A Myriad Sounds, Total Silence:
Pilgrimage to Emptiness in Chinese Poetry and Oracle
Stockholm, 14 June 2003
Shantena Sabbadini
A beautiful way to approach the language of the I Ching is through Chinese poetry. The poems I will read you are much more ‘modern’ than the I Ching texts: they are from the Tang dynasty (600-900 AC). But their language has something in common with the language of the I Ching. Particularly, it is very sparing of determinants of time, space and personal identity, allowing maximum freedom to the play of the images and allowing different nuances of meaning to coexist, superposed, and intermingled. These poems, like the I Ching texts, can only be absorbed by ‘rolling the words in one’s heart’.
Furthermore, as we shall see, their images hover in a liminal space between presence and absence. They can be apprehended at various degrees of rarefaction: at their core we catch a glimpse of something like a luminous void, a creative emptiness without name or form.
* Chang Jian (708-765?), The monastery behind Bo Shan temple
The first poem I will read you is a poem by Chang Jian, and is called The monastery behind Bo Shan temple. Of this poem and of all the following ones I will give you a literal, word by word translation. I will translate them as we have translated the oracular texts in the Eranos I Ching, interpreting as little as possible. This way the parallels with the language of the I Ching will stand out more - and we will come a bit closer to appreciating the flavor of the Chinese original. Here’s the poem.
Clear morning , entering ancient temple,
Rising sun , illuminating tall trees,
Meandering footpath , leading to secluded place,
Meditation hall , deep in flowers and plants,
Mountain brightness , joyous birds’nature,
Marsh shadows , empty human heart,
A myriad sounds, now complete silence,
Only remains the stone bell’s chime.
chu1 ri4 / zhao4 gao1 lin2
qu1 jing4 / tong1 you1 chu4
chan2 fang2 / hua1 mu4 shen1
shan1 guang1 / yue4 niao3 xing4
tan4 ying2 / kong1 ren2 xin1
wan4 lai4 / ci2 ju4 ji4
dan4 yu2 / zhong1 qing2 yin1
In this as in many Chinese poems the personal presence of the poet is reduced to a minimum. It is not a person-centered perspective. There is no subject to the action. As we enter the ancient temple compound together with the poet, we become transparent. The clear morning enters: the archetypal quality of the situation prevails on the personal connotation.
The sun is just coming up, and illuminates the tops of the trees. Two dimensions meet: light above (yang), while the shadows of the early morning (yin) still prevail down below, where we walk the bending path leading to the even shadier and peaceful meditation hall, deeply immersed in plants and flowers. The interplay of these two energies is celebrated in the fifth and sixth verses:
Mountain brightness , joyous birds’nature,
Marsh shadows , empty human heart.
Just as it so often happens in the I Ching we can read these sentences in many ways. I should add that, as usual, the Chinese is a bit more open even than this translation mot à mot: since Chinese ideograms can be indifferently adjectives, nouns or verbs, ‘joyous’ can also be read as joy, rejoicing or causing to rejoice, and ‘empty’ can also be read as emptiness or emptying. So the first sentence could be taken as meaning:
the birds’ joy brightens the mountain,
or the mountainbrightness causes the birds to rejoice.
There is an equivalence and a fluid interconnection of the two halves; together they define what we perceive as a single archetypal situation, a luminous yang presence above.
The sixth verse has a structure perfectly parallel to the fifth, and it unfolds in the shady yin realm below. We can read it as
the marshshadows empty themselves into the human heart,
or the human heart empties itself into the marshshadows,
or the the marshshadows cause the human heart to be empty,
or the marshshadows mirror the emptiness of the human heart,
or viceversa the empty human heart is a mirror of the marshshadows.
Let me remind you that in Chinese the heart embraces also what we call mind. So that the empty heart is here also the ‘empty mind’, the ‘meditative mind’, or the state of meditation. Moreover this word ‘empty’, kong1,
空
is the translation of the Sanskrit term sunyata, referring to the essential emptiness which is at the heart of all forms.
