The levels of Sikong Tu’s aesthetic thoughts are as follows:
1. Formal aesthetics:
Sikong Tu believes that aesthetics is a kind of formal aesthetics, that is, the aesthetics of works of art. Beauty comes from its form and the relationship between the forms. He believes that the beauty of form is independent of its content, emotion or symbolic meaning, so the aesthetics of form should be regarded as an independent art form.
2. Contradictory aesthetics:
Sikong Tu believes that aesthetics also involves the relationship between contradiction and confrontation. He advocated that in works of art, contradictions and oppositions are inevitable, but these contradictions and oppositions should also be properly handled to produce a sense of beauty.
3. Ordinal aesthetics:
Sikong Tu believes that aesthetics also involves the order and sequence in works of art. He believed that the elements in a work of art should be arranged in a certain order to create a sense of harmony and order.
4. The relationship between form and content:
Sikong Tu believes that form and content are interdependent. He believes that the content of artistic works should be expressed through appropriate forms, and at the same time, the form of artistic works should also reflect its content.
5. Subjective aesthetics:
Sikong Tu believes that aesthetics also involves subjectivity and personal feelings. He believes that different people may have different aesthetic experiences on the same work of art, so the beauty of an art work also has a certain degree of subjectivity.
Extended information:
The era where Si Tukong lived was an era when eunuchs were fighting for power, wars broke out, and the people were in dire straits. Si Tukong struggled for decades in the dangerous officialdom. Afterwards, after many ups and downs, when he saw that "the imperial court was weak and discipline was bad", and that the building of the Li and Tang dynasties was about to collapse irreparably, he lived in seclusion in the mountains and entertained himself with poetry and wine.
When he calmed down, the Buddhist philosophy of spiritual ease and selflessness were particularly inspiring to him. In his poems, he attempted to create a tranquil and detached Buddhist spiritual realm to eliminate inner worries. fear, sorrow and pain as his spiritual sustenance.
Sikong Tu’s thoughts in his later years were compatible with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. However, his poetry theory, especially "Shipin", has a strong element of Buddhist and Laoist thought. The Buddhist philosophy is "Shipin" main source of ideas.