Loath though I am to support Starbucks - primarily because of a presentation that some of the students in my senior year Anthropology of Globalization class gave, the details of which I can't remember but which left a bad taste in my mouth vis-a-vis Starbucks as an ethical consumer choice - here in Chengdu, I have succumbed to its several appeals.
Firstly, the coffee situation in Chengdu is very weird. There are many coffee shops, and they sell excellent coffee, but it is European style coffee - small, well-prepared cups of espresso - and one of the few items that is actually more expensive here than in America. There must be some supply/demand quirk in the Chengdu market, because it is only slightly more expensive to buy a pound of these good coffee beans at the supermarket than to buy a single cup at one of the caffes. So, when I want to go sit at a coffee shop and read or work for a while, I have been unable to bring myself to pay four or five bucks for a teacup of espresso, and rather I head to Starbucks for the comfort of a vein-coursingly caffeinated, large mug of decent, if slightly bitter joe. There is also something very relieving to me about Starbucks as a public space. The decor is simpler and the seating arrangements more spacious than at most Chinese coffeeshops, and, since the five or six Starbucks in town have relatively high foreign patronage, it is less shocking for the Chinese customers to see you there, and therefore one is subjected to less of the staring and whispering with which we foreigners become more and more acquainted but never accustomed.
In addition, Starbucks has provided me with some interesting sights.
The cutest thing I have seen in Chengdu (aside from the babies and toddlers, who, because they by and large do not have diapers here, run around with their little butts hanging out of the crotch-slitted toddler-wear that allows them to just squat and poop at will), are the middle-aged, male, Western tourists standing in their all-weather, zip-off mountaineering pants in the middle of Starbucks, arms crossed, eyeing the bilingual menu like some worn but vigilant bannerman manning one of the far-outposts of western civilization.
Although Tom and I are perhaps less wary of China than they are, I cannot say that we are without our peculiar Americanisms. To wit: one afternoon last week, at the Starbucks a few minutes from our apartment, Tom and I committed an almost unbelievably American use of the milk-and-sugar station. Although Tom had asked for room for milk in his coffee, his steaming mug was filled to the brim. They serve the coffee boiling hot at this Starbucks, so, unable to sip it down, Tom proceeded to pour the top few centimeters of his coffee into the the little, round trash hole in the middle of the counter. Watching this tall, blond American pour a coffee he had just purchased into the trash of the very store he had just purchased it in struck me as such a profoundly, incomparably American thing to do, I found that I could not control my chuckling for several minutes. For my part, I had in hand one of the roasted sweet potatoes that they sell on the street here and, finding it a little bland, I added to this farm-grown, fresh roasted root a packet of Starbucks brand coffee sugar-crystals, thus completing our very American usage of the condiment station.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
On the Possibility of Transcendent Language, Part II - China
It is known to most students of Zen that, although our intention is to realize the tradition outside of the Scriptures - to inherit the mind-to-mind lineage - language is an important and perhaps even fundamental aspect of our practice. Indeed, research in the fields of linguistics and human evolutionary biology is proving to greater and greater degrees that language is imbricate with our brains and beings. It is impossible to conceive of a human-being or of humanity without language. Moreover, as Dale Wright observes in his essay, "Koan History: Transformative Language in Chinese Buddhist Thought," although many of the monks who carried the Chan lineages through Tang and Song China saw amongst their patriarchs the common thread of rejection of Sutra and literature study, the antipodal conclusion - "that what the great masters had in common was prolonged and serious study of the sutras" prior to their "critique and negation of this learning" - could just as well have been drawn.
This being the case, the question arises as to whether and how we as contemporary practitioners can engage language without becoming mired in the self-referential nature of linguistic systems, caught in the smooth workings of conceptuality which language simultaneously facilitates and conceals. Where is the territory in which language bursts forth from the confines of its conceptual and systemic limitations such that it is discretely meaningful, practice-able, and experiential? How can language, instead of circulating in known channels, serve to inflect and articulate our psycho-physical lives with the clarity and freshness of a baby’s cry?
