17:50
Once we stop learning in order to pass exams or to impress daunting people, we are ready for the best kind of education, the kind that's done for our own sakes, to strengthen us for the difficulties of our lives, to make us feel less sad and less alone. And it's here that we stand to derive much benefit from classical, that is pre-modern, Chinese culture. In particular, it's painting, poetry, ceramics, and philosophy. Despite the barriers of time and language, we are liable to discover many friends and familiar emotions that can illuminate neglected, important corners of our own deep selves.
Here are five big ideas that the classical Chinese kept stressing for their benefit, and now may serve our own. Firstly, how very small we are. The great Chinese artists never allowed themselves to forget that we are infinitesimal beings in a vast and mysterious universe, and that this frightening thought, well handled, is in fact the root to salvation. They constantly show us vast landscapes against which humans barely make a mark. We have to search for them amidst gigantic mountains, rivers, boulders, and forests.
We loom so large in our own imaginations day-to-day, but under the wise tutelage of the Chinese masters, we are returned to more appropriate and more manageable dimensions. We relearn how little we matter. We can gain relief from seeing just how puny our ego-driven plans are in a world that's so much older, more majestic, and more incomprehensible than we ordinarily recall while under the spell of our illusory ambitions. What does it matter who is famous and who obscure, who celebrated and who disgraced when we are as earthworms or twigs next to the mighty southern mountains whose peaks are constantly shrouded in fast-flowing mist?
Can we continue to care about personal achievement when nature is so resolutely indifferent to everything that we are and attempt to be? The artists of classical China were committed to tempering our distressing egoism and vanity by contemplating us from a new fairer perspective. Secondly, sadness. A redeeming air of melancholy suffuses classical Chinese culture. Here, unlike in our own era and societies, we no longer have to smile when we would prefer to cry or be mute.
The Chinese did not aggressively repudiate their own grief. They understood from a Buddhist and Daoist perspective that the ingredients of life are inherently, rather than accidentally, pretty serious. The gap between our aspirations and reality will always be vast. We will love those who cannot love us back. Our friends and lovers will die. Our own bodies are fast decaying. Far from making us sad, the sadness of the Chinese sages helps us to feel less alone and less persecuted with our own range of sorrows.
We have not been handed some especially cruel fate. This is the way existence is in and of its essence when we are ready to throw off sentimental illusions. Here is the poet Wang Wei reflecting on the passage of time. The poem is called Lamenting White Hairs. Once a child's face, now an old man's, white hairs soon replace the infant's down. How much can hurt the heart in one lifespan? The favorite seasons for the Chinese sages were autumn and winter, time when nature reminds us all of our adherence to nature's life cycles. Here is Sushi drawing appropriately melancholy thoughts from this.
The sunset clouds are gathered far away. It's clear and cold. The Milky Way is silent. I turn to the jade plate. The goodness of this life and of this night will not last for long. Next year, where will I watch the bright moon? Death is a constant in Chinese culture and it rips at all our plans for tenderness and love. Here is Wang Wei giving way to sadness for an old friend. We followed you back for your burial on Mount Shelo. And then through the greens of oaks and pines, we rode away home. Your bones are there under the white clouds until the end of time. And there is only the stream that flows down to the world of men.
Thirdly, open-heartedness. There is something immensely touching and how emotionally vulnerable the great figures of Chinese culture allowed themselves to be. We might imagine older societies to wear a stiff military upper lip. Surely back then, they didn't cry over small things. They were not as soft-hearted as we know we are deep down. But far from it. The Chinese knew how to speak with near childlike honesty of what made them cry. And it was much the same as what makes us cry.
Here is Wang Wei in the 8th century AD writing with acute entirely modern clear-eyed sensitivity about his emotions on watching a young man leaving his family to study in a faraway city. Green, green the willowed road, the road where they're separating, a loved son off for far provinces, old parents left at home. He must go or they couldn't live, but his going revives their grief. Tears dried, he must catch up with his companions. At last the carriage passes out of sight, but still at times there's the dust thrown up from the road.
I too, long ago, said goodbye to my family. And when I see this, my handkerchief is wet with tears. Fourthly, we can cope with simple things. The classical Chinese lived in a highly unpredictable world. In the capital the emperor in his court could be the route to vast riches and status, but politics and business were especially treacherous and reversals of fortune were common. In order to calm themselves, the classical Chinese artists emphasized the satisfactions that were already available on a modest salary.
Not in order to negate every kind of achievement, but in order to quieten their worries and comfort themselves with the idea that even in infamy and exile, there would still be much left to appreciate. There was a long tradition of people who'd fallen out of favor in important circles, leaving town and going to settle in remote provinces. This wasn't depicted as a punishment pure and simple. In many ways it could be a liberation. Artists depicted materially bare lives unfolding in unshowy, uncostly small huts set within the majesty of nature.
Chinese culture chose to celebrate simple elements like birds, rabbits, bamboo forests, flowers, and the sight of the moon. No less a figure than the 12th century emperor Huizong gained relief from painting vast numbers of finches in his palace garden. In order to make the most of their simple pleasures, Chinese artists invented particular rituals. For example, moon gazing, whereby one would sit, perhaps with a friend, and contemplate the moon for hours at a time on a veranda of one's house. And one might in a similar manner contemplate the ebb and flow of the tides. Fifthly, a cult of calm and simplicity.
The Chinese had an extremely turbulent history. Civil wars regularly broke out. Invaders came from the north and west. In the midst of turmoil, they, like we, longed for calm. They wanted emptiness, purity, rest, everything their own lives had too little of. And one of the places they went to look for calm was in an arena that can powerfully move us to this day, pottery. The ceramicists of classical China, could, when the occasion demanded it, create noisy, highly decorated pieces full of dragons and phoenixes. But what they really loved, and what we in turn loved them for, are those occasions when
they created exquisitely pure, empty pieces of pottery, in which we can bathe in expanses of milky green or bluey silver or playful yellow, and attenuate some of our sorrows, confusion, and anxiety. To our surprise, perhaps, we suffer today much as the Chinese suffered in their classical era. And we can look to their ingenuity and kindness to still our anxieties and appease our sense of loss and regret. We should study them, not for knowledge's sake, but with the highest ambition, as a form of therapy.