Now, the dance of yang images above and that of yin images below also mirror each other in rhythm and meaning: there is a rigorous symmetry between the two verses. On one hand each states an equivalence between two terms,
mountain brightness ó birds’nature,
marsh shadows ó human heart,
where the mood of the first equivalence is given by the middle term joy, and the mood of the second one by the middle term empty (including the ‘tranquil comtemplation’ and ‘inner silence’ connotation associated to it in Buddhist usage). To the dance of light and the birds above corresponds the silent peace of the shady pool and of the human heart below. But there is also a word by word vertical mirroring:
mountain ó marsh,
brightness ó shadows,
joy ó emptiness,
bird ó human,
nature ó heart.
In this meeting of the luminous splendor of the mountain and of the shady pool of the heart suddenly all is silent. The myriad sounds of the forest and of the temple compound suddenly cease. The mind of the poet also becomes silent. Only remains the music of a stone: it is the stone bell which is the monastery’s clock.
Let me give you also a few literary translations of the two verses we have analyzed:
Around these hills sweet birds their pleasure take,
Man’s heart as free from shadow as this lake (H.A. Giles).
Here birds are alive with mountain light,
And the mind of man touches peace in a pool (W. Binner).
Hark! the birds rejoicing in the mountain light
Like one’s dim reflection on a pool at night.
Lo! the heart is melted wav’ring out the sight (W.J.B. Fletcher).
The mountain colours have made the birds sing,
The shadows in the pool empty the hearts of men (R. Payne).
Irrespective of the poetic merit of each of these translations, I think that you will agree with me that much is lost in all of them. The language of Chinese poetry, just as the language of oracle, is very close to an imaginal dimension - it is a close reflection of ‘the play of archetypes”, as Jung said - and that’s of course the difficulty for translating it into any Western language.
* Liu Chang Qing (709-785?), Looking for the Taoist monk Chang of the Southern stream
The second poem I will read you is called Looking for the Taoist monk Chang of the Southern stream. The visit to a sage or a hermit is a common theme in Chinese poetry, and the pilgrimage is often the occasion of a deep insight, a spiritual experience. The hermit frequently resides in a remote place, and the arduous journey to reach him is an essential part of the experience.
All the way traveling across places,
in the tender moss seeing clogs’ footprints,
white clouds surrounding the quiet islet,
fragrant grasses obstructing the idle door,
after the rain looking at the pine’s color,
going-round the hill reaching the river’s spring,
stream flower offers the meaning of Chan,
face to face, equally without words.
yi1 lu4 jing1 xing2 chu4
mei2 tai2 jian4 ji1 hen2
bai2 yun2 yi1 jing4 zhu3
fang1 cao3 bi4 xian2 men2
guo1 yu3 kan1 song1 se4
sui2 shan1 dao4 shui3 yuan2
xi1 hua1 yu3 chan2 yi4
xiang1 dui4 yi4 wang4 yan2
Here the journey is the goal: many experiences happen along the way. As the pilgrim approaches his goal, his transformation starts with his seeing clogs’ footprints in the moss (just as in that famous series of pictures, the ‘ten bulls of Zen’, where the search for the lost bull starts with seeing its footprints), white clouds surrounding the peaceful island where the monk resides, his door which is always open and drowned in a cascade of plants.
Notice that here also there are no personal pronouns: no ‘I’, no ‘he’. Traveling happens, seeing happens. We can imagine that the monk’s hut is open and empty, the monk is somewhere outside by the stream. But we get no sense of urgency: the traveler has come from far away, it may have been a month’s journey, but along the way he has been transformed. Now it is enough for him to look at the dark green of the pine-tree after the rain.
When the pilgrim reaches the river’s spring and finally finds himself face to face with the monk, neither one has anything to say, there are no words left. The stream flower has already said it all: it has revealed the meaning of Chan, of meditation (‘Chan’ is the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese word ‘Zen’, sanskrit dyan).
