinking to the retrospect of art history, "Now I have to descend to the 'slope' of anthropological fieldwork." He first agreed with Everyone shared a picture they took in a village in Anxi County, Fujian Province in 1991, "The first thing I saw was a farmland with three types of things in the middle, a stage, and opposite the stage was a village temple, where the gods (local places) were worshipped. The whole village is built around the village temple in the middle and the ploughing fields. The local people use this field to support the temple, and then through this temple, they form a relationship that repeats every year with the surrounding mountain. In China When it comes to landscapes in culture, it is actually related to these, and we need to constantly expand our horizons.”

Wang Mingming

Later, Wang Mingming gave an example from his own anthropology teaching practice. The historian Gu Jiegang went to the Northwest to investigate in the 1940s, and in 1950 wrote a series of articles about the Kunlun Mountains. "Mr. Gu is actually examining the origins of Chinese philosophy and literature in these articles. He cites two figures, Zhuangzi and Qu Yuan. The works of these two figures talk about 'shanshui', and the source behind the Shanshui discourse is According to Mr. Gu, two myth systems have been 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, mythology is no joke, because they mainly believe in gods, immortal gods. The so-called 'there are gods in the west, and immortals in the east'. Where immortals are different from gods, my own understanding is that gods are descended systems, while immortals are individuals who can gain immortality through self-cultivation."
"Zhuangzi is from the Song country, close to the east, and Qu Yuan is in the Chu country. In the eyes of Liang Qichao in later generations, they are all from the 'South'. And these two southerners, when creating their own ideological and cultural systems, will be affected by The Kunlun system and the Penglai system had been closely contacted by their country during the Warring States Period. Liang Qichao believed that the Penglai system was a marine system, and Zhuangzi's thought was closely related to the ocean, and the understanding and belief of the "Yanqi Wuyue" on the ocean. In the era of Qu Yuan, his Chu Ci achievements were very high, but most of what Qu Yuan wrote involved Kunlun rather than 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 have to look at what's behind philosophy, and on the other hand we have to look at mythological systems as regional systems, the connections between them."
In the end, Wang Mingming re-examines the classic Western anthropological view on the "relationship between things and self" with the help of Wang Guowei's "self" and "no self" proposed by Wang Guowei in "Human Cihua". "I understand Wang Guowei's formulation as that in the nature we watch and know, there is no shadow of our own, which is called 'no-self'. Westerners' cosmology will tell us that there is no human in this nature. Although Wang Guowei's "Human Cihua" says that there is a 'realm of no-self' in Chinese words, this 'realm of no-self' is also related to people, but it does not put himself in the description." He went on to propose , to put people in a wider world to understand, which is the reason why we revisit landscape today. "Otherwise, it will be worthless to social science research. Of course, this is for social researchers, not philosophy. Humanistic landscapes still need to be studied, but our vision cannot be limited to people's own social organization, nor can we focus on nature. The world and the human world are viewed in binary opposition.”
Shanshui spirit, "a kind of upright individual spirit"
Wei Bin, a professor at the School of History of Wuhan University, gave a speech titled "The Emergence of Landscapes". "In fact, landscapes can be divided into two levels. One is the natural and spontaneous landscapes - including mountain people, the natural population living in the mountains or by the water. The landscape is their living space, where they engage in agriculture, Fishing, hunting or chopping firewood, and the associated beliefs of mountain and water gods in the early days.”
"The second level is the cultural landscape. It has these three aspects: The first is the cultural man who has escaped the state and social order - there are two kinds of people, one is secular, which is what we usually call The hermits, and religious, such as monks and Taoists. Their mountain living situation has also experienced a distinction from individual to group.
After some people live in the mountains or visit, the writing and painting of the natural beauty of the mountains and rivers have two levels: one is the writing of tourists, and the other is the writing of residents. On this basis, it is further disseminated through audiences and accepted at all levels, and Shanshui begins to appear as a cultural spiritual space. "
Cultural landscape can be divided into two levels, one is the real landscape, including two levels of travel and residence. Another is the inner landscape. The first question Wei Bin asked was why did cultural landscapes appear? "This is actually divided into two levels: the first is the cultural elite, which is mainly related to them. They are under the pressure, frustration and failure of political insecurity or political and social competition - of course, there is a reason , they feel a sense of absurdity, life is like a theater, they feel absurdity in the theater. Driven by these aspects, they find scenery in the mountains, in nature, quiet or alone. But I think Reminder, as a historian, I am more concerned about the fact that they need to build villas, manors, fields or external economic support, so that they can live better in the mountains, this is a landscape.”
"The second level is another kind of cultural elite, a local religious elite. In order to practice in the mountains, their mountains and rivers are mainly instrumental. As they enter the mountains to practice from individual to group, they form a fixed mountain in the mountains. The formation of this belief culture space plays a key role in promoting the formation of the overall cultural landscape space. These belief groups with knowledge attributes have objectively become an important part of the formation of cultural landscapes. Forming power. Formation was in the third to sixth centuries, especially in the South."
Wei Bin emphasized that no matter what kind of person, after entering the mountain, he needs certain material conditions. "Liu Xiaobiao, a famous hermit in the Liang Dynasty, when he lived in seclusion in Jinhua Mountain, he lived in a small basin in the mountain, with farmland, and many people lived with him. I think there will be officials outside for him. Some supplies, so he can stay in this place as a cultural person. Of course, Wang Wei's Wangchuan Bieye is more famous, where he lives and lives with fields and villas." And the cultural landscape The ultimate meaning may lie in a passage of Ge Hong's words, "'Only far away is noisy, so that the mind will not be disturbed.' It is possible to escape from the social order and give the spirit a certain sense of relief and freedom. , less disturbed by the outside world, and better complete self-cultivation.
From the perspective of people today, what is the significance of cultural landscapes in contemporary society? "The social space we live in now has changed a lot from the space environment in which ancient landscapes appeared. Modern people have mobile phones and live in an online society. No matter where they hide, they can quickly locate them. Do we still have ancient people? What is the mountain forest or landscape in our perception? Now let’s talk about how to create the inner landscape. This is actually the state of mind when we see the landscape. What should the real spirit of landscape represent? I think it should be a kind of uprightness individual spirit, or the upright society that is supported by it. I also think that escape is also very common in modern society, the so-called otaku culture, young people are unwilling to change or simply 'lay down', which is similar to the ancients The fundamental difference between longing for the landscape and escaping from the world lies in the sense of inner integrity." Wei Bin said.