In the process of living in China and studying Chinese during the fall of 2007, I thought about these questions and wrote about them in several blog posts. What follows is one of those, dealing in particular with the nature of Chinese characters in their attempted use to generate transcendent experiences of language.
***
The strange looking fellow pictured to the left is Bodhidharma, legendary transmitter of Buddhism from India to China, as drawn by the 18th century Japanese Zen master Hakuin Ekaku. Bodhidharma's intense stare is typical of his depictions, as he is reputed to have cut off his own eyelids in order to combat sleepiness while meditating (the eyelids, having dropped to the ground, supposedly then sprouted as the world's first tea bushes). In this painting, the master's bulging eyes do not appear to be staring steadfastly at the wall of a cave, which Bodhidharma is said to have done for nine years, but rather at a series of Chinese characters. Although modern scholarship has shown that Bodhidharma is very likely a legend - a composite figure drawn from the complex history of the northeasterly transmission of Buddhism and from certain Chinese cultural inclinations - there were in fact numerous true-to-life individuals who, across many hundreds of years, took it upon themselves to transmit Buddhism to China and root it in Chinese soil. Much of what they trafficked in was translation - which, in this case, meant the movement of language from letters to characters.
Foremost among these men was Kumarajiva, a 4th-5th century monk who, like many of the men responsible for bringing Buddhism to China, hailed from Central Asia (his birthplace, the ancient state of Kucha, was in what is today the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Province of western China). Born to an Indian noble and a Kuchean princess, Kumarajiva was prodigal in his absorption of Buddhist scriptures and would go on to produce an astonishing quantity of innovatively translated Buddhist texts. He and his successors over the next seven or eight centuries translated all the available Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, some seven to eight thousand in number, into Chinese. In doing so, they often invented new character combinations or simply used existing characters as homophones for the Sanskrit. The advent of Buddhist Chinese would ultimately have a noticeable influence on the language as a whole. More pertinent to this inquiry, however, is whether the shift from the alphabetic Indic languages to Chinese characters facilitated the possibility of transcendence in the language itself. That is - did the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters open up new avenues in the experience of language? To answer that question, we need to look at what exactly comprises a Chinese character.
Although it is true that Chinese is derived from a pictographic/ideographic writing system, there are today six different kinds of characters in the Chinese character set. The first type, referred to as xiangxing 象形 or 'image shape', refers to those characters which are derived directly from images. Among the most common are:
人 - Ren, person
大 - Da, a person with outstretched arms and legs, meaning 'big'
木 - Mu, tree
日- Ri, sun or day
口 - Kou, mouth
门 - Men, door or gate
The next set of characters, referred to as zhishi 指事 (which might be translated as 'pointing to the thing/matter'), are composed of ideographs, meaning that they are primarily symbolic rather than pictographic. The character 本, ben, for instance, is a tree with a small line in its trunk, and its meaning is 'root or stem', or more abstractly 'foundation, basis, origin.' Another example from this set is 母 - mu, meaning 'mother' - which shows an altered form of the pictograph for woman - 女, nu - with two dots representing breasts.
The third set of characters is composed of any combination of the first two: ideograph plus ideograph, ideograph plus symbol, symbol plus ideograph, symbol plus symbol. The fourth group, which contains some 70% of modern Chinese characters, is called xingsheng 形声 or 'shape and sound'. Its characters are composed of both an ideographic and/or symbolic element and a phonetic element. Thus the character 们, men, which signifies plural when added to a pronoun, is composed of the (slightly altered) character for people 人 plus the phonetic 'men 门', which as I noted above means 'door'.
Rounding out the typography are borrowed and derived characters, the first set being homophones of foreign words and the second being characters that have diverged over time into separate meanings.
What has been striking to me about the pictographic and ideographic characters is how plainly survivalistic they often are, as if speaking to us from an age when humans were closer to the realities of natural selection.