Some commentators read ‘face to face’ as referring to traveler and flower (who are ‘equally without words’) rather than traveler and monk: it doesn’t matter, monk and flower are in a way interchangeable. The name of the monk, Chang, by the way, means ‘constant, eternal’: it is the same word that occurs in the first line of the Dao De Jing, “The dao that can be said is not the eternal dao”. And our poem ends on the same note: ‘without words’. As if, says François Cheng (from whose anthology of Tang poetry in the precious booklet L’écriture poétique chinoise I have taken this poems), the poet is “longing to move beyond words and attain to emptiness” (Cheng says ‘non-being’ but I would rather say ‘emptiness’). The whole poem is “an experience of the wordless through words”.
The emphasis on the archetypal rather than on the personal dimension that we find in these poems is also the norm in the I Ching . Typical in this respect is the use of terms corresponding to our possessive adjectives and personal pronouns. By far the most common of these is qi2, which we have translated in the Eranos I Ching as ‘one’s’:
其
It is a general third person pronoun and possessive adjective meaning ‘he, she, they, it, this, that, his, her, their, its, etc.’ It carries no personal emphasis. By contrast, in the few places where the real personal pronoun wo3, ‘I, me, my’,
我
occurs, a strong emphasis is implied on my subjective experience. Notice that in Buddhist parlance wo3 corresponds to the notion of ego, the personality one consciously identifies with - and that the ideogram itself conveys the idea of a struggle: it consists of two spears.
A place where both terms occur is the third line of hexagram 48, The Well:
48.3a The well: oozing, not taking-in.
Activating my heart’s ache.
Permitting availing of drawing-water.
Kingly brightness.
Together with acquiescing in one’sblessing.
The well stands for the water of life surging up from the depth, nourishing contact with one’s own emotional depth. Here we cannot absorb this emotional/spiritual nourishment, because the well is ‘oozing’ (a term which could also means ‘muddy, slimy, turbid’). I have to pass through ‘activating my heart’s ache’, the pain which is specifically mine: then contact with the water of life can be re-established, and I am permitted to draw it. It is quite a reversal of the situation: now suddenly we have ‘kingly brightness’, and ‘acquiescing in one’s blessing’! But notice that here the possessive reverts to ‘one’s’: I should not presume to possess this blessing as personal property.
* Jia Dao (779-843), Visit to a hermit without finding him
The last poem I will read you is also a pilgrimage poem, and is called Visit to a hermit without finding him. Actually a literal translation of the title would be The sought-for hermit not found.
Under the pine-tree asking the young disciple,
Saying: master collect medicinal-herbs gone,
Alone in the middle of this mountain,
Deep clouds, not know where.
Song1 xia4 wen4 tong2 zi3,
yan2 shi1 cai3 yao4 qu4,
zhi1 zai4 ci3 shan1 zhong1,
yun2 shen1 bu4 zhi1 chu3.
The pilgrimage journey, we have seen, is in itself a powerful spiritual experience. But here the journey seems to be in vain: when the poet reaches his destination, the hermit is absent. Under the pine tree (which we can imagine to be the abode of the hermit - to the Chinese the pine-tree is a symbol of longevity, constance and fidelity) there is only a child (the term denoting the ‘young disciple’ also means ‘child’). The pilgrim asks him about the master. The boy says: “The master has gone to collect medicinal-herbs, he is alone somewhere in the middle (the word also means ‘the center’) of this great mountain, cloud-hidden, who knows where”. We can hear in the words the boy’s awe at that immense solitude, at that wilderness, to which the master seems also in a way to belong: he moves easily into it, he’s at home in places untrodden by humans. And we can imagine the disappointment of the traveler, although nothing is said about it. That’s all the explicit content of the poem, very simple, a ‘minimalist’ poem in a way. Let us now listen to the resonances.
The general undertone is ‘absence’. But it is a very powerful absence, a very meaningful absence. That’s how the teaching gets imparted here: through the absence of the master. His absence is the presence of the mountain itself and of the clouds. That’s the statement of the master, that’s his way of saying what words cannot convey, his way of pointing to the beyond. Again: “The dao that can be said is not the eternal dao”. About the eternal only silence can speak.
