China News Agency, Beijing, January 23. Question: Why did the zodiac become a unique cultural resource for the exchange between the East and the West?
——Interview with Argentine sinologist Wu Zhiwei
Author Song Xueqing
Cut a pair of zodiac window grilles to depict the vision of life, give relatives and friends a red dress to prevent "bad luck in the year of birth", good things are almost counted as the best marriage zodiac... With the arrival of the Chinese Lunar Year of the Rabbit, the culture of the zodiac has once again become a hot topic among people topic.
As a cultural system commonly used by Chinese folks to record birth year and zodiac sign, and predict numerology and fortune, the twelve zodiac signs have become an important part of Chinese folk culture, and have successively spawned unique cultural traditions in East Asia, South Asia and Latin American countries.
What kind of Chinese cultural context does the twelve zodiac signs contain?
Why is it called a unique cultural resource for the exchange between the East and the West?
How does the zodiac rabbit affect people's behavior and choices?
Argentine sinologist Gustavo Ng recently accepted an exclusive interview with China News Agency's "East and West" to make an in-depth analysis of this.
The interview transcript is summarized as follows:
China News Agency reporter: Why do you take the Chinese zodiac culture as a research field?
Wu Zhiwei:
With the deepening of globalization and the improvement of China-Argentina friendship, many Argentines are interested in Chinese culture.
In recent years, the Chinatown in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, has held large-scale events every year to celebrate traditional Chinese festivals, attracting a large number of people to participate, and allowing Argentines to have close contact with Chinese culture.
Forecasting fortune and numerology is one of the topics that Argentines are keen to discuss, and books introducing Chinese zodiac culture are also very popular there.
Since the Chinese zodiac was introduced to Argentina by the Argentine actress Ludovica Squirru in the 1980s, it has been sought after by the public. For more than 30 years, she has provided the public with a "answer to future fortune" every year. The Book of Chinese Zodiac in the Year of the Rooster published in 2017 alone sold 120,000 copies, surpassing the sales volume of works by the famous writer Borges that year.
In my opinion, the zodiac culture is the entry point for a deep understanding of China, and only by getting close to the soil of Chinese culture can we deeply understand its meaning.
Studying Zodiac culture can understand its customs that have lasted for thousands of years, and can also learn from its practical value.
Three children are in front of the Chinese New Year zodiac gift shop in Chinatown, Manhattan, New York, USA.
Photo by Liao Pan
China News Agency reporter: What kind of cultural outlook and cosmology do Chinese people embody in the twelve zodiac signs? How to understand traditional Chinese culture through the twelve zodiac signs?
Wu Zhiwei:
The historical context of zodiac culture reflects the continuity of Chinese civilization.
The "tradition" of the Chinese cultural pedigree is like a huge carpet on which each generation weaves or repairs, eventually forming a unified and complete "carpet" with thousands of years of history.
This way of making history is a remarkable achievement.
The laws of operation of the twelve zodiac signs embody the Chinese methodology of looking at things.
When people are in a culture, they see the world through this culture.
There is a typical way of thinking in Chinese culture: in order to understand it, one must go inside the thing and transform oneself into it.
For example, if a person is a monkey, the zodiac will help that person enter "monkey mode", see the world from the monkey's perspective, and tell people how to act.
Zodiac culture contains the overall thinking and dialectical thinking in Chinese cultural cognition.
The zodiac is like a space with many doors, and each door can lead people to find Chinese culture, history, folklore, mythology and philosophy.
When we try to open the box to interpret the zodiac culture, we will find that there are rich clues inside, one box inside another box, constantly throwing new questions.
Before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Ox, a statue of an ox appeared at Pier 39, a well-known scenic spot in San Francisco, USA.
Photo by Liu Guanguan
China News Agency reporter: As a way to infer people's fortune and numerology, what are the similarities and differences between the Chinese zodiac and the Western twelve constellations?
Wu Zhiwei: Both the Chinese zodiac signs and the Western zodiac signs are products of astronomical and calendar research, and both provide clues for people to understand the past, present and future.
In ancient China, the celestial stems and earthly branches were used to record the year, combining the earthly branches with twelve kinds of animals, and identifying people born in each zodiac year as belonging to that zodiac, endowing them with different meanings such as character and fortune.
Constellations originated from the ancient Babylonians who observed the astronomical phenomena of the zodiac. They called a certain area in the astronomical phenomena "constellations" and used them to measure time.
In the 2nd century A.D., the ancient Greeks combined constellations with myths to produce the constellation names that are widely circulated today.
Therefore, both originate from the needs of the ancients to measure time and coexist with nature.
The different orientation is that the zodiac is not predicted by the position of the stars in the universe, but by comprehensive consideration of the power of the entire universe.
In the zodiac culture, the world is composed of five substances: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, which can mutually restrain each other.
The West believes that the four elements that make up the world are earth, fire, air, and water, which refer to four static, eternal, and non-interchangeable substances.
