Me and the Japanese Language

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 29)

Not long ago, one day my wife and I both woke up before dawn.

            ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

            ‘Four-ten.’

            Question and answer were both in Japanese.

            Trivial as that little exchange may sound, to me it was a watershed. It meant that I had finally resumed a focus, picked up a thread, that had been waiting in the margins of my life for sixty years. By having a Japanese-speaking wife and by saying a few words to her in that language, I was fulfilling a wish that I had expressed on another continent at the age of seven.

            My first contact with Japanese was in the mid-1950s in Wisconsin. My parents and I were living in a wooded neighborhood next door to an American scholar, his Japanese wife, and their toddler son. One summer afternoon in their back yard, I was terrifically impressed to hear this American guy suddenly talking Japanese. What he was saying to his wife Akiko might have been no more than ‘Should I take the clothes in now?’ – but to me it was a magical formula, a language of the gods, transforming a banal situation into a scene of timeless color and romance.

            Akiko was the first person to bring me into contact with Chinese characters.[1] One day she sat down with me and read me a story out of a Japanese children’s book, sight-translating from those beautifully illustrated pages with their long vertical lines of exotic script. I felt a terrific envy for her toddler son Karl, who was being brought up to speak and understand Japanese. I suddenly decided to start coming over as often as possible. I actually asked Akiko if she would teach me Japanese ‘together with Karl.’

            Soon afterward, my family moved out of the woods in Wisconsin and into a city in Louisiana. The ambient foreign language became French, and we actually had some awfully superficial French lessons in school, but I soon discovered I was more interested in playing baseball than in studying. Domination by the instincts had begun. Competition. The ‘school of hard knocks.’ The playing field with its straight lines and uniforms. Slugging and scrapping for a place as a ‘big man’ in society. And so it would continue for half a century. But the seeds of timeless fascination, and their association with Japanese, had been sown.

            Perhaps it was, in retrospect, not surprising that the field of study which eventually became my profession – Chinese, has the reputation of being the most difficult of all. Maybe part of my attraction to Chinese – aside from the beautiful poetry and beautiful women – was that it was the intellectual equivalent of a Bowl Game, an arena in which brain could knock heads with brain and only an All-Star had a chance. Physically, I knew I would never be a Babe Ruth. But mentally...

            Some years later, when I was just finishing up as a graduate student at Leiden University in The Netherlands, there was a sudden vacancy in the Chinese Department and I was offered a teaching job. Nobody was more amazed than myself. It had never occurred to me that someday I would ‘use’ my Chinese for anything so worldly as to earn money. I had always assumed someday I would teach Dutch children English for a livelihood and then go home at night to do what I really wanted to do, which was to learn more Chinese.

            I had to decide right away, and I said yes. I have never really regretted that decision, but in the long run it did change my feelings toward the Chinese language. Starting in 1973, I was a full-time staff member in Leiden. In my new job, the pressures that were on me could not have been called serious, but being a perfectionist, I felt under pressure nevertheless. Before long I began to associate the Chinese language itself with the tensions and obligations of the ‘on-the-job’ situation. If I glanced at a Chinese newspaper and could not understand a headline, rather than this being just another interesting challenge, it became a threat. I started to feel guilty for not knowing the language perfectly. After all, I was now a professional, paid teacher! Soon I began, like every bourgeois office clerk or shopgirl, to look forward to the weekend and to be glad when five o’clock rolled around. What I had first loved to do, I now ‘had to’ do.

In the case of Japanese, there never was such a division between my ‘life’ and my ‘self.’ The language itself was never wrenched away from my personal realm of musings and meanings into an alien area of Philistine worries. It remained in a still-possible, still-to-come state, and there it waited for sixty years.

Even that phrase, ‘sixty years,’ is significant here. In Japan as well as China, there   is an ancient tradition of sixty being considered the number of years in one full human life cycle. Not so long ago in Japan, a person celebrating their sixtieth birthday would actually wear clothes or colors symbolically suggesting a baby’s clothes – the idea being that you were being born all over again.

In my own life as I now look back on it, ‘sixty years’ was the period during which I was continually being forced to adapt to society and its demands. When I was about seven, my family moved out of the woods and into the town with its herd and its hedges. When I was sixty-seven, my wife joined me in retirement and there was no longer any definite ‘public’ pressure in either of our lives. Surely it was no coincidence that right after turning sixty-eight, I suddenly felt a mighty impulse to get back to learning Japanese.

Is Japanese difficult to learn? According to Arthur Waley, one of the most famous translators from Oriental literature, not so very. In the introduction to his little-known Japanese Poetry: The ‘Uta,’ he writes: ‘The translations in this book are chiefly intended to facilitate the study of the Japanese text; for Japanese poetry can only be rightly enjoyed in the original. And since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it.’[2]

Well, that sounds easy enough! But as other contexts show, Arthur Waley was not above indulging in a bit of intellectual show-offery. In his preface toThe Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces, he actually says: ‘Despite the fact that in this book I translate from Chinese, Japanese, Ainu, Mongol and Syriac, I do not want to give the impression that I am a master of many languages. Chinese and Japanese I do know fairly well...’[3]

For a different and perhaps more plausible opinion, we may turn to the wise words of Arthur Rose-Innes, whose dictionary and textbooks have guided generations of students. In the ‘introductory remarks’ to Part II of his five-part First Steps in Japanese Reading, he writes: ‘As many of the characters and combinations of the characters may be read in more than one way the beginner may be surprised at the amount of guessing that has to be done: but it is well that he should exercise from the very beginning that faculty of guessing aright which, as Chamberlain says, is a sine qua non to the student of Japanese all through his career...Before going very far the student may come to the conclusion that the Japanese written language, though very interesting, is one immense muddle; and that, in the absence of logic, the only way to learn it, is by the process known as muddling through. Be that as it may, let him be sure that he will not make much progress except by hard work and perseverance.’