Saying that it is the master’s statement is not really accurate, though: it is not his teaching. One could just as well say that it is the mountain’s teaching: the awesome presence of the mountain is the real focus of the poem. The master is somewhere in the ‘center’ of that mountain, his identity lost in the clouds. Gone on a shamanic journey into another dimension, from which he’s expected to return bringing a healing.
Then we begin to realize that the pilgrimage has not been in vain, and that indeed the journey is the goal. The traveler after all finds what he was seeking, although not in the way he was anticipating.
The four verses of the poem convey a sense of progressive rarefaction, there is something like a distillation happening. In the first two verses we are still in the human world. On the very edge of it, assuredly: the abode of the hermit is a pine tree on a mountain. But under the pine tree a human conversation can still take place between the traveler and the child:
Under the pine-tree asking the young disciple,
Saying: master collect medicinal-herbs gone,
The conversation already has something of the transpersonal: the personal identity of the speakers is not at all emphasized. As usual, there are no personal pronouns. There is just “asking”, “saying”. As if the silence of the mountain is enveloping both pilgrim and disciple. And the pilgrim has already been transformed by the journey: he has already taken the first step.
The hermit points out the rest of the way to him by his absence. In the second verse we see (through the eyes of the child) the master walk away on a mountain path. At this stage there is still a specific goal to his journey (collecting medicinal-herbs): but as he disappears in the distance both his personal identity and the purpose of the journey seem to also fade away, dissolved in the immensity of the mountain. In the third verse the master is alone in the center of the mountain: like a cat hunting at night, he is a different creature, a wilder, vaster being than the master sitting under the pine tree whom (we can imagine) the child loves and is familiar with:
Alone in the middle of this mountain,
Deep clouds, not know where.
In the end there is only “deep clouds, not know where”. No master, no mountain. An image of the empty mind - or, to say it the Chinese way, of the ‘empty heart’ - of the hermit, or also, now, of the pilgrim. No place, no identity. Even the medicinal-herbs are forgotten: they have already accomplished their healing, not only for the hermit, dissolved in the heart of the mountain, but - we feel - also for the traveler contemplating this luminous absence.
I like to see in this poem a metaphor of the process we engage in when we interrogate the oracle. When we interrogate the I Ching, it is a bit like visiting an absence, a dialogue with ‘nobody’. We approach it laden with our personal anxieties - and with our personal identifications. That’s why we consult the oracle, after all: we would like to find a solution to our problem, to find a way to reach our goal. But like the traveler embarking on a pilgrimage, choosing to consult the I Ching we have already taken a step toward the transpersonal. Because whom do we ask? Who’s there on the other side?
Whoever speaks to us in those ancient cryptic texts is certainly ‘cloud-hidden’. Is it King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty and mythical author of the book? Is it Confucius, to whom these pronouncements, like all wise sayings of old, are popularly attributed? Is it shamans from the remote Shang era? Is it “‘spiritual agencies,’ acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer”? Is it the book itself as “a sort of animated being”, as Jung says, giving intelligent answers?
I think that it doesn’t much matter how we want to look at it. What matters is that by bringing our question to the book we have taken a step towards de-personalizing our concerns. It is like saying: I want to look at this issue of mine through the mirror of vast, impersonal archetypal images.
That’s what the book has to offer us. The most fruitful consultation is not necessarily when we get an answer that makes sense to us. The really interesting thing is when a distillation happens, just as it happens to the traveler going up the mountain. Larger views open up, cooler, clearer: he moves closer to the essential. In this immensity something inside him relaxes. Similarly, working with the oracular images we progressively drop bits of ourselves, of our density, of our ‘consolidated form’. Ideally, at the very center of the process (at the center of the mountain) nobody is left: deep clouds, not know where. Only an empty heart can listen: then the answer comes, and it may come not through words, but beyond words.