Abstract:

“Heaven and earth” (tiandi) is a significant landmark category in classical Chinese thoughts. It has a long history and matured in the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States when many idioms and words about heaven and earth which we are familiar with today appeared. “Heaven above and earth below” and “round heaven and square earth” are the two oldest and most influential spatial images in the understanding of heaven and earth. The concepts of “heaven high and earth below” and “high heaven and deep earth” were derived from “heaven above and earth below”, and then the concepts of being high and brilliant and being self-discipline were used to explain the virtue of heaven, while the concepts of being extensive and deep and being deep and sustainable were used to explain the virtue of earth. Influenced by the ancient astronomical theory of “canopy heaven”, the ancients also imagined heaven as canopy covering everything while earth as cart sustaining everything, and in such a way heaven and earth were selfless and inclusive. The concept of “round heaven and square earth” also led to the expression of “wearing heaven and treading on earth”, and even heaven was understood as the round of head or a hat, while earth as the square of a foot or one shoe. Meanwhile, as interrelated images, the round, the bright and the compasses were related to the concept of heaven, while the square, the dark and the carpenter’s square to the concept of earth. The concept of heaven and earth as spatial images also corresponds to the cultivation of virtue and intelligence, such as brilliance, generosity, selflessness, tolerance, divinity, wisdom and so on. Such understanding of moral accomplishments with the images of heaven and earth is far-reaching and fundamentally significant in the ideological system of Chinese civilization. Moreover, the concept of “heaven being the superior and earth being the inferior” was derived from the concept of “heaven above and earth below”, and it even lowered down to correspond to the concept of “monarch being the highest and his ministers being low” in the ritual system. This is the alienation of the early concept of heaven and earth in the society of autocratic monarchy.

Key words: concept of heaven and earth, spatial images, virtue