In short: ‘Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers!’ This is a far cry from Waley’s suggestion that one need only ‘learn the Japanese syllabary and some (perhaps about 600) of the commoner Chinese characters’ to be able to ‘use the native texts.’[4] By the way, a Japanese schoolchild would be well into the fifth grade of elementary school before being officially required to know as many as 600 characters. Let me just add in passing that ‘the Japanese syllabary,’ an alphabet-like series of phonetic signs used to spell words or parts of words, itself comprises more than a hundred symbols which must be learned by rote...

As for grammar and syntax, I think few students would disagree with the description, laid down in 1928 by G. B. Sansom in his Historical Grammar of Japanese, of ‘...some obscure characteristic in Japanese speech which impels those who use it to pile one redundant verb upon another. It is a feature which will not have escaped the notice of those who listen to orations where sentence after sentence ends with some phrase like de aru de arimasu, which literally stands for “being-is-being-is-is,” and can be adequately rendered by the one word “is” in English.’[5]

Sometimes the grammar seems difficult not because it is a ‘muddle’ but for the opposite reason: that it is somehow burdensomely logical and over-analytical, as when ‘I’ve been to Kyoto’ comes out as ‘the fact of having gone to Kyoto exists,’ or at the table when ‘please pass me the salt’ becomes ‘do bestow getting the salt.’

And what about the phenomenally complex problem of the so-called polite forms, such that not only the choice of words but even the grammatical forms constantly depend on one’s judgment as to the status relations between oneself and the interlocutor? In all the Japanese textbooks I have used or browsed, my favorite quote on this is: ‘Another common honorific verb is irassharu, which has more honorific value than precise verbal meaning. It expresses the vague idea of the existence of a person either in motion or at rest and consequently can be translated “to go,” “to come,” or “to be”.’[6]

On the other hand, some of the difficulties students complain about really are rather exaggerated. For example: remembering the Japanese names of the days of the week. True, at first sight kayoobi and suiyoobi don’t seem inherently very suggestive of ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Wednesday.’ But this can be overcome by simply carrying out a few simple steps. First, take a course in French and stick with it until you know the days of the week by heart. This will give you the information that Tuesday, mardi, has the mythological or astrological association of being ‘Mars day’ while Wednesday, mercredi, is associated with Mercury, etc. Knowing these links between the ancient European gods and the successive days will turn out to be crucial in getting the Japanese weekdays right.

Next, go to your local university library, check out the second volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, make a photocopy of page 262, ignore the top half of the chart, and memorize the table of associations of the Ancient Chinese ‘elements’ with the ‘planets.’ Keep in mind that the English name of each ‘planet’ corresponds to the ancient Roman god of the same name, which you now have learned in French. From there, you can easily work out that in ancient East Asian tradition, Mars is associated with ‘fire’ and Mercury with ‘water,’ and so on.

After that, every time you see the Japanese days of the week written in Chinese characters, you will plainly see that kayoobi is the ‘fire’ or ‘Mars’ day, hence mardi or Tuesday; suiyoobi is the ‘water’ or ‘Mercury’ day, thus mercredi or Wednesday, and so on. It remains true that in spoken Japanese ka is not the ordinary word for ‘fire,’ nor sui for ‘water’; these are actually ancient Chinese words in an archaic Japanese transcription, but this is nit-picking. Ignore it. Ignore also the fact that the element yoo in these words is written with a distinct Chinese character which Japanese-English dictionaries define simply as ‘part of the names of the days of the week.’ Actually, historically it means ‘bright,’ so that Tuesday is actually ‘fire’s bright day’ and so on.

A breeze, isn’t it?

            Another problem, this time definitely a real one, is how to read Japanese names aloud when they are written, as they usually are, in Chinese characters. Since characters ordinarily have more than one possible pronunciation depending on meaning, custom and who knows what else...how can you be sure you are reading a person’s name correctly?

            The bad news here is that quite often you simply can’t. The good news is that neither can the Japanese. Basically, you just have to know, whether by being tipped off by an insider or...though this is not foolproof...by looking the name up in one of the special name dictionaries giving attested readings of attested names.

            Traditionally in Europe, the advice given to students of Japanese was to first learn enough Russian to be familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, then find a way to buy a copy of the 1207-page Slovar’ Yaponskikh Imyon i Famil’yiy (Dictionary of Japanese names and surnames) published in Moscow in 1958, and then...look up to your heart’s content!

            English-speaking readers got what seemed like a big break in 1972 with the publication of P. G. O’Neill’s Japanese Names: A Comprehensive Index by Characters and Readings. But the author himself in his preface says: ‘There is no final or complete solution to the problems of reading Japanese names written in Chinese characters. Such characters usually have special name readings which...have to be learned separately. Virtually all these characters have more than one recognized name reading, and may have other unpredictable ones as well...It is therefore not surprising that, faced with such complexity, the Japanese should regard possible but mistaken readings with equanimity. It is usually only in speech, however, that they have to commit themselves to a particular reading of a name, for, when writing in their own language, they can leave the name in the obscurity of its characters.’[7]

            O’Neill’s dictionary is ‘only’ 359 fine-print pages long. So far I have never been disappointed in using it, but still, I keep the Russian tome at hand just in case.

            Well, to sum up after all these by-ways...yes, Japanese really is difficult!

