Stone appreciation is a cultural activity, not an industry. Please, spare the stones.

Spare the stones! Stone appreciation is not an industry, it is merely a cultural activity!

Written by | Zui Shi Weng

Recommended images | Shi Dao Chun

This article is selected from "Qi Shi Quan", copyright belongs to the original author.

Recently I came across an article saying that when Bai Juyi served as governor of Hangzhou, on one occasion while touring the famous Hangzhou site Tianzhu Mountain, he saw two stones, liked them very much, and took them home. After admiring them for a while, his enthusiasm gradually faded, and so he forgot about the two stones. It was not until he left office that he found these two stones in his luggage. Bai Juyi thought: Tianzhu Mountain is renowned for its rocks; if everyone, like himself, took a fancy to something they loved and, disregarding the feelings of others, claimed it for themselves, would that not ruin the elegant reputation of Tianzhu Mountain? Moreover, to secretly keep something one loves, how is that different from embezzling money? Today it is mountain stones, tomorrow it could be treasures. If one does not mend small faults, one will suffer greatly in the end; in days to come one will surely reach out recklessly and become a great parasite, coming to no good end.

Thinking of this, Bai Juyi hurriedly placed the two stones carefully into a box, instructed his family to send them back to Tianzhu Mountain, and wrote this "self-examination poem" titled "Three Years as Governor": Three years as governor, drinking water and eating leaves. Only from Tianzhu Mountain, I took two pieces of stone. This is worth a thousand in gold, yet it does harm to my integrity. From the above, one can see how noble, how profound, how selfless, how pure the ancients' love for stones was! By contrast, how vulgar, how frivolous, how selfish, how fame-and-profit-driven the mindset of today's stone enthusiasts is! Of course, with the development of society, we cannot be entirely compared with the ancients. However, the noble character of the ancients, who "loved stones and respected stones, valuing appreciation over profit", should always be learned from and carried forward!

Therefore, this old man believes that all stone enthusiasts who aim to carry on traditional stone appreciation culture, who take leisure, entertainment, and moral self-cultivation as their philosophy, who take not destroying the original ecology as their principle, and who obtain "wondrous stones" by hand in their natural state, should become the mainstream of the stone-appreciation community in the future. But anyone who aims to gain fame and profit, who takes the businessman's philosophy of "where there is money, there is profit to be made", who sacrifices natural ecology, and who seizes stones by means of mechanical excavation and processing, should be restrained or rejected by the stone world. Therefore, polished stones can be done away with! The idea of developing stone appreciation as an industry can be done away with! Without buying and selling, there is no harm and no destruction! To protect green mountains and clear waters, stone enthusiasts bear an inescapable duty!

We must not forget our original intention, and must return stone appreciation to its true essence! We must establish the absolute status of purely natural "wondrous stones" in the stone world, abolish the broad term "ornamental stone", exclude all man-made stone products from "wondrous stones", and let stone appreciation truly become an elegant, pure, artistic cultural activity that venerates nature, loves nature, and collects nature.

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