The character for 'good', for instance, is hao - 好, and it simply shows a woman 女 with a child 子. A woman with her child is good. And the character for peace, an - 安 depicts a woman underneath a roof. From a modern perspective, these characters might be viewed as sexist, but I tend to think of them more in terms of an evolutionary viewpoint, that is - the management of the reproductive capacity of a community. In a similar vein, the character for home, jia - 家, depicts a boar or pig 豕 under a roof. I thought it a bit odd at first that a picture of a housebound pig would turn Chinese minds toward thoughts of home, but from the perspective of the post-nomadic communities out of which Chinese society developed, home is not where the hearth is, it's where you keep a herd of domesticated animals.
There are other characters that venture into the realm of more refined Chinese culture. The character pin - 品, for instance, shows three mouths, and one of its meanings is 'to taste something with discrimination, savor'. Thus, to pin cha - 品茶 is to 'sample tea', sip by culturally discriminating sip.
Here are some more characters that I've enjoyed learning about:
王 - Wang, meaning 'king', shows a vertical line, symbolizing a person, crossing three horizontal lines, representing heaven, humanity and earth. Thus the character for king actually depicts the institution's cosmological role in traditional Chinese thought.
皇 - Huang, meaning 'emperor', shows a rising sun 白 above the character for king.
蝗 - Huang, meaning 'locust', shows the character for insect- 虫 - next to the character for emperor, making the locust the 'emperor bug'.
凶 - Xiong, meaning 'fierce', 'evil' or 'inauspicious', depicts a pit that has been crossed.
兇 - Xiong, meaning 'cruel or fierce', shows a person (altered) underneath the crossed pit. I find this character very compassionate, as it implies that people's cruelty is the result of their own past experience, rather than the spontaneous manifestations of evil.
原 - Yuan, meaning 'primary, original' or 'unprocessed', shows a spring 泉 (white 白 water 水) from a cliff 厂.
This rather large number to the left, coming in at 55 separate brush strokes, is the antiquated character 'biong', which apparently referred to a type of noodle.
So there you have it - Chinese characters are really cool.
But what of the question I posed above - does the pictography and symbolism of characters alter our experience of reading? Does the multifaceted nature of characters give them the ability to transcend the confines of linguistic self-reference?
A number of people I have met in China make the case that the pictographic origins of characters mean that you can read them differently, ascertaining their meanings as one would look at a painting. Having tried this, I tend to disagree.
For eamxlpe, all you hvae to hvae to be albe to raed an Eilnsgh wrod is the fsirt and lsat ltertes in the rhgit palecs. That is, most of the time we're not really reading words, we're recognizing them. It seems to me that it's the same with Chinese characters - once you've become familiar with one of them, you don't have to think about it anymore, much less look at it as a picture. It just registers in your mind.
For a character to be transcendent, then, it would actually have to encourage its viewer to slow down and really process it. To some degree this phenomenon occurs in classical Chinese poetry, which, as far as semantic breadth and subtlety, is unapproachable by any other language.
Here is a poem by Meng Haoran (691-740 CE), a famed Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.
春晓 A Spring Morning
春眠不觉晓 Still in sound sleep is this spring dawn
处处闻啼鸟 till birds everywhere sing their song.
夜来风雨声 Last night, I heard the sound of wind and rain.
花落知多少 I wonder how many flowers have fallen?
This translation, by Edward C. Chang, favors preservation of the rhyme scheme (AABA, or xiao-niao-sheng-shao) over subtler language. Here is my own translation:
Spring Dawn
Springtime, slumbering, unaware of the dawn,
All around I hear the chirping of birds.
In the nighttime, sounds of wind and rain
Fallen flowers, little known
I read the poem as a four stage progression: a sleeping individual, unaware of the dawning light; he begins to awaken to the sound of birds; this sound triggers a recollection of the sounds of a rainstorm from the night before; he thinks of the flowers felled by the storm.***
With this reading, we can access some of the subtler meanings in the poem - the sense of a spectral movement from sleep into awakening, the tie between wakefulness and memory, the paradoxical convergence of spring, blooming and death, and a melancholy sense of the unknown. Still, even a translation far subtler than my own could not do service to the full breadth of the original.