            Then the question is, at least in some people’s minds...I know because they have asked me...why do you want to spend your retirement working at anything so difficult?

            The answer is that in studying Japanese, I am pursuing my own dream. I am not straining to fulfill someone else’s. Undoubtedly, by ordinary academic standards my knowledge of the language is still ludicrously inadequate, but my dream is not subject to limitation by other people’s notions of ‘adequacy.’ There is no particular level that I need to attain. If I can say ‘Should I take the clothes in now,’ I am already doing fine. If I can say ‘four-ten in the morning’ to my wife now, I am back where I was with Akiko sixty years ago. I am back home in the realm of the timeless...

--Lloyd Haft

August 2015

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[1] Akiko and her esoteric or ‘archetypical’ role in my life have already figured in a previous post on this blog called ‘When Is Bamboo Where?’ – see http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2014/04/when-is-bamboo-where.html

[2] London : George Allen and Unwin, 1976, p. 12. Originally published in 1919.

[3] London : George Allen and Unwin, 1963, p. 8.

[4] Introduction to Japanese Poetry, p. 12.

[5] G. B. Sansom, An Historical Grammar of Japanese. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928, p. 208.

[6] Serge Elisséef, Edwin O. Reischauer and Takehiko Yoshihashi, Elementary Japanese for College Students, Part II: Vocabularies, grammar and notes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, p. 63.

[7] New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1972/1979, p. vii.

T’ai Chi Chih: Lineage or Lone Star?

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 28)

        For some years now I have been practicing T’ai Chi Chih, and like many who have studied it and kept up with it, I have benefited in health and spirit. Unlike most, however, I also studied Chinese at the university and went on to spend years in Taiwan. Knowledge of the language, and the experience of studying tai chi for several years with a Taiwan-Chinese teacher, gave me access to a very different perspective on the tai chi-related disciplines in general, and on T’ai Chi Chih in particular.

        By saying this and contextualizing T’ai Chi Chih in this way at the outset, I am making a statement. I am saying I beg to differ with the standard publicity image of T’ai Chi Chih (hereinafter TCC). That view would have us believe TCC just dropped down from the sky in 1974; it is unique; it had no important antecedents. Justin F. Stone, the ‘originator,’ experienced ‘intuitive flashes’ and devised the various movements based on them.

        I believe that account, though it contains truths, is one-sided and misleading. It ignores, or has been ignorant of, some conclusions that I have drawn based on research into Justin Stone’s own books and some relevant books in Chinese.

        I own three successive editions of Stone’s instruction manual titled T’ai Chi Chih![1] Their publication history is complicated, but the first printing of each seems to have been in 1974, 1984, and 1996 respectively. For convenience, rather than repeating the title I will refer to them simply as ‘1974,’ ‘1984,’ and ‘1996.’ Giving us three quick-freezes in time, each appearing some years after its predecessor, they enable us to piece together a more nuanced version of what I believe actually happened. In particular, the introductory material, forewords, and prefaces contain valuable hints.

        To begin with the original handbook which came out in 1974, the first thing that meets the eye is the prominent role played by Wen-Shan Huang. Huang is the volume’s dedicatee – Stone calls him ‘my friend and teacher’ – and is also the author of an extensive foreword placing TCC in the context of various Chinese concepts and practices.

        Huang, whose name would now normally be written Huang Wenshan (黃文山), lived from about 1898 to 1988 (sources differ). Unlike many other guiding lights of what was then called the Human Potential Movement, he was highly educated and held high academic credentials as an anthropologist. Aside from his scholarly work, he had studied tai chi in China and had learned from some of the most famous masters including Dong Yingjie, Zheng Manqing, T. T. Liang, Da Liu, and Xiong Yanghe.[2] Huang had been Justin Stone’s tai chi teacher in California. Stone himself also taught tai chi – I am referring to what most people nowadays understand as ‘tai chi,’ which in Chinese is called taiji quan or in the older transcription t’ai chi ch’üan – for many years before the advent of his own TCC system. I will detail this shortly.

        Very clearly, Huang places Justin Stone’s system in the context of existing Chinese disciplines. He says: ‘T’ai Chi Chih, or any other forms of the exercise of the Inner School...derived their basic idea from T’ai Chi Ch’uan.’ More specifically, on the first page of his preface Huang explains ‘T’ai Chi Chih’ as meaning ‘T’ai Chi Ruler.’ (‘Ruler’ in this context means ‘footrule’ or ‘foot-long piece of wood.’ The reference is to a sort of stick about a foot long, which in the Orient is held between the hands during certain exercises to keep the hands equidistant. In the transcription used in those days, technically called the Wade-Giles Transcription, actually the Chinese word for ‘footrule,’ 尺, should have been written ch’ih and not chih, and the name of the whole discipline should have been spelled t’ai chi ch’ih, but those apostrophes were often omitted.) Huang writes: ‘My friend, Mr. T. T. Ching, who was taught...by Chao Chung Tao in 1957, in Peking, has maintained a Taoist Center in Hong Kong in recent years for the teaching of this exercise-discipline; I was a member of this Center...Basing his studies upon the fundamental movements of the Art, Mr. Stone, thru his own experiments and creation, has added many new movements...’ In the Chinese-language Appendix C to his own book, Huang specifically mentions 太極尺 or t’ai chi ch’ih as one of the disciplines he himself had studied.

