Renewal of Confucian instrument qin offers hope for better Chinese values
- By Wang Yong
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, September 26, 2014
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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