Yang Lingye’s 羊令野 ‘Sutra Leaves’ 貝葉

Sutra Leaves

by Yang Lingye, translated by Lloyd Haft[1]

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FIRST LEAF

Locked within my galaxy

are you and I. Upon a Sutra Leaf

we are witnesses to the Buddha.

Two holy relics, planted

in the eyes within my eyes,

illuminate the heart within my heart,

festoon the top of the Bodhi Tree.

A lamp. Goes with me

like the stars of morning and evening.

Goes with me:

the cosmos is carried on a single Leaf,

hidden in my palm. And like a relic

it flashes in your eyes.

Tonight the Seven-Story Pagoda is more elegant than ever,

adorned with the charm of a coiffure.

Bell tones fade within the clouds.

There is only the wind chime beside your ear

to awaken with its swaying

the war drums, the fire of the centuries.

And in that rolling sound,

that roaring blaze,

the night will rust no longer.

Within your eyes

the night will rust no longer.

The night will rust no longer in my heart.

The ravishing posture of a pagoda.

The boundless content of a leaf.

The radiant halo of a relic.

Locked within. My heart.

Locked within. My eyes.

The night is very beautiful.

The night will rust no longer.

SECOND LEAF

At the moment of cock’s cry, five o’clock,

I am reading a patch of constellations

in the corner of the window.

My eyes awaken, fixed on the Cross.

No wind.

The butterfly on your hair-tips wants to fly,

the sun your feet hold down wants to fly.

But inside the window. Outside the window.

The cock’s cry locks the time

at five o’clock.

I swallow the first cupful of daylight

which adorns once again

your brow, eyes, lips.

The vibrating wings of a butterfly.

And the cock’s cry locks the time

at five o’clock,

the night will rust no longer.

The mystery of desire leaks forth

from the edge of every leaf

and the stars no longer thirst

for the sleep of constellations.

I look up at my Lady,

my Self. Night upon those lips.

The moment’s radiance soft,

smooth as a fossil.

The structure. Does not rust.

The night. Does not rust.

My hand feels myself, and at that moment

a hunger compels me

to swallow the story in a book.

But my Lady is trembling

at five o’clock.

The hair-tips: no words.

The bed: no dream.

The night which will not rust

lies folded on a Sutra Leaf.

THIRD LEAF

I behold myself unencumbered.

The third of the Sutra Leaves:

Beauty Beyond Form.

Ego is Form.

Ego is the Void.

It is the Third Leaf.

The ego in a leaf is the Buddha.

The ego in a flower is the world.

I am conceived in the Third Leaf.

I am constructed in the Third Leaf.

The kernel within the kernel of a fig

has no dreams,

knows no obstruction.

When there is no ego in the kernel

there is a kernel in my mind.

When there is no kernel in my mind

there is ego in the kernel.

Ego comes. Ego goes.

Ego hears. Ego thinks.

Thus. Thus. Ego is in the midst of it.

FOURTH LEAF

My drunken boat without oars

drifts past lips, drifts past eyes,

drifts past the coastline

of your lofty, unprevaricating nose.

Forever that one line, land’s boundary,

departing from me.

Thrown toward me.

Just at the moment when that one line

is strangling me.

A blue hunger and thirst

entangles the brows of Tantalus.

The fish and dragons are sleepless,

the seaweed dishevelled.

If the Bird of Eternal Regret

awakens the ancient wine in a bronze vase

I’ll drink, blanketed in moonlight

in endless rolling mist.

A chart of the sea. My latitude and longitude

are not drawn in.

The green lights of those nameless harbors

keep hungering for the sight

of drunken flushed faces.

But my hawser cannot keep mirages

from sinking away.

Within the splendor of a cactus

I will watch for the swimming figure of Leander

to guide my drunken boat without oars

to moor tonight beneath your beacon.

Next to your lips.

FIFTH LEAF

You adorn your drunken beauty

with the colors of all wines.

And at that moment, I drink.

It is not mist,

not fog.

Rocking me in the eye of your typhoon.

And then the trembling.

And then the arising.

In the bottom of the glass

the Seven-Story Tower collapses.

My lips touch

the confusion of your hair.

The gods rebel in the tumult of an instant.

Tumult. Pure joy revolves

in the halo of a grape.

And the pupil of every eye in the foam

broods upon the matter of tomorrow’s sunrise.

And at that moment, I drink.

The beauty of your drunkenness

spreads between bed and sleep,

touching the hunger and thirst of an epoch.

I drink. My drunkenness becomes

a sky full of stars.

SIXTH LEAF

In the Heavenly City of Jasmine

a ring-shaped road goes round and round

the summer days, staking beautiful nostalgias

at roulette. They fall in rich confusion.

Shooting down the sun in a wineglass

with a smile of Enlightenment

you sound the full depth,

decorating the curtains of dusk

with many a beautiful face.