        As a little research in internet sources and libraries in the Far East has shown, T. T. Ching (1898-1975) was a teacher in Hong Kong whose name written in Chinese characters is 程達材.[3] Starting in the early 1960s he published several books on what he called ‘Tai Chi Ruler’ and indeed claimed to have learned from Chao Chung Tao (趙中道, in the modern transcription Zhao Zhongdao) in 1957. (I have a book of Ching’s in Chinese dating from 1964, as well as a more extensive later volume called Xiantian qigong taiji chi quanshu先天氣功太極尺全書 whose English title – the main text itself is in Chinese – is The Book of Tai Chi Ruler with Complete Details.) Ching’s work and methods were known in Taiwan as well, via at least one unauthorized reprint.

        I have not found any specific evidence that Justin Stone himself ever studied with T. T. Ching. But in his 1974 description of the movement that he calls Bass Drum (which aside from lacking a wooden ‘ruler’ is virtually the same, including the crucial foot and leg movements, as what Ching in Chinese called yao chi or Rotating the Ruler), Stone includes a footnote: ‘In Taiwan a stick somewhat like a bone is held, so the two hands must remain equidistant apart.’ This would seem to imply that Justin Stone at some stage had seen Taiwanese students performing Ching’s version of this movement. Or perhaps he had heard about this from Huang or someone else. In any case, at this point in time Stone was not averse to publicly associating part of his own system with a pre-existing set of exercises. (This and the bare-handed movement which Ching called mo yu or Groping for Fish, which Stone calls ‘Around the Platter,’ are now the standard first two movements in the regular T’ai Chi Chih sequence.)

Comparing the 1984 revised edition with the original book from 1974, at first sight we see mostly similarities. With a few exceptions, the movements and postures described are the same, and for the most part the descriptions and illustrations are unchanged. Turning to the introductory material, however, we discern a striking new accent in the way the book is now being presented to the world. The original preface by Huang, unmistakably implying a direct link between Justin Stone’s system and the Tai Chi Ruler which had already been taught in the 1950s by T. T. Ching, has been entirely deleted. Stone’s ‘Instructional Introduction’ has been maintained, but the wording of its first paragraph has become less modest. In 1974, Stone had written: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of experimentation. They represent an extension and development of the original movements taught by a Chinese master. The important principles have been retained as the repertoire has been expanded.’

        In the 1984 revision, this has been changed to: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of experimentation. From a development of the original two movements shown me, adding the leg motions and making other changes, I expanded and added eighteen more...Drawing on my meditation experiences and T’ai Chi Ch’uan training, I intuitively devised the other movements...’

        The ‘New Introduction’ to the revised volume also includes the snippet: ‘These are not ancient forms; they were originated by me...’

        Another dramatically new feature is that the system’s name, ‘T’ai Chi Chih,’ is now being construed to have a different meaning in Chinese. Rather than ‘Chih’ being referred to the Chinese character for ‘ruler’ as Huang had done, it is now said to be a different character meaning ‘knowledge.’ The whole expression is said to mean ‘Knowledge of the Supreme Ultimate.’

        In the still newer and extensively revised version which came out in 1996, the new stronger statements of originality are maintained. The name is again ‘Knowledge of the Supreme Ultimate,’ and once again there is no trace of Huang’s original preface. (The revisions are mostly in the illustrations and instructions to the movements, not the movements themselves.)

In the newer publicity material on TCC, Justin Stone is simply said to have ‘originated’ the system in 1974. (See, for example, the brief biography of Stone at the back of his 1996 volume, and later brief biographical summaries on the internet.) The emphasis is less on the ‘many years of experimentation’; indeed, the 1996 biography goes so far as to say that Stone originated the set ‘through intuitive flashes’ in 1974.

        This sudden-precipitation model does not quite tally with what Stone himself wrote in his 1984 introduction (and repeated in 1996): ‘...I began, around 1969, to experiment with my own forms based on the ancient principles. Having been fortunate enough to learn several little-known movements from an old Chinese man – movements practised in former days – I used these as the starting point for my experiments...In 1974, Sun Publishing Company asked me to write a book...and I began the laborious task of finishing and naming the nineteen forms...’

        A bit of background on this is to be found in an article on Stone in the Albuquerque Journal for 28 July 2005. There we read: ‘During a 1971 trip to Albuquerque to visit a friend, Stone wandered into a bookstore. The owner asked what he did...“I said I teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan,” he recalled. That comment immediately generated so much interest from the owner and customers that classes were soon organized for Stone to lead...One of his students was a local book publisher who asked Stone to write about T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Because a definitive text on the subject had already been written by Huang, Stone was not keen on the idea. Huang, however, had shown Stone three movements that Stone modified and used as a warm-up...The publisher then suggested Stone write about these instead.’

        ‘“It was just a few movements, so there wasn’t much to write about, but then, over the course of the next week, movements just started coming to me along with their names,” Stone said.’[4]

       

What all this suggests is that (1) the precipitation of the forms was not as sudden as all that, and (2) the inviting prospect of a publication played a strong catalytic role in the ‘intuitive’ process.

        The year after Stone’s book was first published, T. T. Ching died at age 77, not because he had been neglecting his health by ‘rotating the ruler’ insufficiently, but as the result of a traffic accident. It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if he had lived long enough to see the success and growth of Justin Stone’s system after all references to him personally had been dropped. Would the two Teachers have joined hands in a collaborative effort, perhaps through the intermediary of Wen-Shan Huang, friend of both, who lived till 1988? Or would there have developed a rivalry of the ‘only-my-school-is-orthodox’ type which is so common in the Far East?

        One also wonders whether Stone’s mysterious ‘old Chinese man’ was Wen-Shan Huang himself...at the time of Stone’s publication, he would have been in his seventies. Or was it Tin Chin Lee, a Tai Chi master whom Stone met on a trip to Hawaii in 1958?

