"Peace of mind is naturally cool" first adjusts the mentality.
In Yuan Dynasty, Qiu Chuji's "On Getting Healthy News" proposed that "regulating breath and clearing heart" in summer is like ice and snow in the heart.
"The season is right, the season is right." This is the experience of ancient China people in adapting to the seasons. Then, how did the ancients "keep pace with the times" in the dog days with the highest and most difficult temperature in a year? In the pre-Qin period, people summed up a set of methods. "Huangdi Neijing Four Qi Theory" said: "Summer March 3, this is a fragrant show. Heaven and earth blend together, everything flourishes, you go to bed late and get up early, and the sun never gets tired, so you won't get angry, make Huaying beautiful and vent your anger. If you love someone outside, this summer is the best way to raise a long person. " Obviously, this is the core of "keeping peace of mind": keep a happy mood in summer and don't get angry easily. The word "Neijing" is also a major code of conduct for future generations to summer. Generally speaking, it is "calm and cool naturally".
In hot summer, people are easily excited and angry, which leads to "sex addiction". Irritability will only increase the heat in summer, so the ancients thought that it was necessary to "calm down" in hot weather. The so-called "calmness and coolness" is to "adapt to the four seasons" by adjusting one's mentality, which the ancients called "spiritual health preservation".
Qiu Chuji, a famous health care scientist in the Yuan Dynasty, said in his book On Health Care that summer is "more suitable for refreshing the mind and clearing the heart, often like ice and snow in the heart, with less heat in the heart; It can't be hotter, it's hotter. "
Qiu Chuji's "calming one's breath and clearing one's heart" is also one of the secrets of Taoist summer vacation, and it is also called "Zen", which means "self-cultivation".
Zen is one of the important ways for ancient people to cultivate their self-cultivation, so it is logical to use it to deal with the dog days. Lu You, a poet in the Southern Song Dynasty, has a deep understanding of this. In summer, he would sit quietly and cultivate his morality, just as his poem "Summer" said: "The newly built virtual hall sweeps away the pain, and the child slaves are left unattended all day."
Laozi, the founder of Taoism, advocated "quietness" and "cultivating nature". In Tao Te Ching, he said: "Quiet is better than cold, quiet is better than heat, and quiet is the best thing in the world." Haste can resist the cold, silence can overcome the heat. Laozi even thinks that people with a peaceful mind can become the rulers of the world.
It's nice to "enjoy the cool under the big tree" and "cover the sky and the sun" in hot summer.
In the Northern Song Dynasty, "Taiping Yulan" recorded that the people of Zheng lived in a lonely forest for the summer.
"It's easy to say, but my heart is naturally cold", but Liu Zongyuan, a writer in the Tang Dynasty, bluntly said that he could not do it. When he was banished to Yongzhou, Hunan, he couldn't sleep on a hot summer night. In the middle of the night, he simply got up and went upstairs to enjoy the cool. He once wrote the poem "Climbing to the West Building on a Summer Night": "It is better not to shoot if you can advance westward." It means that I have no hope of overcoming the heat with peace of mind.
In order to adapt to the heat, the ancient folks first put forward the concept of "enjoying the cool". "Enjoy the cool", also known as "enjoy the cool". How to enjoy the cool? There are different choices at different times, but shading and avoiding direct sunlight are the most common ways to reduce the body surface temperature. For example, in the Tang Dynasty, people liked to build a summer place. Although the pavilion was not invented in the Tang Dynasty, it has existed for a long time, but Chang 'an people are more creative in usi.
The so-called "summer party" is an outdoor activity to enjoy the cool, a bit like the modern "cool party", which was still very popular in the Song Dynasty. According to Song Mengyuan's old article "Enjoy the Four Seasons", Volume 8 "Miscellaneous Selling in the Streets and Alleys under the Moon", in the Northern Song Dynasty, "everyone is the heaviest, and there is no season in June. There are often wind pavilions and waterside pavilions, towering tall buildings, ice trays and snow barriers, floating melons and plums, flowing cups and swamps, and new flowers and buds are far away. " Judging from the memory of Meng Lao Yuan, the outdoor cool activities in Kaifeng at that time were more lively than those in the Tang Dynasty.
However, the above-mentioned "summer meeting" should be a way for the "rich" in ancient times to enjoy the cool, while the folks mostly built a simple arbor under a tree or went to cool and low-temperature places such as caves to escape the heat. As the saying goes, "it is good to enjoy the cool under a big tree" is actually just a summary of the experience of the ancients in summer.
Shadow play was popular in pre-Qin period. The Summer of Zheng People is an interesting story about Zheng people enjoying the cool under a tree. The Dream of China in Tokyo, compiled by scholars such as Northern Song Dynasty, Li Mu and Xu Xuan, quoted the personnel office of Taiping Imperial View as saying: Zheng people "spend their summer in a lonely forest, and the sun shadows move". But it also made a night joke that "the moon is moving and moving into the shade".