Autumn at its clearest: sky washed clean, the season drawing inward. On the evening of 10 October the 15th Youyu Salon opened at Chengze Garden as planned. The guest was Professor Lesong Cheng—Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University and Chair of its Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies—who took as his subject “Between Memory and Craft: Writing and Philosophical Thought in Classical China” and led more than a hundred faculty, alumni and friends into the world of writing in classical China: seeing heaven and earth in ink, and learning self-cultivation by doing.
Between Reason and the Humanities: The Case for a Liberal Education
Lei Xiaoyan, Party Secretary of the National School of Development, opened the evening with her own reading of “craft” and “writing,” taking calligraphy as her example.
“Calligraphy is not merely a technical skill. It is also a bodily experience—you are inside the experience—and it has to carry an inner conception as well.”
She carried the idea across to economics. “What we do at NSD is economics of the real world. You have to go out to the fields and the villages and do serious fieldwork; only by walking the ground can you truly write an economics paper. Calligraphy is the same. In the writing of each character there is a bodily experience and an inner reflection, and only then does it become something that can be handed down and deeply understood.”
Faced with the shock of the AI era, she was direct. “Precisely at a moment like this, writing with one’s own hand and practising with one’s own body matter more. If we can still hold to them, they are the most important quality and the most important experience we have as human beings—the things only we can do.”
In his talk, Professor Cheng argued that writing carries three layers of meaning in China: it is a bodily action; it is a right of expression; and it is a historical record of social change and of the human condition.
He entered by way of the relation between two words that English flattens into one. Chinese, he noted, does not treat shu and xie as the same act. Confucius described himself as one who “transmits but does not create.” Calligraphy, by contrast, is “rule-bound without being bound by its rules”—it has norms, yet is never trapped by them. “It begins from the norm and then leaves the norm behind, and in doing so becomes a fragment of a spiritual life.”
Writing therefore binds the craft of self-cultivation to the memory of a culture. At one end lies the most individual of practices: bodily discipline and inner formation. At the other lies a historical tradition that takes writing as its basic vehicle and makes texts and documents the core of Chinese civilisation.
From there Professor Cheng turned to the Chinese sense of history. At one end stands the founding, unchanging Way; at the other, the ten thousand things that never stop shifting upon it. “The only thing that does not change is that things keep changing.”
He cited Zhang Xuecheng’s dictum that “the Six Classics are all history,” and Sima Qian’s resolve to probe the boundary between Heaven and humankind and to comprehend the changes of past and present. Historical writing, he argued, is at once an expression of values and a discipline of the self: “King Wen was imprisoned and there elaborated the Zhouyi; Confucius was in straits and there composed the Spring and Autumn.” To take up the brush and write plainly at the lowest point of one’s life is itself self-cultivation.
What the virtue proper to the historian demands is precisely this: “to judge the way of history by the way of Heaven and humankind, and never to let private advantage, liking or dislike alter the shape of what is written.”
Ideas in Exchange
After the talk the floor opened. Guests pressed Professor Cheng on three questions above all: how someone with no grounding in calligraphy might still experience writing as a discipline of the self; how a bodily, embodied spiritual life can be kept alive in the age of AI; and how values and objectivity are to be balanced in historical writing. Hands went up faster than there was time for, and the sparks of argument carried on into the autumn night.
Youyu Salon, in Good Company with the Classics
In the autumn of 2026 the salon arrived at a sustained conversation about action and understanding. We face today a double crisis—of memory, and of craft. At its core is the end of an embodied life. Our forebears dealt with the world by showing up with the whole body: they went, they saw, they copied, they counted, themselves. Technology now takes over one task after another. Navigation finds the way for us; search remembers for us; the camera sees for us; AI reads, and increasingly writes, for us. The body keeps exiting the scene, and between us and the real world stands an ever thicker layer of mediation.
Professor Cheng put it bluntly: “Our bodies are putting off our lives; we ourselves are drifting further and further from real life.” He described the shifting balance between people and things in a technological age: as speed and slowness trade places, things multiply while the self quietly withdraws. Life is filled up efficiently, and the density of the spirit grows thinner for it. More and more people are waking up to a life that has been outsourced, and want back the right to be present—returning to the room, picking up the tools, learning and making with their own hands. The Youyu Salon is meant to be exactly that: an embodied experience of the humanities and the arts in the AI age, a place where people can once again feel and think together, face to face.
Fifteen sessions in, the Youyu Salon has become less a series of events than a growing community of thought. May art and philosophical reflection become a language we share—one that crosses boundaries and lights the way.