        Does any of this matter? To the present-day Western practitioner, of course not. Once you have abandoned the idea that only something with an ‘ancient’ pedigree can be right, what works for you is right for you.

        On the other hand, although I am no longer a professional scholar – long since retired, I am now as old as Justin Stone was when his revised edition with its revised claims appeared – I am still enough of a scholar to enjoy sorting out old strands, old clues, old loose ends. From this point of view, it is unfortunate that the compilers of Spiritual Odyssey: Selected Writings of Justin F. Stone 1985-1997 were so un-scholarly as not to provide source dates or details on the various pieces included in the volume. On page 78 of that volume, in a section called ‘Comments on Newspaper Articles,’ Stone is quoted as writing: ‘Please don’t falsify and say to interviewers that T’ai Chi Chih is a thousand years old, a well-kept court secret.’

        The interesting thing is that this is exactly what Wen-Shan Huang did say, at the very beginning of his enthusiastic foreword to Justin Stone’s book. Interpreting ‘Tai Chi Chih’ as ‘Tai Chi Ruler,’ Huang wrote: ‘More than a thousand years ago, this exercise...was kept as a secret known only to the clansmen of the Emperor. Mr. Chao Chung Tao, who was the descendant of one of the Emperor’s clansmen, was taught the secret...My friend, Mr. T. T. Ching...was taught the teaching, or Imperial secret, by Chao Chung Tao in 1957...’

Huang was probably, at that stage, trying to help Justin Stone. In the Far East, if you are teaching a martial art or a tai chi-related health discipline, the best thing is to claim that your method is not original – no such thing, it is the authentic continuation of a school whose unbroken tradition goes back many centuries. If you dare to set yourself up as a Teacher, you are supposed to have a venerable background.

In the West, the opposite holds. Only the new is truly relevant. Especially in anything involving health, only a recent discovery is really credible. I suspect that in the 1970s, thrilled at the chance to get more attention for his method by publishing a book on it, Justin Stone was perfectly glad to be endorsed, and placed in an old Oriental tradition, by an eminent Teacher like Wen-Shan Huang. Later, perhaps feeling more confident that he could make it on his own, he was Western enough to want to emphasize his originality. Since then, most of his followers probably have had no idea of what a Chinese reader would undoubtedly think of as the main roots of the whole thing.

        In sharing what I have discovered, it is not my intention to detract unduly from Teacher Stone’s reputation. If his methods are effective – and I say they are – then they are legitimate regardless of their exact provenance. It is undoubtedly true that most of the movements he taught were of his own devising. It is also demonstrably true that some of the most basic ones, including the leg and foot movements which Stone himself emphasizes are characteristic and essential, were already being taught by his teacher’s teacher many years before.

--Lloyd Haft

May 2015

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[1] Published respectively by Sun Publishing Company (Albuquerque, 1974); Good Karma Publishing (Fort Yates, Nevada 1994, but apparently a reprint of the ‘new revised edition’ by Satori Resources, 1984); and Good Karma Publishing (Boston, 2004 – the sixth printing of a ‘second edition’ which originally appeared in 1996).

[2] This information is from the original 1973 Hong Kong edition of Huang’s massive illustrated handbook Fundamentals of Tai Chi Ch’uan (see the Acknowledgements in English and Appendix C in Chinese). The book was reprinted in 1974 with a new introduction by Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley and a widely known inspirational and self-help author in her own right. Four years previously, Laura Huxley and Alan Watts had both written forewords to a much briefer book on tai chi by Gia-fu Feng – surely one of the grand old books of the Human Potential Movement!  

[3] In the modern international Mandarin transcription this would be Cheng Dacai, but I do not agree with the practice of automatically rewriting Cantonese speakers’ names as if they were actually pronounced in Mandarin in daily life.

[4] The article as I have consulted it on the internet really does say the ‘trip to Albuquerque’ was in 1971, but I have not been able to confirm this.

Spirit Writing in Old Matsu, Anno Now

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 27)

During our recent stay in Matsu, we were lodged in a bed-and-breakfast owned by one of Katie’s former bosses, who is from Matsu. We all call him Brother Tiger because the two characters of his name literally mean Lucky Tiger. Brother Tiger was and is an administrator and advisor of various cultural agencies including one of Taiwan’s most famous traditional-style opera troupes. Like others from this particular part of Matsu, from childhood up he has been a participant in the cult of a local god called ‘The Marshal in Armor’ (in the military sense of a ‘field marshal’).

       The Marshal is a frog spirit. He is called Marshal in Armor because in the local dialect, the word for ‘frog’ sounds like the Mandarin word for ‘armor,’ and being a god, like a field marshal he has power and authority.

       There are several images of the Marshal. The main one is located in a subsidiary altar of the local temple of the ‘Empress of Heaven,’ i.e. the goddess Matsu. The Empress of Heaven, like our Holy Virgin Mary who is also called Queen of Heaven, is said to have been a flesh-and-blood girl during her life on earth. Later she achieved the status of a goddess capable of helping earthlings with many things including saving fishermen in peril, helping women to become pregnant...in short, she is a divine refuge figure who is worshipped by millions and I would say is probably, maybe next to the Buddha in his or her various guises, the single most universal religious focus of the Taiwanese people. I will not now elaborate on the goddess Matsu as that is a whole story in itself...