In the Chinese, for instance, there is no pronoun in the entire poem! Chinese poems can often do without identifying the speaker, and thus can be read from different but equally legitimate perspectives. Although Chang and I put the first-person pronoun in different lines, neither of us managed to avoid sticking it in there, whereas the Chinese poem has the multivalence to suggest both a first-person perspective and a more universal evocation of experience.
Looking to the characters themselves, there is a certain striking compactness that, combined with the meanings suggested by their component parts, is very difficult to translate.
In the second line, for instance - 处处闻啼鸟, the words mean 'place place hear chirping birds'.
The visual repetition of the character for 'place' is much more forceful than saying 'everywhere' or 'all around'. The character for 'hear' contains the pictograph of an ear 耳, that for 'chirp' contains the pictograph of mouth 口, and that for 'bird' 鸟 is, well, a picture of a bird.
Despite all of this, I still think it is too strong to suggest that the characters really transcend themselves as language. We can, after all, make deep, interesting, multivalent readings of texts in alphabetic languages as well, even if they lack the cool pictographic element. Therefore it seems to be the reader's attitude, more than the language itself, which produces an experientially meaningful effect.
What, then, of specifically Buddhist poetry and writing? Were the unique aspects of characters used to unlock language from its self-referentiality, opening it to a fresh relationship with our own experience?
Here is a poem from a Chinese Buddhist nun named Haiyin, who lived in the latter part of the Tang Dynasty, some 1100 years ago:
水色连天色 The color of the water merges with that of the sky,
风声益浪声 The sound of the wind adds to that of the waves.
旅人归思苦 The traveler's thoughts of home are painful,
鱼叟梦魂惊 The old fisherman's dream-self is startled.
举? 云先到 Lifting his oars, the clouds get there before him,
移舟月遂行 When his boat moves, the moon follows along.
旋吟诗句罢 Although I've done reciting the lines of my poem,
犹见远山衡 I can still see the hills extending in both directions. ****
This poem (as the one above) is maimed by the fact that I had to type it in simplified characters, instead of the traditional form in which it was written, but still there are certain striking effects. In the first line, the character for water - shui, 水 - is a pictograph of ripples in a river. There is the visual pulse of the repetition of the second and fifth characters in both the first and second lines. Breaking down the etymology of 'dream-self', the third and fourth characters in the fourth line, we have something like unclear 林 at night 夕 vapor 云 spirit 鬼. The fifth and sixth lines, with their suggestive conflations of perspective, build into the abrupt challenge of the conclusion, wherein Haiyin does her Zen best to reach out and strike the reader into a new sense of awareness.
But here again we cannot say that it is the language itself facilitating its own transcendent usage. It is, rather, a developed posture of a religion with a particular, highly intentional attitude toward the use of language. This type of stance would see its furthest refinement in the gong an ('public cases,' derived from a pre-existing Chinese notion of public legal precedent; Japanese - 'Koans') developed during the Tang and Song Dynasties. The koans, usually consisting of paradoxical questions or brief interchanges between teacher and student, were developed as a way for students to hold or physicalize their relationship to words, thereby gaining access to their own experience in a way that simply answering a question never could provide.
Foremost among these men was Kumarajiva, a 4th-5th century monk who, like many of the men responsible for bringing Buddhism to China, hailed from Central Asia (his birthplace, the ancient state of Kucha, was in what is today the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Province of western China). Born to an Indian noble and a Kuchean princess, Kumarajiva was prodigal in his absorption of Buddhist scriptures and would go on to produce an astonishing quantity of innovatively translated Buddhist texts. He and his successors over the next seven or eight centuries translated all the available Buddhist scriptures and commentaries, some seven to eight thousand in number, into Chinese. In doing so, they often invented new character combinations or simply used existing characters as homophones for the Sanskrit. The advent of Buddhist Chinese would ultimately have a noticeable influence on the language as a whole. More pertinent to this inquiry, however, is whether the shift from the alphabetic Indic languages to Chinese characters facilitated the possibility of transcendence in the language itself. That is - did the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters open up new avenues in the experience of language? To answer that question, we need to look at what exactly comprises a Chinese character.