Last night’s story becomes

a reprint of an etching,

covering my walls, shielding my eyes.

Rolling and unrolling willingly

in the rumor of a breeze beside your hair.

Silence is a way-station

in bas-relief on your spade-shaped cheeks.

At a single glance from a drunken eye

countless cities will fall.

Fall in the rose bushes, blossom by blossom

adrift, rising and falling with the footfalls

in a far passageway, not knowing in what style

tomorrow’s miniature landscape will be arranged,

or by what hand.

SEVENTH LEAF

On the Seventh Leaf

I am tailored by that hand.

A new moon graces my shirt front.

A poinsettia awakens at midnight in the window

and you awaken in Bethlehem.

And the gods cry your name

in the first stroke of the clock.

Every eye is printed

with the candlelight softness

of that moment. So,

go ahead and mould your world.

All the future is held within your eyes.

Just the way sleigh tracks,

written in the ground at the sky’s first clearing,

awaken the first jasmine blossom here.

Babies’ smiles

are unfolding among the leaves

a poetic calendar of seasons

and watching you attentively

within the eyes of this world.

EIGHTH LEAF

Last night the honeysuckle

blossomed in Pan’s fingers.

When did the clouds finish reading

the goats’ hoofprints?

Wistful flute sounds

pour from the fingers.

And whisperings, sentimentally

lingering on blades of grass,

are stitching across the whole window

the renovated colors of dawn.

Eyes heavy with homesickness

comb through dishevelled clouds on a forehead.

At the moment of the stars’ downfall

a pair of reindeer came leaping for joy,

leaving behind an echo in the valley of night.

On that echoing wave

my name is written,

my portrait painted.

And the cloud-tresses, as ever tenderly

encircling the moment of mystery,

come out of that world.

Come out.

The wind of the wilderness

turns us around. A waltz commences.

NINTH LEAF

The man who paints the sun

has never yet succeeded

in painting his own shadow.

So difficult to catch: to the east, west,

south, north. So difficult

to catch yourself within the round, round sun.

To catch.

A beautiful butterfly, during a waltz in a dream,

teases the hem of your skirt, catches the shadow

painted by the sun.

But the man who paints the sun

is confused by its shifting positions

on the seasons’ pearly teeth;

he chews on an unfamiliar language, chews on

odds and ends of his own shadow.

Twists himself upon

the projection of the sun, between

folds of meditations.

Kisses the Lady’s ankles, crawls ahead,

past the inner precincts, rising steeply

on to the top. Within the clouds

I hear my name being called.

Sing! Sun,

paint the Self’s shadow between the Sutra Leaves,

sun! Paint it! Press all the tones of nature

fold on fold between heart and heart.

And then revolve; and then follow

the projection of a shadow, a sound wave’s

propagation.

In the world’s revolving,

time’s ever-existing axis

shows a new face, while a wave-like gesture of hands

paints roses on the sun’s forehead.

TENTH LEAF

A miniature landscape.

The bittersweet beauty of June

is captured in my cactus.

Then a tenth sun is painted

beneath a Sutra Leaf.

You are trimmed into a tiny laurel tree

with a crown to cover your forehead.

And the crescent moon of desire

puts a love to the slow torture

of hair and leaves. –

The brothers of the sun sing their own dirges,

paint their own portraits.

Seasonal color blindness affects an eye

that holds many secrets in storage.

Inexhaustible firmament, with what

shall I decorate you?

Thirst between the lips, summoned to drink

the ritual rain of spring –

coming out of hibernation

jolt by jolt I awaken

beneath a southern window,

awakening upon a Touch-Me-Not.

ELEVENTH LEAF

Give to me hands.

Give to me lips.

Between tree and tree, between star and star,

encountering each other in the instant of the centuries.

Grasp the clouds of a season to adorn

your brow. Brew the rains of a season

as drink for your eyes.

The sound of the sun’s footsteps

installs itself in the postures of our sleep.

But the night is without color, without form.

Carve me on time’s wall of shadows.

When I look upward, paint the blue of eyeballs.

But the sound of the clock is in bas-relief.

The fairy dragon does not soar,

the phoenix does not dance.

Among these columns, these pavilions,

a Lady leaped out of my forehead.

A what leaped out?

A red sun, razing

passionately as roses

the last bastions of Self.

TWELFTH LEAF

Goddess-of-Mercy Mountain

gradually comes through in bas-relief.

And we shift position

at every moment. On a palette of evening haze

the perception of lips and eyelashes

emerges in pastel.

And a desire beyond all senses

flames up in the looking upward.

Leaving all echoes behind on the trajectory

we take a truer road, just this once

foresaking distance, causing a rift

between time and space.

Scenes are daubed at will

between human pupils and lips,

molding ravishing expressions

for this world. And my left foot extends

to the ends of the earth; my right foot

sinks into a corner of the sea.

