Keeping bonsai at home is truly nourishing for health, and the benefits really are many
Keeping bonsai at home is truly nourishing for health
When it comes to what to keep at home for the best health benefits, many people will surely think of all kinds of flowers, grasses and plants. Actually that is not the case: keeping bonsai at home is what has the greatest health-preserving effect. Why? Because the most important role of health preservation is to please the eye and delight the spirit.
Statistics show that among all occupations in China, calligraphers and painters have the longest average lifespan, already exceeding 90 years, and most of these calligraphers and painters paint landscape paintings, while bonsai is the "miniature 3D" version of a landscape painting.
Looking at a good landscape painting, we feel enchanted by it, both body and mind delighted. Research by Professor Chen Xiaoye of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences shows that the nature expressed in landscape paintings is the most nourishing for health, and it can be encompassed through bonsai. What is beneficial to health preservation is certainly a good ecology; the foundation of a good ecology is land and water, and mountains are three-dimensional, their ecosystem more complete, which is why the paintings we find so delighting all contain "mountains" and "water."
The reason ordinary green plants and fresh flowers are less nourishing for health than bonsai is that they can only create a very small ecosystem. The Chinese gardens we love to visit, or famous landscape paintings, all take trees as their main subject. In this sense, Chinese painting is art, and even more a health-preserving art, because it conforms to and fulfills the instinctive needs of life.
The reason landscape paintings and gardens can enchant people is that they contain a very high amount of information. This includes the stones that Chinese people love, which are sought after for being "thin, porous and transparent," because stones that are "thin, porous and transparent" have a much larger surface area than solid stones of the same volume, and can carry more information. When a person actually looks at them, they feel endlessly varied and wonderfully strange, and are enchanted by that wonder.
The principle by which bonsai nourishes health lies in this as well. Although a bonsai is very small, it generally simulates the mood of mountains and water, condensing great information into a small space, while an old pine tree and an artificially aged pavilion also carry historical information, which adds information from the dimension of time. Though a bonsai is small, the world it expresses is vast.
This is also why, in the past, whenever they could, men of letters would do their utmost to realize their dream of mountains and water, building a garden even in the smallest space at home, and at the very least creating a garden with words. And the bonsai we keep at home is likewise a remedy for when we cannot visit famous mountains and great rivers in person.