Although it is true that Chinese is derived from a pictographic/ideographic writing system, there are today six different kinds of characters in the Chinese character set. The first type, referred to as xiangxing 象形 or 'image shape', refers to those characters which are derived directly from images. Among the most common are:
人 - Ren, person
大 - Da, a person with outstretched arms and legs, meaning 'big'
木 - Mu, tree
日- Ri, sun or day
口 - Kou, mouth
门 - Men, door or gate
The next set of characters, referred to as zhishi 指事 (which might be translated as 'pointing to the thing/matter'), are composed of ideographs, meaning that they are primarily symbolic rather than pictographic. The character 本, ben, for instance, is a tree with a small line in its trunk, and its meaning is 'root or stem', or more abstractly 'foundation, basis, origin.' Another example from this set is 母 - mu, meaning 'mother' - which shows an altered form of the pictograph for woman - 女, nu - with two dots representing breasts.
The third set of characters is composed of any combination of the first two: ideograph plus ideograph, ideograph plus symbol, symbol plus ideograph, symbol plus symbol. The fourth group, which contains some 70% of modern Chinese characters, is called xingsheng 形声 or 'shape and sound'. Its characters are composed of both an ideographic and/or symbolic element and a phonetic element. Thus the character 们, men, which signifies plural when added to a pronoun, is composed of the (slightly altered) character for people 人 plus the phonetic 'men 门', which as I noted above means 'door'.
Rounding out the typography are borrowed and derived characters, the first set being homophones of foreign words and the second being characters that have diverged over time into separate meanings.
What has been striking to me about the pictographic and ideographic characters is how plainly survivalistic they often are, as if speaking to us from an age when humans were closer to the realities of natural selection.
The character for 'good', for instance, is hao - 好, and it simply shows a woman 女 with a child 子. A woman with her child is good. And the character for peace, an - 安 depicts a woman underneath a roof. From a modern perspective, these characters might be viewed as sexist, but I tend to think of them more in terms of an evolutionary viewpoint, that is - the management of the reproductive capacity of a community. In a similar vein, the character for home, jia - 家, depicts a boar or pig 豕 under a roof. I thought it a bit odd at first that a picture of a housebound pig would turn Chinese minds toward thoughts of home, but from the perspective of the post-nomadic communities out of which Chinese society developed, home is not where the hearth is, it's where you keep a herd of domesticated animals.
There are other characters that venture into the realm of more refined Chinese culture. The character pin - 品, for instance, shows three mouths, and one of its meanings is 'to taste something with discrimination, savor'. Thus, to pin cha - 品茶 is to 'sample tea', sip by culturally discriminating sip.
Here are some more characters that I've enjoyed learning about:
王 - Wang, meaning 'king', shows a vertical line, symbolizing a person, crossing three horizontal lines, representing heaven, humanity and earth. Thus the character for king actually depicts the institution's cosmological role in traditional Chinese thought.
皇 - Huang, meaning 'emperor', shows a rising sun 白 above the character for king.
蝗 - Huang, meaning 'locust', shows the character for insect- 虫 - next to the character for emperor, making the locust the 'emperor bug'.
凶 - Xiong, meaning 'fierce', 'evil' or 'inauspicious', depicts a pit that has been crossed.
兇 - Xiong, meaning 'cruel or fierce', shows a person (altered) underneath the crossed pit. I find this character very compassionate, as it implies that people's cruelty is the result of their own past experience, rather than the spontaneous manifestations of evil.
原 - Yuan, meaning 'primary, original' or 'unprocessed', shows a spring 泉 (white 白 water 水) from a cliff 厂.