The one who came crawling

beyond that threshold, the prodigal,

awakens to horses’ hoofs, cocks’ cries.

And the face of the years – a counterfeit coin

flung into the sunlight.

The gold of silence, cast into an image

of Her Who Heareth the cries of the world.

THIRTEENTH LEAF

The black and white of hair about the temples

is entangled with debates on life.

And you are not content with death;

you’ll be back from there.

The tears and laughter of this season

still lie swaddled within

your sleeping form.

In the sunlight, you are a naked infant.

–        A flower, after enduring the bee’s sting,

sucks honey of the first vintage.

And from the honey of death, you will recall

Mother’s first milk.

All the suppositions have already started.

And you, for all your masks,

are a wakeful drinker. Contemplate

your own shadow on the wall of the world.

The oyster at the bottom of the sea,

pregnant with a radiance,

ignores the fish eyes peering side to side.

Sometimes being reduced to ash

is purer than burning. A joy

is calling you onward.

Calling you onward, the threshold of death.

You’ll be back from there.

---

[1] Originally published in Raoul D. Findeisen and Robert H. Gassmann (eds.), Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marián Gálik, Berne etc.: Peter Lang 1998, pp. 387-399. A few slight errors have been corrected in the present text. I wish to thank Lucia Hau-Yoon, William Tay, T. I. Ong-Oey and Warren K. J. Sung for the many hours they spent helping me with this very difficult text.

The 20^th-century Taiwan poet Yang Lingye (pseud. of Huang Zhongcong 黃仲琮 , 1923-1994) has not fared well in the hands of compilers of anthologies. After a period of growing prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, he seems to have drifted out of the spotlight, I hope temporarily. If present-day readers had to categorize his poetry, the words ‘Modernist’ and ‘Buddhist’ might both be used. Personally I would vehemently add the term ‘Existentialist’ (in a broad sense) to these.

Sutra Leaves has been called both a ‘long poem’ and a sequence or suite of poems. The original Chinese text, first completed in 1959, is available in the posthumous selected volume of Yang Lingye’s poetry Jiaohuade nanren 叫花的男人 published in Taipei in 2004 by Erya 爾雅. That volume also includes the text of the prose-poem sequence Notes on Facing the Wall 面壁手記 from which I have published selected translations in the previous blog post.

In 1995, I published a brief article outlining my own approaches in reading and interpreting Yang Lingye’s poetry. I hope to revise and expand it soon. It can be accessed under the link ‘On Yang Ling-yeh’s (羊令野) poetry’ on this blog.

Yang Lingye’s 羊令野 ‘Notes on Facing the Wall’ 面壁手記

from Notes on Facing the Wall

prose-poems by Yang Lingye 羊令野, selected and translated by Lloyd Haft[1]

_________________________________

[10]

A soul is undergoing the Death of a Thousand Cuts, from its own graver. The final form has not yet emerged. But already your hands hang down, the look in your eyes drifts with the gloom, your lips are shivering in the season of ice.

Now that you’ve lost all the sketches, how are you going to sculpt a Self? You have lost your way among the beautiful and the ugly: caught between humans and spirits. You draw a cross on your sole: east south west north. Where are you going to set out from?

All the mountains are already rising. Amidst that ancient solemnity, escorting the clouds you surge along into a cosmos that awaits enlightenment. The field of your heart resounds with your superhuman footfalls.

[40]

Merely lifting your hands, you become a ladder to the clouds. And a desire arises. The beauty of flying: you call and the wind pays obeisance.

Who’s to ascend by means of you? Those spaces beyond clambering. And you: a tortuous road through the sky, unfolding into the Void.

It’s that way of standing: what trees mean. What distracts me. While your solitary shadow keeps all its dangerous depth.

[47]

Wind, lightning cannot touch you, nor the carpenter’s axe. You are a gnarled oak, beyond mark and measure. Sun and moon swirl in your growth rings.

Fragrant nor pretty, though you walk an unfamiliar road you unfold a landscape of your own, using the sunlight to form a shadow on the ground.

Remembering ruins: pillars and beams meant to stand, burned in the fires of lost empire. But you, the lowly oak, have a corner of the green hills all to yourself, luxuriantly being nothing special.

[50]

You heard a bullet leaping along the trajectory. And then a life burst out of your breast. What you are holding in your cupped hands is that kind of life: kneading the sound of metal into an image of tomorrow, its fire-colored face washed up from the blood that a million human cries drowned in.

Behind your eyelids the sea thickens, becomes a tear. Mountains are pressed by your palms, becoming grain-sized fossils. When you forge yourself into a sword with which to prop up the sky, the very constellations come tumbling down.

You have no name in the books of time, though your body is a history that can never be read to the end. And from somewhere, against a background of curling smoke and battlefields, the sunlight of life emerges in pastel.

