(Un)consciousness? Music in the Daoist context of nonbeing

This chapter explores the interpretation of music as a philosophical concept within the context of Chinese aesthetics. A particular focus is the Daoist connection of music with psychological concepts such as consciousness, the experience of time, and the emergence of memory in space and time. The human body, regarded as both physical and spiritual, is an integral element of Daoism, which offers a route to understanding consciousness as coterminous with being and nonbeing, and to linking the latter to music. In the Daoist tradition nonbeing, in musical time, brings forth dynamic and temporal connections between the conscious and the unconscious through memory. The chapter uses the programmatic title and literary preface of Seagulls and Forgetting Schemes, a Song dynasty qin piece, as an exemplar of the Daoist aesthetic of (un)consciousness, approached as both an ideal comprising a world or state of enlightened detachment and an aesthetic activity for cultivating such a world or state.