The Cosmos as Garden (PDF)

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction:
The People's Republic of China (PRC), in ideological classification also called ¿Red-China¿, is the largest country in East Asia and the most populous in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population. Since the economic liberalization began after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the investment and export-led economy of China has grown 70 times bigger and is among the fastest growing in the world.
Although China cultural as well as political is opening up since about thirty years, the Chinese manner of cerebration, except of few exemptions, has still keep refused most people in the western world.
I also had to learn this the hard way at the beginning of my stay in Shanghai, although I tried to prepare for my travel. Primarily this has to do with the ancient Chinese ideology self. The Chinese, who are calling their country ¿The Empire of the Middle¿, were on principle in the past rarely attempted to leave their nation because the remaining world for them was not really livable. Outside the boundaries, there lived the so called barbarians, who in ancient times mostly were embodied by brutal Mongolian tribes, who martially tried to infiltrate China and from them the Chinese had to protect. So, they created their own world, a world in the world, enclosed by the thousands of meters long Great Wall (Chang Cheng), inside of they felt confident and could develop further. This retirement in an enclosed space and last but not least the retirement in oneself paved finally the way for their private gardens, in which they could undisturbed find an access to a better ¿world¿.
This essay will deal with these little enclosed garden worlds, these micro-cosmos in a macro-cosmos. This work consists of a searching for their history and the holistically ¿religious¿ backgrounds, which first made enable these small but coevally ¿infinite¿ universes. It get to the bottom of the correlations between time and space, establish relationships between narrow and open, bright and dark, and last but not least inside and outside, which all are parts of an all-containing, super-ordinate ¿Great¿. It makes close connections to landscape paintings and the gardens self, which as major motif threads through the whole text, will find out that they are close correlated to the ¿Great¿ and grapple with the centre of the ¿Whole¿, with the ¿Zero-Perspective¿ or the ¿Vapidness¿, in which the human as important part at [...]