[52]

Your footsteps are an inquiry into my whereabouts. And free from the depths of my valley the oriole’s song rises, woven into the brocade of a landscape. Wakeful blue eye, who was it that planted the exiled willow beyond its habitat, and sold springtime at a giveaway to the dwellers in the sunny South?

And how many refrains are you still going to sing? The westward road stretches even longer, your shadow has grown thin as a daisy: why not trim it into a bonsai? Who will bring you an autumn with which to color the Southern Mountains?

So you brandish the cup, urging your own shadow to drink. Your gaunt fingers pluck cold strings. For whom will you play the lute that your face is?

[53]

The lute that your face is sounds your autumnal plaint across the red of autumn leaves: that blood-washed ball, the setting sun. The final fall of the city of loneliness.

The first snow flies as a flag of surrender above the drunken guest’s temples. From in a mirror you read aloud the proclamation: joys and sorrows to be altered beyond recognition! A banner painted with battlefield scenes comes snapping into view.

Gather up the gunfire complexion of yesteryear; make of it a stiff border for the travel bag that your flesh is. Like the clanking ring on the haft of an ancient sword, the wailing walker’s footprints trudge out song beyond all following.

[70]

Smash open any of the audible worlds, and you come leaping out. Iron and steel blossom with graceful sparks in obeisance to you. In every house enjoying the sleep that is the fruit of autumn.

It’s an imprisonment, like a peachpit, and spring peeps out of it. While the language of flowers longs mightily for a wind to write it wide.

You forge a Self in stones and metals; the quiet flow of time falls silent to allow your shadow to pass.

[71]

The neighbor to the east raises chrysanthemums; the neighbor to the west makes wine. And there you are, sad and between, heaping yourself into a mountain. Call Tao Qian and he doesn’t answer; call Li Bai and Du Fu, they won’t come. Your solitary shadow is carved in silvery moonlight across a garden of allusion.

It is always at these moments when the willow’s drunkenness congeals into blue eyes. Just in the midst of your ease, a gaze is fixed on you.

Walk circles around the pine, the chrysanthemum. Sample the face in the wineglass. To be sure, the wine’s no longer the fruit..

[72]

Your scales become sediment, become an arc of moonlight on water beyond the angler’s reach. Your wings are adrift, a cloud no arrow will touch. And so you let your shadow wander, wide as sea, empty as sky.

But what is embroidered on the map of your heart? You’ve laid all the patterns aside, giving the flowers back to the snow, marrying the moon off to the wind. As you let yourself melt away into nature, the very face of this world mutates.

Inside your body a time of honesty is taking shape. A beautifully wrought fountain of blood is being opened, rejoining the purple river’s flow while you keep charting your little course across the heart’s transparencies.

[73]

You are the cracked earth that even the clouds’ long stilts can stamp no moisture out of. In what the sunlight’s golden blade dissects – in those parched crevices, you keep hoping to find an edible fish. And who’s to tap a well of autumn water in those blind eyeballs? In a vase full of tears, a soul is dying of thirst.

Twisting your own hair into a rope, you hang passionately from whatever appears, while gloom interlaces the thicket of your hair with a boundless, vague luxuriance. Who will trap the light of autumn and kindle a torch of red leaves for you?

Get the moon to lend you a diviner’s coin: can that obscure text, your fortune, be translated into the darkness of tomorrow, into the forwarding address of a lost shadow?

[77]

Your long arms dragged, became oars; your loose hair became a sail and you were pulled down every kind of stream. Who knows the winds, the tides you poked your way through.

It must have been the river that wine turns into, that you came bobbing along. Are you the one who caught the moon? Your net bulges with the numberless eyes of autumn.

While moonlight wanders through the alleys, you remember a dried-up river bed. And then your boatman’s song falls, falls the full length of your shadow.

[89]

Who could stir up your footprints from the campfires’ ashes? The last gunshot still rings with the news: fire contact made. Every tree waits in its original state.

The butt of the gun in your hand is already sprouting with spring fungus. The myriad birds sing sadly; the hundred flowers are spattered with tears. Who’s to read yesterday’s Diary of a Hunter? Weekend: green unicorn circling left and right, colorful phoenix dancing up, down.

But your body rises as a tree that marks the years on a map without coordinates. One by one the wind-eroded clouds come out of hiding.

[88]

Night after night your two eyes, which have survived the first frost, gaze upward, becoming a skylight at autumn’s end. Who will siphon off the stars you overflow with, and wash your grieving shadow clean?

If two migrant birds were to fly out slowly from behind the crystalline curtains of a boudoir, the Milky Way would not be the home they returned to. Like snow, like falling stars their multifarious feathers would drift one by one into oblivion.

Two ploshing springs keep coming, painting a stream of blue across the sky: sun and moon, held in your longing, that sunflower exploding, that dawn.

