| The dissertation investigates a poetics of creative kong (emptiness) by studying the philosophical origins of the concept of emptiness in Indian Buddhism as well as its development in China from ancient times through the seventeenth century. I argue for the philosophical and religious significance of kong in the Chinese context as being open-minded, non-obsessive, and creative. The poetics and aesthetics of kong owes a significant debt to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. The senses of kong helped the writers and artists of the Ming to intuitively feel and observe the immanent vividness of the world, and to stimulate their vitality and creativity when they sought a communion with Nature (rather than interfering with it).;The human experience of nature is expressed in unique ways in late Ming China. Despite striking affinities with other developments in aesthetics around the world, the late Ming sensibility forces us to re-think the larger history of world culture. Long before the Western Romantics or Symbolists developed their experimental ideas, late-Ming writers and artists achieved a communion with nature in practicing a poetics of creative kong (emptiness) represented in such aesthetic qualities as qing (limpidity), dan (blandness), xingling (individual inspiration), kongling (inspiration ex nihilo), and shenyun (spiritual resonance). Their vision and artistic works remind us of those of the Romantic era in the West but reveal, by contrast, an important aspect in Western Romanticism. As many scholars have observed, the Romantics imposed anthropomorphic assumptions, making anthropomorphism part of their accounts of the external environment; in that process the internal and the external were often confused. Late-Ming figures, for a variety of reasons that I explore, do not display this tendency.;I also argue that the new ideas in the poetics of creative kong were the main reasons for creativity and originality that prevailed in different artistic endeavors of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. Western critical concepts such as Kant's idea of aesthetic "disinterestedness" in the Age of Enlightenment, Keats's negative capability in the Romantic era, Mallarme's white space in the Symbolist movement, and Alberti's white wall during the Renaissance are studied in their affinities with, and differences from, the Ming concept of creative emptiness.;By contextualizing representations of these concepts in literary and artistic works within both their cultural background and analytical interpretations and in extensive analyses of significant texts, I attempt to describe a picture of the Chinese poetics of creative kong from its early stage to its later innovations. At the same time, by showing previously neglected similarities between the Chinese writers and artists of "creative emptiness" and Western figures in philosophy, literature, and art, I want to suggest that a comparison of these two traditions would substantially contribute to world aesthetics. |
