“体时”:中国饮茶艺术中的具身性时间

“Bodily Time”: Embodiment of Time in the Art of Chinese Tea Drinking

本文意在经由对中国饮茶艺术中的时间观念的分析,来说明在时间上的精确与煎煮步骤上的细化规定,是使饮茶由一种日常实践转变为品饮艺术的关键因素。其中的时间规定并非康德或牛顿意义上的绝对时间,而是一种以感官经验为基础发展而来的具身性时间观念。基于对茶法中诸如火候、汤候、缓急等几个与时间密切相关,同时又极其依赖身体训练的关键技术的分析,本文提出以“体时”为关键词,来理解中国饮茶艺术中这种基于感官却又超越感官的时间意识,不仅在技法层面上作为一种修身工夫而一直沿习到今天的饮茶文化中,还在思想源流上承载着中国传统文化中重“体”亦重“时”的特点。茶文化作为中国最具代表性的优秀传统文化之一,其时间维度的讨论在学界并未引起足够的关注。做这样的尝试,能够让我们看到一个基于中国文化经验的时间观念与艺术呈现。

Through analyzing the concept of time in Chinese tea drinking art, this paper attempts to show that the precise time and the refinement of the decoction steps are the key factors that change tea drinking from a daily practice to a drinking art. The time referred to here is not absolute time in the sense of Kant or Newton, but an embodied time concept developed on the basis of sensory experience. Through analysis of the key elements in the art of tea preparation, such as boiling time, heating time, and tempo control which are all closely related to time and heavily reliant on bodily training, this paper proposes to use“bodily time”as the key concept to understand time consciousness in Chinese tea drinking art which is rooted in, but goes beyond, the senses. Such time consciousness is not only a kind of self-cultivation at the technical level still in use in today’s tea-drinking culture, but is also a living example of the emphasis of traditional Chinese culture on both“time”and“body.”Tea culture has long been considered a representative of traditional Chinese culture, but its time dimension has been largely ignored in the discussions of the academic circles. Hopefully, this paper will allow us to see a time concept and its artistic presentation in such a concrete Chinese cultural experience as tea drinking.