As a cultural phenomenon, painting and tea ceremony have many similarities. The main manifestations are: one is to maintain health, the other is to cultivate morality, and the third is to be happy.
Tea tastes bitter and astringent, but leaves a mellow and sweet aftertaste after drinking it. It can produce fluid and quench thirst. This is the function of tea. It enters every home as a daily necessity. With the development of society and the accumulation of culture, drinking tea has become a cultural phenomenon and a tea ceremony. The "Tao" is often associated with "spirituality" and "cultivation", and the tea ceremony has therefore become a high-level cultural activity. Painting, which originally belongs to books, is one of the "six arts" and is used for "adult education". Later, with the changes in history and culture, it gradually became a carrier of personal emotional sustenance and personality. It can be used for pleasure and "sleep travel". It integrates literature, poetry, philosophy, calligraphy and seals, and has become a very important feature of national culture.
“Tea is as useful as rice and salt, and cannot be left without it for a day” (Wang Anshi). Drinking tea is not only a daily use of ordinary people, but also loved by scholars and officials in the past dynasties. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, activities based on tea-making skills were also developed as games: tea fighting and tea ordering. Song Dynasty literati Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, Su Dongpo, Su Che and Lu You were also keen on tea fighting games.
Literati in the past dynasties have written or composed poems praising the functions and wonderful appreciation of tea. Countless people have written poems about tea. Among them, Lu Tong is especially praised for his "Biography to Thank Meng for Remonstrance and Sending New Tea". The whole poem is as follows: "One bowl moistens the throat with kisses, two bowls relieve the loneliness, and three bowls search the withered intestines, leaving only five thousand volumes of words; four bowls cause light sweating, and all the injustices in life are dispersed to the pores; five bowls make the skin clear; Six bowls can bring immortality; seven bowls can't be eaten, but I can feel the cool breeze blowing in my armpits." This poem illustrates the magical effects of drinking tea.
The process of drinking tea has gradually become a process for people to cultivate their morality and perfect their personality, which requires tea drinkers to have a certain taste and cultivation. The specific tea drinking environment also makes drinking tea a pleasant and nourishing aesthetic experience. Drinking tea must be in a pure and elegant state of mind. If you are full of evil and worldly thoughts, it will violate the pure and peaceful spirit of tea. Tasting tea means tasting people, and tasting tea means tasting people. Tu Long of the Ming Dynasty said in "Kao Sheng Yu Shi": "To drink good tea and drink it is not the person you are, just like drinking wormwood from the spring, it is a great sin. There are people who don't know its taste, and they drink it all in one go. It's true. There is nothing more important than discerning taste. "Lu Yu said in the "Tea Classic": "The purpose of tea is that it tastes very cold, and it is most suitable for people who are wise and thrifty." Drinking tea not only has the simple medicinal effect of quenching thirst and promoting body fluids. Function, it can also be upgraded to how to behave, which is related to virtue. This is tea virtue.
Tea is a product of nature. Although it has been picked and made by humans, it still restores the original taste of tea. If the tea drinker has a noble character and can return to the origin with a peaceful heart, a state of no desire and no pursuit, and a clear mind, then he can return to nature with tea and achieve the state of unity between heaven and man. This is the highest realm of tea people.
Painting is also about painting the heart, focusing on a peaceful state of mind, the cultivation of personality, the perfection of virtue, and the cultivation of art. The emergence of painting initially served the function of "educating people, helping others, clarifying admonitions, and guiding ups and downs." Until the rise of metaphysics in the Wei, Jin, and Six Dynasties, people began to pay attention to health preservation, personal subjective ideas began to become prominent, and people began to indulge in wild behavior. To express one's own personality effectively, the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove" were very representative at that time.
Painting is like drinking tea. It is an art of health preservation. It can delight your mood, cultivate your sentiments, and nourish your soul. When painting, you can calm down, use your Qi to drive the brush, practice Tai Chi postures, and move your whole body, so it is said to nourish your body. Paintings are mental images, expressing feelings, traveling between heaven and earth and all things, and conveying them to the brush, so they express music and aspirations.
Tea ceremony and painting ceremony are spiritual and cultural activities and have nothing to do with utilitarianism. This state is relaxed, joyful, and mindful. Whether you are drinking tea, painting, or appreciating paintings, you must consciously eliminate the boundaries between things and me, and engage in emotional communication with tea (or paintings) with all your heart. Through the mutual integration between things and me, you can feel the relationship between people and tea. (or painting) to achieve the realm of mystical understanding of things and myself.
When drinking tea or painting, if you have no worries, let go of your body and mind, are not agitated or chaotic, and integrate your whole body, it will be "Zen tea" or "Zen painting". Both the tea ceremony and the art of painting are based on nature and advocate artistic conception. The beauty of nature is simple. It is manifested in the self-height of the sky, the self-thickness of the earth, the self-blooming of flowers, the self-brightness of the moon, the self-confidence and indifference, and the infinite indifference.
In the tea ceremony, this is expressed as simplicity and conciseness, pure willfulness, no pretense, and the concentration of mind and heart in a casual state; in the painting way, it is expressed as having no worries, acting casually, using a detached heart, and writing as much as possible to create the artistic conception of the painting. .
A good painting scene is often a tea scene. Ni Yunlin's "Rong Xi Zhai Picture" shows a rocky shore, a few dry oak trees, a lonely pavilion and a lake in the vicinity. , a distant mountain is painted with light strokes in the distance. It is extremely desolate, cold and lonely. The picture is natural, without traces, clean and elegant, without dust and smoke. Isn't this kind of tranquility the ideal state of meditation and sipping tea?