The 10th "LSCAT Cup" Jiangsu Province Translation Competition
竞寒试题
汉译英本科组
743 字
The most direct connection between landscape and the personal cultivation of the literati began with Confucius. Although Laozi, who was slightly earlier than Confucius, had already put forward the proposition of "goodness is like water" in Tao Te Ching, Laozi's statement was too subtle, but it was Confucius, with his "grounded" attitude, who inspired the literati to aesthetize and realize the beauty of landscapes.
In the Analects of Confucius, Confucius said, "The wise man enjoys the water, the benevolent man enjoys the mountains; the wise man moves, the benevolent man stays still; the wise man enjoys happiness, the benevolent man lives." Water's spirit of lightness and endlessness, the mountain's Wei'e solidity and solidity, all easy to remind people of the essence of life. It is precisely because human emotions and qualities are similar to certain objective attributes of nature and landscape that Confucius used this as an example and proposed the correspondence of "landscape and human nature". Han Ying of the Western Han Dynasty made a more detailed interpretation of "the wise man enjoys the water, the benevolent man enjoys the mountains" in his book "Beyond the Han Poetry". He thinks: the reason why the wise man is happy with the water is that the water "walks along with the reason and does not miss the small room", and human beings should be like the water, choosing the suitable way, aspiring to be far-sighted, and going through the dangers and obstacles without any hesitation, and ultimately accomplishing a great cause. The reason why the benevolent man is happy with the mountain, is because the mountain is lofty and vast, tolerate all things, people should also be like the mountain, with a high character to make others admire, but also to have a big heart, willing to give, and not be afraid of humiliation.
When Confucius said these words, it was probably just a momentary realization, an inadvertent expression of his inner experience. But in the long time since then, Confucianism has gradually associated the cultivation of personal character with the joy of mountains and waters in a comprehensive way, so that all the virtues of a gentleman can be compared to mountains and waters in a broad sense, that is to say, mountains and waters have given later generations of literati an all-around sense of moral identity. In the words of Mr. Qian Mu's "New Explanation of the Analects", it is: "Morality is based on human nature, human nature out of nature, the beauty of nature is reflected in the human heart, and the expression of it is art. There are still a lot of artful beauties in the Analects like this chapter, such as the conveyor flew back to the sky, the fish jumped in the abyss, and the heaven and man are united, and they are also united with the morality and the art." Mr. Qian here flicked out the term "the unity of heaven and man", which is a direct attack on the essence of pre-Qin Confucianism. What is the "unity of man and heaven"? The most direct expression is "landscape a human nature", the connotation of its expansion, it becomes "landscape a human nature a morality an art", so, a complete personal moral cultivation system will be able to build.