       As I was saying, there are several images of the Marshal. The main one is worshipped at the Empress of Heaven’s temple, but an important role is also played by a compact mobile image, a wooden thing maybe a foot high, which is mounted on a wooden ‘litter’ or ‘sedan chair’ that can be carried around during processions or...as I will go into shortly...on inspection trips or even airline flights. The sedan chair is carried by four men, two in front and two behind. Besides serving as the Marshal’s vehicle when he needs to go somewhere, it is also the instrument of his ‘spirit writing’ when he chooses to communicate with humans. When this happens, the procedure is that the bearers tilt the whole sedan chair 90 degrees while continuing to hold it from below...the Marshal can’t fall out because he is mounted inside. The writing is done by placing a table under the tilted sedan chair. The table is covered with ash from burnt incense. The bearers bend over somewhat, enough so that a crossbeam of the sedan chair is in close proximity with the top of the table. When a question is asked or the Marshal wishes to make a pronouncement, the whole Ark, so to say, gets to Moverin’...bearers plus chair plus crossbeam get to vibrating, heaving up and down and sideways, till the end of the crossbeam bumps repeatedly into the ash and makes markings in it. The markings are Chinese characters or other familiar signs...although in reporting this, I am taking it on faith because when I looked at the marks, it defied my imagination how anyone could read anything out of them. This point is important, though, as it is a somewhat unusual manner of spirit communication. It is not at all unusual for the Chinese to receive guidance from gods or spirits, but oftentimes either the message is spoken through a medium who is in trance, or writing is done by other means including the ‘planchette,’ which is a mechanical device made up of connected sticks that looks something like a pantograph.

       The Marshal is a testy character and not averse to letting his displeasure be known. One of the stories about him is that when the County Chief was in town, the Marshal demanded he should come to the temple for a visit. At the Marshal’s instruction, a very large glass of the renowned local firewater (116 proof kaoliang) was prepared for the County Chief and he was told to drink up and listen. What the Marshal had to say was that certain repairs were needed on the local scene and would the government please do something about it. (The story does not go on to tell whether the repairs were all subsequently put through.)

       One of the Marshal’s quirks is that he loves opera. About two years ago, when Brother Tiger was in town and went to see the Marshal, he said he was planning to take early retirement. The Marshal said Hey, not so fast now, you’re not done yet. Since you’re a big shot in the opera world, I want you to stay on long enough to arrange a nice opera performance for me to watch. So Brother Tiger agreed! (This was not the Marshal’s first interaction with their family...years previously, when their daughter was having a difficult pregnancy, the Marshal gave a medical prescription, a certain remedy to be drunk by the girl for a certain period of time, after which the trouble disappeared. Another time, when Brother and Auntie Tiger’s son was getting married in Taiwan, the Marshal was a guest at the wedding...he had been flown over to Taiwan, sedan chair and all, in a regular passenger plane.)

       So at the Marshal’s behest, Brother Tiger shelved his early retirement and busily set to work to organize the opera – finding a suitable play, enlisting musicians etc. The Marshal himself designated which performers were to play which roles. This all took time, but by the time we got over to Matsu for a visit a few days ago, things were at an advanced stage and the opera was being rehearsed at a locale provided by a local school. We went to watch. The Marshal was present in his chair rig, watching the whole time.

       After the rehearsal, a table was set up with incense ash on it so that the Marshal could write out his reactions and suggestions. The bearers brought him over, tilted his rig into writing position, and the bumping and marking commenced. Brother Tiger, based on all his professional experience, gave the performance a ‘grade’ – 85 points out of a possible 100. Not good enough, said the Marshal; next time I want you to get it up to 95.

       Certain performers were singled out as needing improvement. This time they got by with a mere admonishment, but on other occasions the Marshal has been known to demand ‘punishment’ in the form of making the deficient performer kneel on the cold stone floor for the time it takes one stick of incense to burn to the end – about one full hour.

       The cult of the Marshal in Armor is not practiced in Taiwan proper or even in Matsu as a whole. It is specific to the locality of Qinbi where we were staying, and (I have been told) to certain spots on the Chinese Mainland.

--Lloyd Haft

February 4, 2015

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 26)

Fundamentals of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, by Wen-Shan Huang who was Justin Stone’s teacher, contains a preface by Justin Stone – just as Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih!, published at about the same time (1974), not only includes a foreword by Huang but is dedicated to him as a ‘friend and teacher.’ Huang’s book, unlike Stone’s brief manual, is an imposing tome, 559 pages in all, more like a reference book for a lifetime. Probably nobody ever read it at one sitting.

       It took me forty years to get around to the Appendices at the back, which are in Chinese. (By that time I had at least a reasonable knowledge of Chinese, though I still had to ask my wife what certain key phrases meant...)

       In the third Appendix, where Huang lists some acknowledgments, he calls Justin Stone by a Chinese name, adding the English name in parentheses. The Chinese name is Shi Dong 石東, the two characters meaning ‘stone’ and ‘east’ respectively. Shi is an existing Chinese family name, and Dong is a plausible first name.  If we rearrange the characters to put the first and last names in the usual Western order (‘Dong Shi’), they mean ‘Oriental Stone’ or ‘Eastern Stone.’ Very appropriate, given Justin’s intense study and assimilation of Oriental meanings and values.

       I have no way of knowing whether it was Wen-Shan Huang himself who gave Justin this name, but it is a reasonable guess. Western students of Chinese things often receive a name from their Chinese teacher. (I did.) And there is a technical detail of ‘Shi Dong’ which adds to my suspicion that Teacher Huang himself gave this name to Teacher Stone. In giving names to foreigners, the Chinese like to select Chinese syllables which are not only meaningful but more or less resemble the original sound of the person’s name. In Southern Chinese speech, ‘Shi Dong’ would likely be pronounced ‘Si Dong,’ or if pronounced very fast – as is usual – ‘S-dong.’ To Chinese ears that would sound very close to ‘Stone.’ And Wen-Shan Huang was of South Chinese origin.