---

[1] The 20^th-century Taiwan poet Yang Lingye (pseud. of Huang Zhongcong 黃仲琮 , 1923-1994) has not fared well in the hands of compilers of anthologies. After a period of growing prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, he seems to have drifted out of the spotlight, I hope temporarily. If present-day readers had to categorize him, the words ‘Modernist’ and ‘Buddhist’ would probably both be used. Personally I would vehemently add the term ‘Existentialist’ (in a broad sense) to these.

The term mianbi 面壁, which I here translate literally as ‘facing the wall,’ is also a traditional Buddhist term for meditation practice. One of its modern meanings is [ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary 2003]: to ‘engage in pursuing something difficult.’

The original Chinese text I have used is from Yang Lingye zixuan ji 羊令野自選集 [Yang Lingye: Works selected by himself], published by Liming Cultural Enterprises 黎明文化事業 , Taipei, 1979. Thanks to Liming for permission. The original contains 94 numbered sections, of which I have selected and translated 13.

In 1995, I published a brief article outlining my own approaches in reading and interpreting Yang Lingye’s poetry. I hope to revise and expand it soon. It can be accessed under the link 'On Yang Ling-yeh's (羊令野) poetry' on this blog.

Bosvijver (gedicht)

Moeder, wat u samenbracht –

alles wat zich mij

heeft willen noemen –

was mij veel,

meer dan alle toppen

van het bos rondom.

Als vissen om een drijvend korstje

vraten aan uw hart gedachten

ieder met een mond,

elk een honger.

Inwachtend, in-

dragend liep u vol.

Uw lijdens groeiden uit,

werden leden: mijn

longen uw verlangen,

nieren uit uw nood,

lippen uit uw hongerende mond,

woorden uit de lippen

die als wolken in de koele morgen kwamen.

Zo bracht ik verder wat zich in u

zocht, nergens vond:

honger het enige dat bij u bleef.

Nu alle jaren, alle ringen

weg en alle lijn verwaaid,

terug in het bos van toen,

hier aan de oude oever, denk ik

terug aan u,

hier aan u –

waar moet ik u vinden anders

dan beneden,

onder in het water

dat de bomen spiegelt nog, niet meer u?

Hier aan u –

hier laat ik weer,

laat ik neer wat weegt,

haakt,

hangt ons als een honger aan elkaar.

--Lloyd Haft

Paintings by Joseph Yen 2 (poems from Formosa)

(1)   Lotus by Night

How to tell the dark

from the blossom it feeds?

Leaf’s shadow spreading

from stem rising?

And the water – where

else than in waves,

never the light

but the light divided –

up now,

down then,

never where it was,

breaking into sight

wherever I am breaking,

wherever an I is spreading,

mirroring its leaf, its shadows,

ever its deepening eyes.

(2)   Mother and Child

Where do I have a face

except where I am open,

where up I look

and into me you be?

Where are my lips

except at your coming?

Saying you I see,

know in your name my need.

Eyes closed –

where I feel you is light –

knowing in your ribs

a form of my hand: fingers of me,

finding me now:

what made my face

and seeks my face

and feeds me, feeds with seeking.

--Lloyd Haft (from Formosa, Querido 2005)

Whatever Happened to Air?

 (Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 23)

At a certain age, many of us suddenly crave to revive old familiarities. It becomes haunting and vital to find out ‘whatever happened to’ this or that schoolmate, to take a trip to the town and neighborhood where one spent the first summer after graduation, met one’s first serious...and so on.

        The Sentimental Journey need not be physical. You can do it in the space of a single library. In my case, a big part of it was to re-read, or even just take another respectful look at the title pages of, some of the books that had introduced me to Oriental Studies when I was just getting into my twenties. They included Spoken Chinese by Hockett and Fang, books on Buddhism by Edward Conze and Christmas Humphreys, even the Joyce Chen Cook Book.

        Looking back through these Venerable Tomes, one finds things that in the light of later training and experience are ‘incorrect.’ But as anyone who has lived in the Far East knows, the authoritativeness of the Teachings does not depend on whether they are factually true, but only on whether they are still circulated and quoted.

        One of the books I went back to was East Asia: The Great Tradition by Edwin O. Reischauer and John King Fairbank.[1] In the chapter ‘Classic China: The Golden Age of Chinese Thought,’ on page 77, I stumbled on a passage that would not have seemed strange to me as a student:

...all nature is made up of varying combinations of the “five elements” or “five powers” (wu hsing): wood, metal, fire, water and earth. The parallel to the four elements of the Greeks (earth, fire, air and water) is striking.

After decades of further reading both inside and outside ‘the field,’ I have two comments on this. The first is that nowadays not many academics would translate the hsing 行 (nowadays usually spelled xing) as ‘elements’ – that term sounds too material and physical. The translation might be ‘energies,’ ‘processes,’ energetic transitions,’ ‘phases,’ ‘modi’ or whatever, but probably not ‘elements.’ This would already seriously undermine any comparison with ancient Greek thought.

