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September 26, 2014

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Renewal of Confucian instrument qin offers hope for better Chinese values

IN 1919, when many Chinese intellectuals abandoned Confucian values to embrace modern Western thoughts for a “better life,” about 30 aficionados of the seven-stringed qin — the Confucian musical instrument with a history of 3,000 years — held a performance party at Yi Garden in Suzhou City to profess their unabashed passion for things and styles Chinese.

Among them were Ye Zhangbo, a renowned qin player; Gu Heyi, owner of Yi Garden and a versatile artist; Li Zizhao, possibly the best qin player at that time; and Wu Changshuo, a guru painter, calligrapher, seal cutter and poet.

My hats off to them for their largely unsung effort to preserve the Chinese way of life at a time when Western thoughts made a foray into China, along with Western gun power, putting Chinese values on defense.

Confucius considered qin more than just a musical instrument. He favored it because of its sound that never goes to extremes, and its songs that forever talk to nature.

“Every part of qin music presents an image of nature — orchid, plum blossoms, mountains, water, cranes and wild geese,” senior Swedish sinologist Cecilia Lindqvist says in her book “Qin.” She also says that playing qin helps one discover one’s unruffled self, as meditation in Zen would.

“Returning to one’s unruffled self is about the essence of Chinese spirit,” she observes. “Like Plato, Confucius believes that music has a significant impact on the behavior and morality of a nation and an individual. ... Many latter-day Confucian scholars believe that peaceful music helps shield listeners from discord and violence.”

Symbol of man-nature harmony

Qin is such a symbol of man-nature harmony that a typical qin is usually 3 chi and 6.5 cun long (chi and cun are ancient Chinese units of measurement), representing 365 days a year. As a qin is mainly made of two wooden boards, the above board always comes in the shape of a curve, representing the sky that is round, and the bottom board is always flat, representing the earth that is flat.

Qin is indeed not just any other musical instrument pleasant to the ear. It’s the carrier of Confucian thoughts that are meant to please and pacify the mind, to teach one to be in harmony with nature and with oneself.

That’s why the 1919 party of a few qin aficionados went a long way to manifest the meaning of not only a few melodies, but of Confucian ideas of balance and benevolence. In the better part of ancient China, most scholars and emperors played and promoted qin in their pursuit of a harmonious society.

But after the collapse of China’s last dynasty in 1911, especially after 1919’s New Culture Movement that sought to bury Confucian values, so to speak, qin gradually lost its luster in the life of Chinese people. In 1935, Yi Garden witnessed the last qin party on its turf. Wars made further gatherings impossible. In the “cultural revolution (1966-76),” qin was derided as a carrier of so-called decayed feudal thoughts and many pieces were burned to ashes. What a pity.

A turning point came in 1986, when tai chi and qin master Wu Zhaoji, also a professor of mathematics at Suzhou University, launched Wu’s Qin Society along with a few other qin artists. Regular qin parties at Yi Garden were gradually restored thereafter. Wu’s Qin Society insists that qin is a carrier of Confucian characters, not merely a piece of musical instrument.

Last Saturday, Qin Society organized more than 150 qin artists and enthusiasts across China to gather at Yi Garden in celebration of the 95th anniversary of the landmark 1919 party of qin devotees.

Certainly, we outnumbered the 1919 participants, but was this time really different? Has spring finally come for qin and the simplistic way of life it signifies? The answer is both yes and no.

Yes in the sense of ever growing popularity of qin art among young Chinese today. In 1956, less than 200 people in China could play qin. Now the number is in the tens of thousands.

No in the sense that this generation of ours is perhaps more exposed to Western influence than our forerunners in 1919, only in a different way.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Though appreciating Western scientific spirit and industrial progress, many of our forerunners were able to maintain a moral life more or less free from materialistic pursuits. By contrast, seeking material prosperity has come to define many Chinese people today, as manifest in their rush to flaunt their LV bags, fancy cars and sugar daddies. Even many qin players today boast about the high prices of their instruments, rather than really enjoying the peace in qin music.

This race to “keep up with the Joneses” — to consume as much as possible — is evidently part of the American Dream that comes at the expense of natural environment. This is not to say Western influence — American influence in particular — is all undesirable, but to say that we should not lose the very elements that make us Chinese.

And some of these elements — oneness between man and nature, for instance — may well be a desirable dose for today’s global ills that originate from endless pursuits of material prosperity and profits as spearheaded by modern Western faith in the power of man over nature.

There’s a long way, today as before, for qin’s spirit to sink into our life. Now as then, we live in an illusory happy world designed and defined by modern Western faith in consumption power.

Still, I see hope.

“I love qin, I love all things and ideas that are ancient, noble and elegant,” says Xin Manqi, a high school student in Shanghai who has studied qin for about six years. “I will always emulate the ancient, noble and elegant spirit, even if I shall be engulfed in floods of doubt.”

She excels in chemistry and mathematics, both related to modern Western science, but her greatest hobbies are qin and ancient Chinese poems.

Cheng Xingjian is a young corporate clerk in Shanghai. He has studied qin with Wu Guangtong and Wu Mingtao from Wu’s Qin Society for many years.

Despite traffic inconvenience between Shanghai and Suzhou in those earlier years, Cheng turned out to be one of the very few students to have persisted.

“The Wus lead by example the Confucian way of life,” Cheng recalls. “First of all, they are Confucian scholars who are benevolent to students. So when they teach me qin, they actually teach me to be a man of benevolent character.”

To Wu Guangtong and Wu Mingtao, the moral fiber of a potential student also matters. They once politely turned down the application of a man to study qin, for the man talked about little more than that he could rake in 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) a year. “We do not teach someone qin simply because he or she is rich.”

What a Confucian qin artist cares about most is benevolence, or an uncalculating mind, which is reflected in the classic qin song named Ou Lu Wang Ji, the first to be played at Yi Garden last Saturday.

Ou Lu means water gulls. Wang Ji means forgetting calculation. This 15th-century qin song describes water gulls flying around a man without calculation, but flying away from him when he starts to calculate catching the gulls.

As I listened to the song played by Pan Yidong, head of the Museum of Chinese National Music (located in the city of Wuxi), on Saturday, I wished that someday all birds will fly around us without worrying about being caught, that all men and women will face each other without calculation.




 

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