About the conversation under the book storage window,
People and flowers are fragrant.
-Talking about the traditional literati flower arrangement in China.
Arranging flowers is a good way to get rid of troubles. Being with natural things will be moved by the energy of life. In modern city life, there are few opportunities to get in touch with mountains, rivers and nature, but even if a bottle of flowers representing emotional images and a plate of landscape flowers depicting natural scenery are inserted indoors, you can immediately forget your current troubles and get a relaxed and happy return to nature. Flowers are powerful. They are natural languages and they contain the meaning of life in the universe. You can read a world by reading a flower. Science and technology decode natural knowledge from it, and literature and art decode human stories from it.
Throughout the history of ancient literati arranging flowers in China, it is not difficult to see how the literati in the past dynasties regarded arranging flowers as the expression carrier of their own times, telling the reflection between themselves and nature, themselves and the times, and themselves and the world.
Nan Gezi, an anonymous writer in the Song Dynasty, said: "Although the pavilion is small, it is not vulgar. There are some bamboos at the bottom of the window. Jiangnan mountain scenery exhibition, two or three. Yi Ding burns very sweetly, with tender chrysanthemums in the gall bladder. However, there is nothing to worry about. Everyone is playing chess. In the lyrics, we can see the elegant taste of people's living conditions in the Song Dynasty. Bamboo under the window and chrysanthemum in the bottle are the shadows of flower arrangement art in life.
Poems and songs of past dynasties are also full of flowers, or dedicated to chanting flowers, or using the symbol of flowers to express their metaphors in lyric poems and lyric poems.
The arrangement of flower arrangement has always been not only the elegance of women, but also the aesthetic taste and spiritual presentation of literati. The figure and posture of flowers are also a state of moral cultivation. Literati chanting flowers is often not a deliberate aesthetic, but a heartfelt chant.
Today, people generally have a misunderstanding that "flower arrangement" is only a kind of "technology" that advocates the interest of life, and it has nothing to do with art, but at most it is an "artistic ability", but a kind of interesting activity for women (usually women) in their leisure life. Or a "professional skill" that will only be used in weddings, meetings and ceremonies. It is no longer comparable to Tao. I can't even tell the similarities and differences between "China traditional flower pattern", "Japanese flower pattern" and "Western flower arrangement".
Mr. Huang Yongchuan, the founder of Taiwan Province Chinese Flower Culture and Education Foundation, once wrote in the book The History of Chinese Flower Arrangement: "Flower Arrangement is an art of life, which rises and falls with the rise and fall of political and economic development. Therefore, although it was conceived in the Six Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties and flourished in the Song and Ming Dynasties, it never recovered after the Qing Dynasty. Until modern times, although the atmosphere was prosperous, what we see today are all Japanese schools. How can it not be embarrassing! (History of Chinese Flower Arrangement)
The public doesn't know that flower arrangement, as a way of life of literati, has been closely linked with literati since the Six Dynasties. There were Geng Xin in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and seven sages of bamboo forest in Wei and Jin Dynasties. In the Tang Dynasty, Wang Wei, Lu Hong and Lu Yu all had high attainments in arranging flowers, appreciating flowers and chanting flowers. In the Tang dynasty, there was a love of flowers throughout the era. Poems are full of the beauty of flowers and trees, and the works on flowers are even more colorful, such as Li Zan's flowers and trees, Jia Dan's "Hundred Flowers" and Luo Qiu's "Flowers and Nine Tin" (representative works of flower arrangement in Sui and Tang Dynasties), and so on.
Ouyang Zhan, a famous person in the middle Tang Dynasty, once wrote the poem "Spring Disc Fu", saying, "It's hard to be a beautiful woman. It's expensive to build a land with a fake plate and to embroider it sparsely. The jungle is beautiful, and a hundred flowers are blooming. It shows that there was a formed philosophical concept and aesthetic characteristics of flower arrangement at that time, and sufficient consideration was given to the shape, color, flower device, flower material, line, conception and methods and skills to maintain the life of flowers. If we can get a glimpse of its grand occasion with a Tang poem, it is probably Juyuan Yang's sentence: "If you stay at Merrill Lynch, you will be a flower watcher when you go out. "The fashion of the Tang people who love flowers can be seen.
In the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, due to social division and long-term war, the feelings of literati have changed from a magnificent and free sigh atmosphere to a euphemistic expression of expressing their feelings through things. Following the literati's flower arrangement form has also turned to wild flowers and weeds, using local materials, being informal and readily available because of the confusion of people's lifestyles. At that time, people advocated returning to nature, such as Tao Yuanming's "picking chrysanthemums under the east fence and seeing Nanshan leisurely."
Fortunately, at that time, the foundation of the prosperous Tang Dynasty had been laid, and people had a systematic understanding of the situation and character of flowers, as well as the experience and research of flowers, so the most famous flower work in history-Flower Classic by Zhang Yi of Shu Han was born, which simulated the official rank of human society according to the color, aroma, personality and temperament of flowers. This is also a typical symbol that literati place their ideal personality here with flowers as metaphors and flowers as pronouns. For example, in "Flower Classic", the flowers rated as "Nine Destinies One" are: orchids, wintersweet, peonies, flowers and purple flowers (Daphne odora). They are the most elegant, noble and powerful flowers. What kind of flowers are planted is what kind of people are, and the evaluation and understanding of flowers in the heart also reflects a person's inner world.