        But even more importantly – for the life of me I cannot see any ‘parallel’ whatsoever, let alone a ‘striking’ one, between a four- and a fivefold system. In the Greek grouping, there are indeed four radical constituents. This quaternity naturally lends itself to a symmetrical presentation, whether as a circle divided into four equal quadrants, a vertical and a horizontal axis each having two poles, a bar or horizon having two elements above (air and fire) and two below (water and earth), and so on.

        In the Chinese fivefold scheme, symmetry is more problematical. Sometimes the ‘elements’ are drawn up as a circle with wood, fire, metal and water occupying points along the rim and earth in the center. But often the five are equally spaced along the rim, or as points on a pentagram or star. Their order is not always the same. They can stand in various kinds of mutual relationship, so that it is not possible to state that one is higher or lower than another.

        In the writings of C. G. Jung (I am not American enough to call him ‘Carl’ Jung, which he himself never did in his publications), who was a tremendous influence on many young people of my generation, the fourfold or quaternity idea is not only important; it is raised to the status of a supposed ‘archetype’ inherent to human consciousness. It underlies or constitutes the ‘mandala,’ a focus or ordering device.

        But if we are looking for ‘archetypes’ that supposedly apply to the whole of humanity, then what about a people, like the Chinese, who exceed the bounds of the fourfold and get along perfectly well with their fivefold focus?

        Perhaps the Jungian ‘archetype’ notion was more culture-bound than we had thought. Maybe there is no such thing as an inherent quaternity to which consciousness is magnetically attracted. And why should there be? The human hand, undoubtedly one of the unconscious models for such things, has not just four fingers but five, if not – as in the writings of Zhuangzi or the poetry of Zhou Mengdie – even more.

        To be sure, many scholars believe the Chinese fivefold goes back to an earlier fourfold (or more accurately, four-plus-one) scheme. Supposedly there were originally four Quarters (fang 方) surrounding a Center; subsequently the Center was dislodged from its unique role and all five players became equal.[2] But even if this is so, the change is supposed to have occurred several centuries before the beginning of our era, and isn’t it then strange that the Chinese, comprising such a huge percentage of humankind, should have merrily proceeded to live an anti-archetypal and in that sense atypical life for the past couple of thousand years?

        But aside from the validity or otherwise of a formal or structural ‘parallel’ between the Western four and the Eastern five, we can also approach all this from the viewpoint of content. Comparing the Greek and Chinese lists of ‘elements,’ what does the five have that the four lacks?

        As it turns out, things are more complicated. The Chinese model contains two factors that the Greek does not – wood and metal – but at the same time, it importantly lacks the Western element of air.[3]

        I say ‘importantly’ because in Western culture, the ‘air’ element symbolizes mind, spirit, consciousness, or communication, and that factor is often considered the specifically human dimension, the crucial difference between mankind and the non-human world.

        It would go beyond the scope of this Scrapbook to expand on the cultural associations of the Chinese non-air elements of wood and metal. But could we just make a wild leap and surmise that the functions of ‘our’ air, in ‘their’ system, are perfectly well present but divided between wood and metal?

        We cannot. Even the assumption that more or less the same ‘functions’ must be operative for ‘them’ in more or less the same ways, is a wide one. It smacks of archetype-mongering, and I personally do not believe it.[4] In traditional China, people would have had no problem with there being no specific sector reserved for ‘consciousness’ as such. In the fivefold grouping of inner organs which is one of the conceptual mainstays of Chinese medical theory, thought or ‘ratiocination’[5] is treated as one of a group of ‘emotional states’[6] in which both ‘grief and worry’[7] and ‘joy’ are assigned to entirely different organs. I am inclined to agree with Chad Hansen that most ‘Chinese thinkers treat mind as an action guide’ and ‘we may even doubt that an intelligent, rational philosopher working in the ancient [Chinese – LH] conceptual scheme has any reason to postulate consciousness.’[8] A. C. Graham, discussing the two Cheng 二程brothers who were among the most influential neo-Confucian philosophers, says they ‘do not regard the mind as an organ of knowledge distinct from what it knows.’[9]

        Even linguistically, offhand I cannot think of a word in Classical Chinese that would have meant ‘air’ with the same monosyllabic obviousness and plausibility of the jin, shui, mu, huo and tu 金水木火土 that are in standard use for metal, water, wood, fire and earth. The modern word for ‘air’ is kongqi, but neither kong nor qi would have unambiguously meant ‘air’ as opposed to ‘emptiness,’ ‘unreality,’ ‘sky,’ ‘ether,’ ‘energy,’ ‘atmosphere’ or various other things.