       I don’t know if Justin actually used this Chinese name much. (Incidentally, in the older spelling common in those days, 'Shi Dong’ would have been ‘Shih Tung.’) But maybe there are other students out there who, like me, have been curious as to what his Chinese name might be. If somebody does know of another attested  Chinese name for Justin Stone, please do let me know!

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

Sonnets by Zhu Xiang 朱湘十四行詩選譯

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 25)

Sonnets by Zhu Xiang 朱湘十四行詩選譯

translated by Lloyd Haft

Zhu Xiang 朱湘 (1904-1933) was one of the great pioneers of modern Chinese poetry. In the years after World War I, Chinese poets were struggling to find ways of writing a new poetry that would go beyond the Classical Chinese tradition and do justice to modern developments in both language and thought. It was not easy for them to get an audience for their experiments. The prestige of Classical Chinese poetry, and its prominent social role in a Confucianist culture which exalted the written word in time-honored forms, made Western-style verse seem at first more like an amusement than a legitimate literary form.

        Among a small circle of young enthusiasts, however, Zhu Xiang had admirers. Widely read in both traditional and modern literature, he published his first book of verse in 1925. It might have seemed that he was on his way to a bright literary and academic career. His sensitive and disharmonious character, however, led him to break with one promising environment after another. Originally associated with Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931) as one of the ‘Crescent Moon’ group of poets, he eventually fell out with Xu and published vituperative attacks on him, calling him a ‘fake poet’ who wrote ‘banal’ and ‘nauseating’ verse. He tried going to America for study, but at both Lawrence University and the University of Chicago, he soon found reasons to quit school in protest. Returning to China to become a department head at Anhui University, he soon quit his job in anger. His marriage – ironically, a supremely traditional match which his parents had arranged for him even before he was born – proved disastrous, and at the age of 29, unable to solve the personal and financial problems that dogged him, he committed suicide.[1]

        Zhu Xiang’s strong interest in Western poetic forms is reflected, among other things, in his metrical translations of Shelley’s verse. His posthumously published collection The Stone Gate (石門集) includes 71 original poems in the sonnet form, making him the most productive Chinese sonnetteer of the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the 'sonnets,' like English Sonnet 6, deviate from the normal 14-line form in a way that is reminiscent of the 'curtal sonnets' of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The typography of the originals is rather strange: each sonnet appears as two blocks of seven vertically printed lines without stanza divisions, one block above the other. Symmetrical and neat though this arrangement was, it obscured the precision and intricacy of the stanza structures and rhyme schemes which Zhu Xiang had so carefully observed.[2] In the Chinese versions of the sonnets I have translated below, I have rearranged the typography so as to read horizontally and from left to right. I have done my best to edit the pronunciation, which is not always clearly legible in the original.

English Sonnet 6

If there had been no quake, there would remain

no precious ruins, records of Pompeii.

Columbus was a pirate: greed for gain

that gave us a bigger map, where more land lay.

The same Bible held millennia civilized

they almost murdered Galileo by.

Science fermented: hell grew authorized.

Saturn seen, disasters drop from the sky.

Hard to discern the cycle of man’s lot...

Growth from wreck, evil in good begot.

沒有地震，那滂佩伊故墟

便無從留下珍貴的文獻。

科倫布是海盜；他的貪慾

卻拏新版圖加上了地面。

「聖經」 撐起有千年的文化，

幾幾乎拿蓋里留給殺害—

科學釀成了地獄的批發，

都是土星見了，降下天災。

人事的循環太難於捉摸……

建設來自破壞，善產生惡。

English Sonnet 16

A single sickle moon bringing a couple of stars.

Cool. Unbound. The marketplace, on the night set:

a dog barks in the distance. Through the street’s heart, cars

rush but rarely; dimmed is care, quiet is fret.

Suddenly the breast is awash, an ancient longing swells.

And all around, an ancient scene, seeming sight

of wilds, frogs, willows, elms where the tiller dwells

and rivers unfold from foothills, out of the dew of night.

The mountain spirit whispers: there’s a stream about.

As if forever. Pine, pagoda. Cypress, shrine:

they welcome not the traveler, nor cast him out.

If he has come, let him sit on the stone incline

and gaze on the always far and ancient – I’m imagining,

facing a couple of stars and a single sickle shining.

只是一鐮刀的月亮，帶兩顆星，

清涼，灑脫，在市廛定下來的夜；

遠方有犬吠，車輛奔走過街心，

寥落的；擾攘與喧囂已經安歇。

古老的情思驀然潮起在胸頭，

以及古老的意境。仿佛有群蛙

搏動在原野內，榆柳，田舍河流

展開在夜露之中，在山麓之下。

山靈的喉舌微語著，一條山溪。

仿佛是終古的，松柏，寶塔，寺廟；

它們並不迎迓遊客，也不嫌棄，

要是他來了，坐在石磴上，閑眺。

總是這麼古老，悠遠的，我幻想，

對了兩顆星，與一鐮刀的月亮。

Italian Sonnet 2

I’d lay aside all wide of sky or sea

if you’d leave me but one small tenement,

the way a seed in the fruit’s core is pent,

to hide me from the outer world’s cruelty

and the true road of living let me see:

emerge reborn as pine cone’s subtle scent,

almond smooth, walnut rich but prudent.

Some go feeding the common gluttony,

some in spring sun overfly the peaks

and only then set roots and petal, slow,

after a hundred years reach out, clawed

(what their deep cry by day and night bespeaks)

to clench green, that ripened it not go:

and harden with that, while the four winds maraud.

