The Aesthetics of Chinese Life: Dwelling Poetically

At the opening of his book The Art of Living, Lin Yutang wrote: "The Chinese philosopher is a man who dreams with one eye open, a man who observes life with a blend of love and ironic detachment, a man in whom selfishness and benevolent tolerance are mixed together, a man who sometimes wakes from his dream and sometimes falls back into it, feeling more alive in the dream than when awake, so that even his waking life is tinged with dream. He keeps one eye open and one closed, sees through the things happening around him and through his own futility, yet retains just enough sense of reality to walk the road he ought to walk. Therefore he has no illusory hopes and so has nothing to awaken from; he has never harbored extravagant expectations and so has nothing to be disappointed about. His spirit is thus set free. Having observed Chinese literature and philosophy, I have come to a conclusion: the highest ideal of Chinese culture is a man of broad-minded equanimity toward life, founded on enlightened understanding. Such equanimity produces a generous heart that enables a man to pass through life with gentle irony, casting aside fame, rank, and gain, and living with optimism and resignation to his fate. This equanimity also produces a sense of freedom, a free and untrammeled taste, an unyielding spirit and an indifferent attitude. Only with such a sense of freedom and such detachment can a man deeply and fervently enjoy a happy life."

Mr. Lin Yutang's summary is so spot-on that I do not hesitate to quote him at length. Westerners, standing in their own perspective, always feel that the Chinese do not live freely enough. But the freedom that Westerners speak of is, in the eyes of Chinese philosophers, only a very superficial kind of freedom. True freedom is the broad-minded ease that, after seeing through everything in the world, takes root deep within the heart. This freedom allows a person to be unconstrained beyond his bodily form, bound by nothing. This can also be called the Chinese aesthetics of life: the Chinese person who has lived life to its utmost elegance understands that he is merely a passerby and a temporary sojourner between heaven and earth, and holds the worldly pursuits of fame, rank, and gain in contempt. Such an attitude enables him to stand aloof from things, bound by nothing, coming and going as he pleases.

Mr. Lin Yutang's summary is a bit verbose. If a person has some grounding in classical Chinese literature, he might prefer to express this idea through a gatha of the Budai Monk: "One bowl, a thousand households' rice; alone, I travel ten thousand miles. Few are those I greet with open eyes; I ask the way at the head of the white clouds."

This Chan poem is written with such ease and freedom. The Budai Monk's understanding of life is so thorough—boundless heaven and earth, a solitary figure, traveling with an alms bowl. He disdains all the human relationships and worldly ways of this dusty world, and goes to seek the road at the far end of the white clouds. Such a detached attitude toward life is exactly what Mr. Lin Yutang described as "passing through life with gentle irony, casting aside fame, rank, and gain, and living with optimism and resignation to one's fate."

The Chinese aesthetics of life is evident in this. The Chinese philosopher is an optimist who has seen through the essence of life with great clarity. They cannot even be bothered to lecture at length; the Chinese like to write poetry to express their reflections on life, which has more or less to do with the Chinese taste for a plain and simple aesthetic. Lengthy tomes tire the reader, while short, incisive verses leave a deep impression. Chinese poets love to use a few simple lines of verse to express profound philosophy, making it hard to tell whether they are men of letters or philosophers.

Chinese poetry often carries a gentle irony toward the real world. For instance, the Ming Dynasty ci poet Yang Shen wrote "Linjiang Xian · The Surging Yangtze Flows East," in which he mocks those heroes of history (whom today we call successful people) like this: "The surging Yangtze flows east, its waves washing away all heroes. Right and wrong, success and failure, vanish in a moment. The green hills remain as ever; how many times the sunset glows red. White-haired fishermen and woodcutters on the islets, long accustomed to watching the autumn moon and spring breeze. A pot of muddy wine, we meet in joy. All the affairs of past and present are turned into talk and laughter." A similar poem is Yuan Zhen's "Palace Retreat": "The old imperial palace is desolate; the palace flowers bloom red in solitude. White-haired palace ladies sit idle, speaking of Emperor Xuanzong." These verses turn the great figures into the gossip and laughingstock of ordinary people after meals. And that is indeed how it is; no force can stop the Chinese from treating the romantic heroes as jokes.

If we have some acquaintance with classical Chinese, we will be unable to stop ourselves from loving such writing—loving its rhythm and the beauty of its imagery, and even more loving the profound philosophy of life it contains.