In addition, Li Yu, the queen of the Southern Tang Dynasty, was the founder who pushed the traditional flower patterns in China to the artistic peak. He is not only the inventor of "flower management" among the "six big flower devices" in later generations, but also the "Jindong Tian" he founded is the earliest and largest flower arrangement art exhibition in history.
In the Song Dynasty, Song Taizu made great efforts to make peace, and the atmosphere of flower arrangement in various places got warmer and better. "arranging flowers, hanging pictures, burning incense and ordering tea" is regarded as the four great arts of life and has become an indispensable artistic accomplishment in everyone's life, even servants are no exception. At that time, the most famous "Flower Show" was a grand flower viewing banquet held by the Song people on the "Flower Festival" (February 15th of the lunar calendar). In the seventh year of Yuan You (1086), Luoyang satrap held a flower party, which was regarded as "wasting people's money and reaching the peak". The flower arrangement works handed down in the Song Dynasty are even more abundant, including Zhao Xihu's Clear Cave, Lin Hong's Clear Offering of Landscape, Su Dongpo's Xun Lun on Wu Ge, Zhou Mi's Return to the Heart and Miscellaneous Knowledge, etc. The most famous articles at that time, especially Zhou Dunyi's Love Lotus, Zeng's Ten Friends of Flowers, Topaz's Ten Guests of Flowers and Zhang's Twelve Guests of Flowers, all became the aesthetic standards for later literati to arrange flowers and enjoy flowers.
Later, the Yuan Dynasty was an era when the society was not chaotic and the war was not extinguished. The literati class seeks peace of mind under the oppression of other nationalities, so the style of emphasizing sensibility and expressing ethereal mood has become the mainstream of flower arrangement for the literati class. Free and wanton presentation of spiritual images and willful and frank self-expression make flower arrangement once again become another lip of literati, telling their own unclear feelings.
Until the Ming Dynasty, when the style of writing was at its peak, the literati's flower arrangement was completely divorced from political ostentation and extravagance, forming a special academic type of world art, and a complete system of flower pattern works came out. The aesthetic style pursued by the whole era is "literati flower".
The most noteworthy is the History of Bottles by Yuan Hongdao in Ming Dynasty, which is the most academic and systematic classic in the history of flower arrangement. Later generations scrambled to translate and took this as a criterion. It has a far-reaching influence on the spread of flower arrangement art in later generations and overseas. Classic works on flower patterns compiled by other scholars include Flower Orchard by Zhang Gande, Picture of Bottled Flowers by Chen Hongshou, Flower Sparse by Wang Shimao, Yan Qiyou's by Chen Jiru, Flower Case by He Xianlang, Three Stories of Bottled Flowers by Gao Lian, Grass Flower Spectrum and The Position of Zhai Qing by Wen Zhenheng. It was an era when literati aesthetics became the mainstream aesthetics in society, and it was also a golden age when people rushed to follow suit and pursued the realm of literati flower arrangement.
In the Qing dynasty, the national situation gradually declined, and academics moved towards textual research. Scholars and flowers are declining, people's attention to the beauty of nature is decreasing, or their aesthetics are becoming vulgar. The traditional flower pattern of China system declined with the National Games of Qing Dynasty until it slowly disappeared.
Of course, the historical relationship between literati and flowers is not only covered by such a superficial overview, but also the intertwined relationship between them, which deserves a lot of space to write.
Yuan Hongdao in Ming Dynasty said in his book "Orchid of Flowers" that flowers are formed by "subtle qi of heaven and earth". The word "smart" contains anthropomorphic meaning, just like flowers are animals, with perception, emotion and spirituality. Flowers are indeed the most external expression of life in all plants. Collect plant essence. Bai Juyi once wrote: "There is a national quintessence between heaven and earth, which can be obtained by all kinds, but most people, among them, scholars." The elites in the human world use the flowers condensed by the "essence" of nature as a metaphor, and the gesture in the middle is also worth pondering.
I often think, what should be the practical significance of traditional flower patterns in China? After all, this is not a skill related to food and clothing, nor is it an art that people just need in their lives. In the past, its existence, in addition to the high-level needs of life aesthetics, had a higher meaning of "educating and helping others". Now, does it still have such a role?
In an article, Mr. Zi Zhongyun casually mentioned: "Pursuing truth, goodness and beauty and hating falsehood, ugliness and ugliness should be an ordinary human nature, but after too much experience and joining the WTO, the aesthetic nerves may become numb ..." I think the so-called "life aesthetics" is precisely here. The function of beauty, no matter how subtle, is a subtle inner education. Therefore, Mr. Zi also said, "If you have enough perception of beauty, you can't help but sigh and laugh at those ugly things that are not surprised and indifferent, such as being in your throat." 」
And this rare "like a fish in the throat", I think, is not only for "beauty", but also for the bottom line of "truth" and "goodness"