This rather large number to the left, coming in at 55 separate brush strokes, is the antiquated character 'biong', which apparently referred to a type of noodle.
So there you have it - Chinese characters are really cool.
But what of the question I posed above - does the pictography and symbolism of characters alter our experience of reading? Does the multifaceted nature of characters give them the ability to transcend the confines of linguistic self-reference?
A number of people I have met in China make the case that the pictographic origins of characters mean that you can read them differently, ascertaining their meanings as one would look at a painting. Having tried this, I tend to disagree.
For eamxlpe, all you hvae to hvae to be albe to raed an Eilnsgh wrod is the fsirt and lsat ltertes in the rhgit palecs. That is, most of the time we're not really reading words, we're recognizing them. It seems to me that it's the same with Chinese characters - once you've become familiar with one of them, you don't have to think about it anymore, much less look at it as a picture. It just registers in your mind.
For a character to be transcendent, then, it would actually have to encourage its viewer to slow down and really process it. To some degree this phenomenon occurs in classical Chinese poetry, which, as far as semantic breadth and subtlety, is unapproachable by any other language.
Here is a poem by Meng Haoran (691-740 CE), a famed Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.
春晓 A Spring Morning
春眠不觉晓 Still in sound sleep is this spring dawn
处处闻啼鸟 till birds everywhere sing their song.
夜来风雨声 Last night, I heard the sound of wind and rain.
花落知多少 I wonder how many flowers have fallen?
This translation, by Edward C. Chang, favors preservation of the rhyme scheme (AABA, or xiao-niao-sheng-shao) over subtler language. Here is my own translation:
Spring Dawn
Springtime, slumbering, unaware of the dawn,
All around I hear the chirping of birds.
In the nighttime, sounds of wind and rain
Fallen flowers, little known
I read the poem as a four stage progression: a sleeping individual, unaware of the dawning light; he begins to awaken to the sound of birds; this sound triggers a recollection of the sounds of a rainstorm from the night before; he thinks of the flowers felled by the storm.***
With this reading, we can access some of the subtler meanings in the poem - the sense of a spectral movement from sleep into awakening, the tie between wakefulness and memory, the paradoxical convergence of spring, blooming and death, and a melancholy sense of the unknown. Still, even a translation far subtler than my own could not do service to the full breadth of the original.
In the Chinese, for instance, there is no pronoun in the entire poem! Chinese poems can often do without identifying the speaker, and thus can be read from different but equally legitimate perspectives. Although Chang and I put the first-person pronoun in different lines, neither of us managed to avoid sticking it in there, whereas the Chinese poem has the multivalence to suggest both a first-person perspective and a more universal evocation of experience.
Looking to the characters themselves, there is a certain striking compactness that, combined with the meanings suggested by their component parts, is very difficult to translate.
In the second line, for instance - 处处闻啼鸟, the words mean 'place place hear chirping birds'.
The visual repetition of the character for 'place' is much more forceful than saying 'everywhere' or 'all around'. The character for 'hear' contains the pictograph of an ear 耳, that for 'chirp' contains the pictograph of mouth 口, and that for 'bird' 鸟 is, well, a picture of a bird.
Despite all of this, I still think it is too strong to suggest that the characters really transcend themselves as language. We can, after all, make deep, interesting, multivalent readings of texts in alphabetic languages as well, even if they lack the cool pictographic element. Therefore it seems to be the reader's attitude, more than the language itself, which produces an experientially meaningful effect.
What, then, of specifically Buddhist poetry and writing? Were the unique aspects of characters used to unlock language from its self-referentiality, opening it to a fresh relationship with our own experience?
Here is a poem from a Chinese Buddhist nun named Haiyin, who lived in the latter part of the Tang Dynasty, some 1100 years ago:
水色连天色 The color of the water merges with that of the sky,
风声益浪声 The sound of the wind adds to that of the waves.