In this kind of gentle irony (the honest Chinese, even when mocking others, do not like to use acid and biting words), Chinese philosophers completely negate the life value of all the mighty figures of past and present, so that the little left of them is not worth anyone's envy. The Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu put it more bluntly: "Wang, Yang, Lu, and Luo wrote in the style of their age; their frivolous writings are mocked without end. You lot will perish, bodies and names alike, yet the rivers flow on forever."

We often say that Chinese men of letters disparage one another. In fact, Chinese literati may not truly despise one another; they simply, from the marrow of their bones, scorn all the vanities of this world—even the spiritual pursuits of their own reckless youth. When Du Fu wrote such poetry, he was not arrogantly asserting that Wang, Yang, Lu, and Luo would "perish, bodies and names alike, while the rivers flow on forever"; he equally believed that he himself could not escape the same fate. He merely used this irony to reveal a profound philosophical truth about life.

As early as the time of Laozi and Zhuangzi, the Chinese had already seen that life is essentially a meaningless journey, and that so-called meaning is only what people assign to themselves—yet the various meanings people assign to their lives are nothing more than the cocoon with which they bind themselves. So the Chinese like to use such negation to free themselves from this bondage; the liberated self then becomes someone who deeply loves life itself, rather than loving the various vanities attached to life.

Another Chinese monk, the Tang Dynasty Master Huineng, wrote a gatha: "The bodhi is originally not a tree; the bright mirror is also not a stand. Originally there is not a single thing—where can dust alight?" He used this gatha to express his understanding of the void nature of life. If Sakyamuni, the founder of Indian Buddhism, had read Master Huineng's poem, he might have blushed—he talked at length through an entire Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, whose core idea Master Huineng expressed in a mere twenty characters.

Understanding that the essence of life is "emptiness" and "nothingness" makes one suddenly feel much lighter. One need no longer brood over one's successes and failures, and can escape the bonds of fame and gain to live an easy and leisurely life. Europeans and Americans are born into a Christian sense of mission and can hardly appreciate this ease of the Chinese. A hundred years ago they did not understand us, and a hundred years later today they still do not.

There was an essayist in the Qing Dynasty named Liu Dakui, who wrote an essay titled "On the Study of Non-Being," specifically praising the benefits of "nothingness." He said: "Of all things under heaven, to have nothing is to have no cares; to have something is to have troubles. The greatest trouble for a person is to have a body, and having a household comes next. Now, if one had no eyes, what would one care for the colors of the world? If one had no ears, what would one care for the sounds of the world? If one had no nose or mouth, what would one care for the smells of the world? If one had no mind, then let the world's order and chaos, right and wrong, gain and loss go on—I would have nothing to do with them, and my task would be done." The idea he expresses is also found in Laozi's Daodejing, only far more concisely. Laozi said: "My great trouble is that I have a body. When I have no body, what trouble do I have?"

The Buddhist canon has truly suffered from the verbosity of ancient Indian writing. To the Chinese, who admire the beauty of conciseness, the vast Buddhist Tripitaka could be entirely condensed into a thin book of classical poems that a child of six or seven could recite, rocking his head back and forth, in a month or two. There is no need to "plumb the scriptures deep, where wisdom is like the sea," spending a lifetime studying the bulky, repetitious, and verbose Buddhist sutras.

In China, nothing cannot be simplified and poetized. Ancient Chinese medicine was also poetized by Chinese philosophers and men of letters. Tangtou Gejue (Verses on Prescriptions) and Yaoxing Fu (Ode to the Nature of Medicinals) are models for reciting and learning Chinese medicine through poetry. Medical scholars of every dynasty worked to poetize Chinese medicine; the Qing Imperial Academy of Medicine even, by imperial command, compiled Yizong Jinjian (Golden Mirror of the Medical Orthodoxy), a massive book of medical mnemonics that poetized Chinese medicine as a whole, so that later students of TCM could recite the principles, methods, formulas, and medicinals as they recite Tang poetry and Song ci. The famous Qing medical educator Chen Xiuyuan also wrote a Yixue Sanzi Jing (Three-Character Classic of Medicine), turning TCM into verses. After the dry and boring TCM was poetized, it became much easier to memorize.

So our nation has a powerful ability to turn the complex into the simple—and we should be proud of this. We can make everything complex and heavy simple and light; we can live this life, which weighs on so many people, with breezy ease. We are a people who dwell poetically; our aesthetics of life is founded on our marrow-deep penetration of life, an optimistic spirit. Our freedom is complete spiritual freedom, and only such freedom can be called total freedom—because we are bound neither by others nor by ourselves.