我情願拿海闊天空扔掉。

只要你肯給我一間小房—

像仁子蹲在果核的中央，

讓我來躲避外界的強暴；

讓我來領悟這生之大道，

脫胎換骨，變成松子清香。

核桃內豐外嗇杏仁潤涼……

有的去給世人越吃越要；

有的，趁陽春飛越過山嶺

那時候，生根著葉起來，慢，

很慢的……百年後他伸手爪

[ 他高呼，低喚在黑夜，白天 ]

要抓住那青，成年不變換，

與那硬，任風在四邊騷擾。

Italian Sonnet 16

In curious dream’s arena I caught sight,

in body’s shell evolved, of two of me:

the left a singing, innocent beauty,

the right a sword dancer, robed in light.

Radiance on all sides guarded them with white

nor granted a single sorrow-splash entry,

yet sorrow added watering waves, musically,

to measure grander, mood more rich and right.

Of this frame’s remnants I’ll not deign to reck

– distinguish as ye may the ‘life,’ the ‘wreck’ –

for the eternal mates you’ve never found the word:

separate east and west their journeys seem.

Only in sky will song accord, in dream,

with the rise and falling of the shadow sword.

在一場奇特的夢裏，我瞧見

軀殼中化出來了一雙自我—

美麗，天真，左邊的她正唱歌；

右邊的，光芒繞體，他舞寶劍。

那護身的白光關照到四面，

不容煩惱灑的水絲毫透過，

同時，煩惱澆上音樂的波，

那情調更豐富，節律更莊嚴。

這一架的殘剩我毫不關懷；

儘由你們去分了，「人生，」「破敗!」

你們抓不住那永恆的一雙……

雖說他們的途徑各自東西，

唯有在天空上，唯有在夢裏，

歌聲才叫得應那劍影低昂。

Italian Sonnet 22

Proffering its sixty rings of jade, the soul

pays its respects at the shrine of life, where true

and false – the variously carved blossoms – through

circling months and years are threaded whole.

The modest temple plays its earnest role:

all beings’ offerings are accepted, yet there do

remain but precious few, each strung onto

a necklace, or hung from a pavilion pole.

More than the sands in the Ganges, for all time

jade rings will be (be praised!), in fragrance,

in splendor and peace, in the reverence of descendants:

and even the souls be decked in lanterns green

while they gaze on old toils borne, old dreams seen –

till the whole body sinks in sweat and grime.

捧著六十塊圓璧，魂靈呈獻

有人生的龕上：有真也有假；

有精也有粗，那雕鏤成的花

盤繞過小周的月，大周的年。

並非無量大的，這廟宇莊嚴……

衆生的敬奉雖是全部收下，

存留的卻並不多；它們懸掛

在楹柱上，或是佩戴在胸前。

不作恆河的沙，長此有圓璧

〔這是多麼可欽！〕陪侍著芬芳，

光采，恬靜；長此供後人瞻仰；

魂魄也能燃著碧色的燈籠，

常來眺望往昔的辛勤，幻夢，

一直到全身頹圮入了汗泥。

Italian Sonnet 34

He shouldn’t have been born, the writer of verse.

I’ve duly undergone my share of shame,

swallowed the bitters of the human game –

compared to certain others, I’m the worse:

the Muse’s retinue. I’m not averse

to falling short of an Average Man’s name.

Whatever this heaven-given tongue exclaim,

it’s never of my own. The words are Hers.

Far be it from me to hope for more

as long as why one here endures this span

– that it was all for Her – the Muse infers.

Nor shall I be disturbed if man curse,

call me a beggar. For a goddess one can

never force; one only can implore.

作詩的原不該生下，

應分的我受盡羞辱，

又吃世間各種的苦—

比起有些人來，還差。

詩神的侍從，我不怕

遠離了作一個凡夫；

這天賜的舌頭說出，

並非我的，是她的話。

旁的我並不敢希望，

只要這番堅忍，詩神

能以知道，是爲了她。

我也不理會人唾罵

爲一個乞丐：向神靈

只好去求，不能勉強。

Italian Sonnet 52: “Homer”

Blind prophet! You who saw the light

in darkness – inseparable: two and one;

seeing the two-faced god: and seeing the prone

worshippers’ toning voice and shadowed sight

born of a single sound, a sound so slight.

You sang the riddle revealed by the god of the sun,

told of the expedition’s exultation

and how bitter returning wisdom’s plight,

told how life begins in a beautiful grapple –

and another kind of beauty when it’s done.

Between are storms and slaughters, mire and rest.

So it is, at the honored gods’ behest.

And when it’s finished?...Blind man, I mean their fun.

You’ve no idea. That’s another apple.

啊，盲目的先知者，看見光明

在黑暗之中，分不開，二而一；

又看見那一身兩面的神祇，

與頂禮膜拜者的聲調，形影。

一個聲音生的，便只是聲音—

你歌唱出日神所宣示的謎：

說遠征的「熱烈」是如何快意。

「智慧」的歸家又是多麼艱辛；

說人生開始於美麗的攘奪，

說人生終結在另一種美麗，

中間是風浪，屠宰，溷濁，鬆弛……..

如此，遵照了神祇們的意旨，

它完了……至於他們的那遊戲，

盲人，你並不知道怎樣結果。

---

[1] See the chapter on Zhu Xiang in my The Chinese Sonnet: Meanings of a Form, published in Leiden by the Research School of Asian, African, and American Studies, 2000.

[2] The edition I have used was published in Shanghai by the Commercial Press in 1935. My translations, used here with permission, have appeared earlier in The Chinese Sonnet: Meanings of a Form.