Flowers

For Chinese people, the most desired state of life is tranquillity. The aroma of osmanthus flowers and the calmness of the mountains in the silence of the night are a welcome respite before thoughts flood the day again. One should pause to enjoy grass in the spring, a summer wind, red leaves of autumn and a plum blossom in the winter before they disappear. In appreciation of present moments and contemplation of years lived, people often turn to flowers to celebrate profound moments of being.

In Chinese philosophy, vegetation is part of the flowing universe. In the grand scale of time, in the eyes of the Chinese, towering mountains and surging rivers carry the same value as delicate flowers and vast trees. ‘I know the universe is big, but I still feel pity for the grass’, said Confucian Master Ma Yifu. No matter how challenged we are in life, when we pause to notice, we appreciate the green colour of the grass and how free of our existence it is. The most beautiful thing in the world is nothing but the glory and decline in an unassuming fragility of life.

Chinese literati wisdom resides in the deep folds of one’s mind. One day, Wang Zengqi, a writer and a humanist better known as China’s last ‘pure literati’, and his friends took shelter from the rain in a shop in Kunming. They spotted a wooden flower drenched in rain near a hotel entrance. Forty years on, and the memory of the drenched flower is vividly in sight. ‘People are outside the lotus pond, the empty cup of liquor and a drenched wooden flower.’ Yin and yang signifies the changing seasons of spring and autumn, all of it being captured in a fleeting moment. Fragility of the moment cannot be destroyed at random. Flowers and grass are speechless, life is self-contained, everything wilts, but the sensation of the moment remains.

The realm of Chinese Art is also regarded as the absolute beauty of silence. The heart moves with the creator, so the movement stays in harmony with the moment. If one needs to speak, it defies the notion of Art. Art is the hometown of silence, the epitome of speechlessness. The sensitive mind of an artist from the Qing Dynasty captured this in a poem in the painting of the valley: ‘There is a Chinese zither under a plum tree, there is a forever sound in the bare mountains.’ In the silence of the valley, people are together with the remnants of plum blossoms and yet not attuned to each other’s existence. This is to say that things exist independent of our awareness of them. This is best summarized in a Su Shi folk couplet: ‘The bare mountain is no one, the water is flowing, and the flowers are open.’

Heaven and Earth are beautiful and speechless; grass and trees are silent. Arranging flowers in flower vessels is part of Confucianism and Taoism. Literati regards a flower vessel (a vase) as the Earth and a flower or a twig as nature that come together in a creation of the human mind. Qian Qianyi’s poem says it perfectly; it is captures the understanding of the depth of thoughts, and the colour of mountains binds the flowers’ branches in the vessel’. The beauty of the creation comes from the mapping of the soul, and its true meaning is not in words but in the experience of life. It is known as the ‘one flower, one world, one leaf and one spirit’ concept. A plum is a proud bone, a cluster of chrysanthemums is a hermit, a pot of orchids is a modest gentleman. . . How can we come up with a creative concept in the confines of small spaces without a philosophical underpinning of the harmony between a man and nature?

We are surrounded by nature in our everyday lives. If only we could adapt the silence of the fallen flowers, the elegance of chrysanthemums, sans envy and sighs. If only we could appreciate the flowing change of the world around us. No noise of life, but a tranquillity of the heavens and Earth, a divine space of being in tune with nature.