An Exploration Of The Differences Between Chinese And Western Ideas Of Leisure

This article attempts to first sketch out the outline of the human leisure activities, to give an intuitionistic display of leisure culture from the historical perspective angle. Leisure as a whole is the negation of daily survival life and consistence of the common world, thus the escape and beyond of such daily routine so as to help one desire and approach its dreamy free world. This desire for the ideal freedom in the reality of human life can be roughly divided into four directions:entertainment direction, easy and comfortable direction, creation, exploration and development direction, religion and love direction. While various cultures have different preferences for different direction of leisure, and the practice of these preferences constitute the culture eventually formed its own characteristics. Then a brief and further thought would be put to distinguish the connotation of Chinese "Leisure",which reflects a more "use free "concept, from that of Western "Leisure". By contrast to the Western leisure concept, we find that the core of Chinese and Western leisure cultural differences is on active challenge. The last chapter is the core of the paper, discussing the core reasons of differences between Chinese and Western leisure culture:cultural ideal. Mading a comparison at the beginning of the civilization on the leisure thought and leisure pursuits,we will find that leisure in China and Western countries have the cultural root difference. It has big difference between Confucius, Lao Tzu and Platon, Aristotle’s idea of leisure. This is the best window to display differences between Chinese culture and Western culture, from which we can find that one culture advocates adventure and vitality, while another culture love peace and stability. At the end, a brief summary was made to this article on the topic of leisure and civilization.