中国小说中相对性时空观念的建立

The Construction of Temporal-Spatial Concept of Relativity in Chinese Novels

与先秦时期的萨满式宇宙观念不同,东汉以后中国早期小说所表现的神仙世界,其空间特征往往是一"小中寓大"的球形宇宙,在时间上则有流逝较为缓慢的时间尺度,并通过与世俗世界时空形式的对比构成奇幻的文学效果。尽管在中国的先秦时期有相对性时空观念的萌芽,但真正系统的表述出现在汉译佛经以及南传佛教巴利语文献中,所以,这种观念是在印度文化的刺激下产生的。这其中,相对性时间观由于与中国传统思维方式契合而得到了广泛的接受,"梦幻人生"这一故事类型便是相对性时间观念的另一种表现形式;而"小中寓大"的空间观念则因为与直观感知矛盾,在本土化过程中更多地采取了变异的方式。

Different from the Shaman cosmic concept in the pre-Qin period, the immortal world presented in China's early novels since the Eastern Han dynasty had been featured by a sphere world with the connotation of 'significance perceived from small world'. It showed a slow flowing time scale and thus a fantastic literary effect was achieved by comparison with the secular world temporal-spatially. Although the sprout of the temporal-spatial concept of relativity may be detected in pre-Qin novels, the genuine systematic demonstration only appeared in the Buddhist doctrines and those documents in Bali, which, therefore, stimulated the generating of this concept and the concept in turn was widely accepted because of its perfect matching-up with traditional Chinese ways of thinking. The novels with the theme of 'life in dreams' are actually another form of representation of the temporal-spatial concept of relativity; whereas the spatial concept of 'significance perceived from small world' took on the deviating form in the process of being localized in the sense that it is not in sync with the original intuitive perception.