Argumentation On Taoist Beauty Before Qin Dynasty

This article aims to analyze the multiple meanings of Tao, explain the specific incarnation of Tao and discuss the influence of Taoist Beauty on ancient Chinese aesthetics. Primitive people conceived Taoism ideas because of their awe to the great nature and considered Taoist as the most authoritative domination. The thinkers in the Autumn and Spring State inherited it and gave the new content to it. The Confucianism emphasized the social ethic meanings of Tao. They considered it as the highest demand of the social ethics, namely it was kindness, humanity and virtue. The Confucianism also realized people's natural property, but they thought although the life began with nature, it didn't end in it. They insisted on governing the theoretic reasonableness by the practical reasonableness and emphasized to realize the combination of the nature and the mankind by social and human understanding and practice. Tao was always connected with existing theory and emphasized the source and regular significance of the primitive people's Taoism ideas. The natural Taoism was the absolute unity and had no dissimilarity as the origin of everything. As a result, it is nothing. Nature and mankind realized unity on the base of nothing. Reflected in the social practice, this nothing was the undone and the nature. Both the Confucianism and the Taoism considered Tao as the highest idea. Confucius explained Tao as humanity and virtue and emphasized that only by following the Tao of humanity, people could obtain a kind of freedom and the feeling of aesthesis in the course of the combination of the individual and the society. The "Analects"held the idea that virtue was beauty and the compromised beauty was the highest beauty. Compromised beauty realized the unity of the human and the society, reached human's freedom and was the highest realm of aesthetic standards. Meng Zi proposed enriching kindness by self-cultivation and considered noble personalities as beauty. Xun Zi also considered beauty as a kind of ethical norm and a kind of personal influence. Lao Zi's Tao was both a kind of material and a kind of spirit, whose basic characteristic was nothing. The most...