Study On The Thought Of Listening To The Wind In Pre-Qin Period

As a very special being in Chinese tradition culture,“wind” has two faces: the material one and spiritual one.Wind permeates through many aspects of Chinese culture in a conceptual way and its importance embodies in areas like poetry,music,calendar,Chinese medicine and so on.Ways to learn and to understand wind vary hugely in different historical periods.Representatively,many scholars in pre-Qin period advocated that “listening” is a very significant way to sensing the wind.Thus,the inquiry into the wind through the methodology of auditory in pre-Qin period constructs not only the meaning of the world,but also the corresponding thoughts system.Unlike western philosophers who highlighted certainties in things and developed the approach of “visual centralism”,Chinese ancient thinkers paid much attentions to auditory sense so as to grasp both the meaning of things and effects of things.Wind entered people's vision very early in the pre-Qin period——distinguishing seasons and creating musical temperament by listening to wind,teaching poetry and music about wind,or even achieving the states of Dao through sensing wind——the thinkers of the pre-Qin period not only wanted to listen to the rhythms of natural sounds from the wind,but also devoted themselves to learning more meanings in the back of wind,especially voices from the bottom of the heart and sounds of Dao or God.The mutual shaping and construction between wind and auditory sense bear fruits of both the unique way of thinking under the spirit of “listening to the wind” and its distinctive cultural characteristics in pre-Qin period.