        It is true that traditional Chinese medicine includes, in addition to the five phases or elements or whatever, another standard list of factors, this time sixfold, in which ‘wind’ is one of the players. The six are called the liu qi 六氣or six...aaah, but yes, six what? Donald E. Kendall, a well-known author in the Chinese-medicine field from whose work I have profited, calls them the ‘airs,’ ‘sky-airs,’ or ‘atmospheric airs.’[10] Nathan Sivin, whose translations I think mostly have the ring of sinological reliability, calls them ‘climatic configurations.’[11] In any case, I think it is clear that ‘wind’ as a ‘configuration’ or as one of the possible ‘airs,’ is not the same as ‘air’ pure-and-simple.

        Still, I must admit that having mentioned it, I am intrigued by my own thought that maybe ‘wood’ and ‘metal’ have something to do with my mind. Tree-shapes stirred by a breeze at dawn, shadows reflected in a metal-framed mirror at the approach of evening: maybe these Chinese-sounding images have more to do with ourselves than we think. And maybe we think about them more, or in different and less ‘mental’ ways, than our culture has taught us to think that we think.

        And come to think of it, there is at least one important area of Chinese culture in which the ‘elements’ are explicitly features of mental activity. This is the whole family of meditation techniques in which the mind is indeed an ‘action guide,’ directing the imagination or attention through a fixed sequence of foci or loci or stations which are associated with organs of the body.[12] To make this just a bit easier to – what shall we say, ‘imagine’? – I will give a brief description of one of these techniques, practiced by quite a number of people in Taiwan, which I learned earlier this year from an 82-year-old retired actress and opera singer whom I will call Teacher Zhang (her real surname).[13]

        Sitting with crossed legs (if possible in what yoga practitioners call the lotus position), we start by letting our hands rest easily on our knees, with the thumbs lightly touching the index fingers and the other fingers loosely open. The left hand lies palm-up, the right palm-down, so that we have a ‘yin’ and a ‘yang’ hand. Then we check to see that three important points are vertically in line above each other: (1) the ‘yin opening’ or yinqiao 陰竅, an imaginary point nearby the anus and/or slightly in front of it, (2) the ‘heart opening’ or xinqiao 心竅, thought of as between the breasts or nipples, and (3) the ‘general assembly point’ or baihui 百會at the center of the crown. We think of our body as connected with ‘heaven energy’ via the ‘general assembly’ and with ‘earth energy’ via the ‘yin opening’; the ‘heart opening’ in between is to direct or supervise what will go on in our body.

        When these three are in line (as much as possible), we direct our thought to the lowest point, the ‘yin opening.’ We stay there until we have a feeling, a consciousness, or a sense of ‘something’ being there. Directed or accompanied by our thought, the ‘something’ then gradually rises along an imaginary mid-line of the body until it reaches the ‘heart opening.’

        From there, again led or accompanied by our thought or imagination or attention, ‘it’ divides to left and right, going into the lungs on both sides. We think of ‘the Metal of the lungs’ and stay there with our attention, but without straining too hard to avoid extraneous thoughts, which will arise in any case. We do not necessarily keep repeating the words ‘metal’ or ‘lungs’; in the fivefold system, metal is simply the ‘element’ associated with the lungs. We sustain a relaxed awareness of ‘it’ being present in the lungs.

        When we feel it has been enough for now, we let ‘it’ return from left and right into the ‘heart opening’ in the center. From there it proceeds backward through the body to the spinal column and then goes down the back to the level of the kidneys. Again it divides to the left and right, going into the kidneys on each side. We are aware of ‘the Water of the kidneys’ and stay with this until we feel it has been enough for now.

        Again ‘it’ returns from both sides to the mid-line of the back at about kidney level, and from there proceeds forward and down through the interior of the body, to the so-called Cinnabar Field or dantian 丹田. The dantian is not an organ but a theoretically present point. Because of its importance in the so-called Inner Alchemy of Daoism, in English it is often called the ‘Lower Elixir Field.’ Another name is qihai 氣海, the ‘Sea of Energy.’ Skipping all possible debates over the exact location of this point (if there is one), let’s just say for now that it is slightly under and slightly behind the navel.

        We let our attention rest briefly in the Cinnabar Field, then let ‘it’ rise again along the original mid-line to the ‘heart opening.’ This time, from the ‘heart opening’ we direct it to the right and slightly downward, into the liver. We consciously think of ‘the Wood of the liver’ and let it remain there, circulating or being present in the liver.

        When we are ready, we then have ‘it’ return to the ‘heart opening’ between the two breasts, where it now stays for a while. We think of ‘the Fire of the heart.’

        Finally, to round off the sequence of five ‘organs,’ we let ‘it’ sink from the heart downward into the tummy and belly area which in a general way is associated with the spleen. Thinking of ‘the Earth of the spleen,’ we imagine ‘it’ being in this region. When we feel we are finished, we have completed one cycle of meditation.