旅人归思苦 The traveler's thoughts of home are painful,
鱼叟梦魂惊 The old fisherman's dream-self is startled.
举? 云先到 Lifting his oars, the clouds get there before him,
移舟月遂行 When his boat moves, the moon follows along.
旋吟诗句罢 Although I've done reciting the lines of my poem,
犹见远山衡 I can still see the hills extending in both directions. ****
This poem (as the one above) is maimed by the fact that I had to type it in simplified characters, instead of the traditional form in which it was written, but still there are certain striking effects. In the first line, the character for water - shui, 水 - is a pictograph of ripples in a river. There is the visual pulse of the repetition of the second and fifth characters in both the first and second lines. Breaking down the etymology of 'dream-self', the third and fourth characters in the fourth line, we have something like unclear 林 at night 夕 vapor 云 spirit 鬼. The fifth and sixth lines, with their suggestive conflations of perspective, build into the abrupt challenge of the conclusion, wherein Haiyin does her Zen best to reach out and strike the reader into a new sense of awareness.
But here again we cannot say that it is the language itself facilitating its own transcendent usage. It is, rather, a developed posture of a religion with a particular, highly intentional attitude toward the use of language. This type of stance would see its furthest refinement in the gong an ('public cases,' derived from a pre-existing Chinese notion of public legal precedent; Japanese - 'Koans') developed during the Tang and Song Dynasties. The koans, usually consisting of paradoxical questions or brief interchanges between teacher and student, were developed as a way for students to hold or physicalize their relationship to words, thereby gaining access to their own experience in a way that simply answering a question never could provide.
Baker-roshi writes in his forthcoming book: : “Words can be something like pitchers, containers from which we can pour. Used in this way, we can pour the meaning of words beyond where they reach in language alone.”
It is in this aspect, then - the physicalization of words, their use to hold and pick at and lever and sand down and filter experience - that I believe one can find the most pointed and accessible form of transcendent language: calligraphy. Having recourse both to semantics and to the physically suggestive power of art, calligraphy, to my mind, is open to being opened in a way that is very difficult with most language.
I think the key to calligraphy is the fundamental simplicity of the medium. It is spare - ink and paper - and has no recourse to narrative. Aided by these constrictions, a skilled artist is able to practice remarkable, even stunning transparency in the art, in that the work itself can be an invitation to her own self's being. Of course any painting can reflect an artist's life, but with calligraphy there is something so pointedly fleeting: the experience of the artist, marked as exquisite by the irreversible inking of the paper. To me it is something like performance art, but with the sometimes hard edge of the concept of performance replaced by the pure factuality of the experience of creation and relationship. The artist's hand controls the brush, and yet the drops or splatters of ink, the unpredictable wicking of the ink through the paper - these mark out the inherent limitations of even the artist's control of her own relationship to her work. The delicate balance of ink and white paper to me signifies the succulent ambiguity of relationship - the artist to his work, the viewer to the artist, the self to the self. And yet it is an ambiguity that can be inflected by the meaning of the word itself. The above calligraphy (by Nelson Chu*****) is the word 'xiang', meaning 'to think' or 'to want'. It is composed of the words 'examine' - an eye 目 beholding a tree 木 - and 'heart/mind' 心. To think, to want - to examine the heart and mind. May our use of language flower here.**The preceding breakdown comes via my boss, Liu Xiaowei, who also deserves credit for a few of the character etymologies. Most of the etymologies come from Rick Harbaugh's phenomenal Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, Yale University Press, 1998. zhongwen.com
***My exposure to, and much of the content of my reading of, this poem, are thanks to Professor Paul Kroll of CU Boulder. We read the poem in his classical Chinese class. The Chang translation is from: Edward C. Chang, How to Read a Chinese Poem - A Bilingual Anthology of Tang Poetry, BookSurge Publishing, North Charleston, 2007.
**** Grant, Beata. Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2003.
*****
Nelson Chu - http://www.cse.ust.hk/~cpegnel/calligraphy/ChineseArt.html
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