/lit/ - Literature

>>16915726
eems but a helpless stammering?
There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally
is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the
Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao.2
But whereas the
Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable
necessity, the Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless
smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape
become so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious
foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity common to
all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a north-south
general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side-buildings, courts and
halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and space that one is quite justified in
saying that the artist builds and reckons with the landscape itself.” 3
The
temple is not a self-contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water,
trees, flowers, and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important
as gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which the
art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that are reflections
of particular Buddhist sects.4 It is the architecture of the landscape, and only
that, which explains the architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension
and the emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as
the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead at last
to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to detail whereas
Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set direction. “The whole
picture is not to be taken at once. Sequence in time presupposes a sequence of
space-elements through which the eye is to wander from one to the next.** 1
Whereas the Egyptian architecture dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it is direction in depth that maintains the becoming
of space as a continuously-present experience.
...
In China, in lieu of the awe-inspiring pylon with its massy wall and narrow
entrance, we have the “Spirit-wall” (yin-pi) that conceals the way in. The
Chinaman slips into life and thereafter follows the Tao of life’s path; as the
Nile valley is to the up-and-down landscape of the Hwang Ho, so is the stoneenclosed temple-way to the mazy paths of Chinese garden-architecture.