A Study On The Aesthetics Of Guodian Bamboo Slips

In October1993, there are eight hundred and three bamboo slipsunearthed at No.1Chu Tomb of Guodian Jingmen of Hubei, seven hundred and thirty ofwhich are written with characters of Chu State. There are about thirteen thousandcharacters on them. The bamboo slips are ancient books which belong to Confucianismand Taoism.The Mei(美) characters on Guodian Bamboo Slips are all written as Mei(媺).Mei(媺) in Chu character is made as a person with feather on the head. That is to say,people in Chu State think a person with feather on the head as Mei(美). It is so differentfrom rich sheep as Mei(美) that it is the aesthetical characteristics of Chu. And Mei(媺)contains the meaning of Shan and Mei(美) at the same time, which embodies the ethicalcharacteristic of Chinese Aesthetics.There are abundant aesthetic minds in Guodian Bamboo Slips of Confucianism,which take Li and Yue as the main content and discuss the relationship between Xingand Qing. And also, they talk about Shanrang in Politics. All of these embodies thefeatures of politics and ethics of Confucianism. Aesthetics of Confucianism is similar toits politics and ethics. So Aesthetics of Confucianism is a kind of ethical one.In Guodian Laozi, Tejing is before Taojing, which is the same with MawangduiLaozi. It shows that the philosophy and aesthetics of Laozi does not regard Tao as thehighest category, but Ziran. Guodian Laozi cates for Ziran because it is the highestaesthetic realm. Taiyishengshui gives us a different cozmic graph from Laozi andZhouyi. It regards Taiyi as the origin of the world and Shui gets through the process ofthe birth of the world, which embodies the poetical cognition of people in Xianqin.From Guodian Bamboo Slips, Aesthetics of Confucianism is not so opposite toTaoism, but they are complementary.