       

What I have just described is one particular version of what I call a ‘family’ of meditation techniques which utilize the fivefold system of inner organs as foci in a mental process which is said to be beneficial to physical health. Sometimes that mental process is explicitly called neishi 內視 or ‘inner viewing’; sometimes the practitioner is encouraged to think of specific colors, animals or other attributes while dwelling upon each of the organs. Interestingly, though the fivefold group of organs is perennially the same, the order in which they are ‘innerly viewed’ is not always identical. In my description above, I have indicated the order which I learned from Teacher Zhang, but in other sources on paper or the internet, I have seen two alternative orders.

        Now a question: does the order really matter? I don’t know if it does. I personally see no reason to deviate from what I have been taught, but I could very well imagine that the order doesn’t matter much, as long as one respects and takes seriously the overall procedure and, especially, the reasons for which one took it up in the first place. I could even imagine...but now I’m getting very Western again...that the number of these not-really-physical ‘organs’ is just a convention which could perfectly well be changed. If two weeks from now I consulted a new Teacher and was told that the heart and spleen were so closely related that I could henceforth collapse those two stations into one, I would believe it.

        But I would not do it. True, to do it would be to reduce the five to the supposedly ‘archetypal’ or ‘original’ four. But could my Spleen, or the Earth that is my belly, really Ratiocinate itself into being happy with going back and giving up, relinquishing, saying goodbye to the warm dawn energy gleaming through the branches of Wood, to sunset mirrored in the dream-rich peace of Metal, in return for the restoration of mere thin...Air?

--Lloyd Haft

---

[1] Also known as A History of East Asian Civilization, Volume One. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1958/1960.

[2] For an interesting discussion of this with many references, see Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China, Cambridge University Press 2000. Wang says (p. 77) the shift from four to five ‘undermined the absolute and sacred centrality of the former ruling clan,’ amounting to ‘reduction’ of the center to a ‘fifth fang.’ There was a shift (p. 92) ‘from centrality to cycles of change.’

[3] An interesting sidelight is that one of my own favorite Chinese philosophers, Shao Yong (1011-1077), actually did advocate a fourfold system, but it never won widespread acceptance. In his scheme, the four are fire, water, earth and...again not air but...stone.

[4] In general, very much in opposition to that grand old patriarch and patron saint of Leiden sinology Gustaaf Schlegel (1840-1903), I believe in a fundamental incompatibility or incommensurability between Chinese and Western concepts. See another Scrap in this series, ‘Haft’s Incommensurability Principle’: http://lhaftblog.blogspot.tw/2011/03/hafts-incommensurability-principle.html

[5] This translation is given by Nathan Sivin (see full reference in note 11 below), p. 287.

[6] Translation from Sivin, p. 209.

[7] This translation is from Kendall, Dao of Chinese Medicine, p. 114. See note 10 below.

[8] Chad Hansen, ‘Language in the Heart-Mind,’ in Robert E. Allinson (ed.), Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, Oxford University Press 1989, pp. 119-120.

[9] A. C. Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers: The Metaphysics of the Brothers Ch’eng, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing 1992, p. 62..

[10] I am referring to Kendall’s book Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art, Oxford University Press, 2002, especially pages 89-92.

[11] In Nathan Sivin: Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China: A Partial Translation of Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine (1972) with an Introductory Study etc., Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan 1987, p. 275.

[12] My terminology here is, I realize, tortuous, simply because the things I am referring to are no less so. Many years ago my former student Michel Hockx pointed out to me that when Chinese refer to ‘imagination,’ very often what they actually mean is what in the West would be called ‘reproductive skill,’ and in that sense not regarded as imaginative at all. I say the stations in the meditation are ‘associated with’ organs of the body to avoid the issue of whether or not the ‘organs’ on which the meditator focuses are ‘the same as’ objectively present physical organs inside the physical body. At the very beginning of my own instruction, Teacher Zhang said very emphatically that when she referred to the ‘heart,’ she was not talking about ‘the physical heart.’ As if to underscore this, she added that for meditation purposes, I should think of the heart as being in the middle of the chest rather than specifically on the left side.

[13] I know of one published biography of Teacher Zhang. I will not quote it because, dating from 2003, by definition it tells us nothing about newer developments in the last ten years. In outlining Teacher Zhang’s later career and life, it takes us up to her decision, as she approached seventy, to retire to a mountain environment in order better to pursue meditative and other spiritual ‘practice.’ It says nothing about her still later decision, as I understand it, to return to big-city life after trying to adapt to the mosquitoes, snakes and general daily inconvenience faced by an elderly person living in a formidably remote rural area. If these were indeed the reasons why Teacher Zhang went back to Kaohsiung rather than trying to engineer a mind-over-matter ‘demonstration’ by ‘overcoming’ the troubles at any cost, I must say that in my view this makes her more rather than less credible as a spiritual Teacher.