In Chinese culture, things are in perpetual change, and this difference in movement and stillness is profound and influential.
Citizens of San Francisco, USA shop at the Spring Festival flower market in Chinatown.
Photo by Liu Guanguan
Reporter from China News Service: Not only in China, South Korea and Japan in East Asia, Thailand in Southeast Asia, and Mexico in Latin America also have zodiac cultural traditions. What are the different meanings of zodiac animals in different cultural contexts? How to use the zodiac culture to promote exchanges and mutual learning between Eastern and Western civilizations?
Wu Zhiwei:
Take the zodiac rabbit as an example. Because rabbits have many children, people in Catholic countries regard rabbits as the creator of life and the symbol of Easter. Therefore, the zodiac rabbit has the meaning of reproduction and new life.
In traditional Chinese culture, there are stories such as "the jade rabbit smashes medicine" and "the cunning rabbit has three caves". Rabbits are endowed with meanings such as longevity and alertness.
Of course, the zodiac rabbits in different cultures have some common characteristics, such as being easily shy, needing harmony, and possessing talents.
The zodiac animals are the relics created by the myth of life, and they must have their special features if they have been used by people for thousands of years.
On the one hand, as a product of people's natural worship, the zodiac animals have the symbolic meaning of totems, which help people form their identities for families, groups, communities and even countries.
The zodiac signs of Rabbit, Horse, and Ox make people's identities different from those of other zodiac signs.
On the other hand, like many ancient cultural customs, the cultural meaning of animals in the zodiac is easy to understand, can cross countries, languages and races, and be understood by people with different cultural backgrounds.
Therefore, it is a unique cultural resource for communication with the West.
The first step of the current East-West cultural exchange has been taken, but the second step has not yet been realized.
Due to differences in language and ways of thinking, it is difficult to use the country's discourse system to understand foreign cultures, but to project "ours" onto them, which is prone to estrangement.
Therefore, communicators in China should listen to the voices of the local people and understand how the information they transmit is received by the audience, instead of only reporting what the communicators are interested in.
Western people should also step out of their cultural comfort zone and open their doors to other cultures other than Western culture.
In Chengdu, Sichuan, foreign friends took a group photo with the zodiac signs.
Photo by An Yuan
China News Agency reporter: The Chinese Lunar Year of the Rabbit is coming. You once said that "the zodiac is one of the ways to reflect the energy flow of the universe", can you explain how the zodiac in different energy states affects people's behavior and choices in combination with the zodiac in the year of the rabbit? With the increasing prosperity of science, can the zodiac culture continue to be passed on?
Wu Zhiwei: The zodiac sign "rabbit" ranks fourth in the twelve zodiac signs, corresponding to Mao in the twelve earthly branches, and the year of the rabbit is the year of Mao.
Specifically, a zodiac year lasts for a lunar year, and every twelve zodiac years is a cycle.
Another cycle is the "five elements", each "line" lasts for 2 years.
In this way, two complementary cycles are formed, and the whole cycle lasts for 60 years.
Therefore, in 2023, the heavenly stem is Gui, the earthly branch is Mao, and the five elements belong to water, so it is the year of the water rabbit.
However, the zodiac culture does not simply add the characteristics of "lines" in front of the zodiac animals, but strives to understand each "line". ".
The Rabbit zodiac endows people born under the sign of the Rabbit with great gifts: to do all the necessary tasks correctly and to provide security for the family.
Rabbit people love their families very much and consider their loved ones a part of themselves.
Those born in the Year of the Rabbit will also be acutely aware of the many dangers left behind by the Year of the Tiger.
They will realize that in order to maintain a strong family life, professional advancement, and economic status, they first need to build a secure foundation, a solid platform that can withstand unforeseen circumstances, external attacks, and internal weaknesses.
Of course, this is my personal research, whether it has universal significance needs to be further explored.
Thai people take a group photo in front of the "Light Tunnel" in Bangkok's Chinatown.
Photo by Wang Guoan
Chinese zodiac culture has been used, forged and improved by many people.
Modern science has extraordinary vitality in China, but ancient traditions such as divination, the five elements, and the zodiac are gradually being included in the category of "irrational" and even misunderstood by modern science.
In my opinion, the zodiac is not a decorative element, but a flesh-and-blood knowledge that becomes part of the individual experience and person.
I believe that this tradition will be rescued and given new life at some point in the future.
(Finish)
Brief introduction of interviewed experts:
Gustavo Ng is an Argentine sinologist, a well-known media person, an expert on China issues, the editor-in-chief of "Contemporary" magazine, and a researcher at the University of Congress of Argentina.
He once worked for international mainstream media such as Argentina's "Clarion", Japan's "Yomiuri Shimbun" and Spain's "Le Monde". comminicate.
Author of "Year of the Rooster", "Year of the Dog", "Year of the Ox", "Everything You Need to Know About China", "China: Beyond Poverty", "10,134 Kilometers Across China", "Autumn Butterflies", etc.