We are looking at a painting by the great
Ming Dynasty landscape artist and Chan Master Shi Tao: a scholar (with
attendant) on a promontory gazing out over a sea of mist to ridges of hazy
mountains in the distance. On the right of the picture is a poem by Shi Tao’s
friend and associate, the poet Huang Yanlu, in Shi Tao’s calligraphy. The poem
describes a ruined city: images of razed walls, deserted orchards and abandoned
houses, none of which can be seen in the picture. From this disjunct between
painting and poem, David Hinton begins his investigation of the spiritual roots
of Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy and poetry.
Hinton sees the white space and multiple
perspectives of Chinese landscape painting as a visual expression of the
perpetual movement between Absence and Presence which, according to the first
verse of the Dao De Jing, gives rise
to the ten thousand things of mental and material phenomena. He reveals how
this tension operates within Chinese characters – strokes organized around a
void, within the sweeping gestures of calligraphy - in which a balance is
sought between the being-in-the-moment of the movement of the brush and the
residue of that movement/moment in the ink stroke left on the page. He also shows
how classical Chinese grammar itself – with its absence of pronouns, verb
tenses and deliberate ambiguity of syntax and word class - is also a
manifestation of this dynamic interchange.
Along the way he makes some fascinating
observations about the differences between Western languages and Chinese. Western
languages impose a barrier between the things of the world and descriptions of
them; at the same time as they describe the world, they try to transcend it.
The relationship between words and things is arbitrary and mimetic, as Saussure
and the Structuralists noted. In our creation myth, language comes before the
world and the world is somehow a creation of language: And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. In the beginning was the Word, and so
on. Chinese creation myths, on the other hand, begin with the hexagrams of the Yi Jing which represent every possible combination
of ying and yang, and which rather than
describe the particulars of reality, embody the deeper forces and processes of
reality, Hinton writes. The clear
division into noun and verb of Western languages imposes a fixity on the world
that blinds us to its real nature as a process of perpetual impermanence.
Whereas Chinese, in which words can be both neither noun or verb and both noun
and verb, retains that fluidity and that awareness of the underlying processes
of change.
Moreover, Chinese poetry, calligraphy and
painting represent an attempt on the part of the practitioner to get behind the
false dualities of Absence and Presence, ying
and yang, observer and world, language
and reality, to the fundamental essence that lies behind them, represented by
the mysterious character 玄 xuan, ‘dark enigma’ which also
appears in the first verse of the Dao De
Jing. Out of this dark enigma everything rises, and back into it everything
sinks in a perpetual movement of becoming and passing. This is related to the
Chan meditation practice of observing how thoughts come and go and in the
process, stilling the everyday mind and letting the true mind 本心ben xin come forth. This true mind is our true nature, the true nature of
reality, and which exists before all thoughts begin, and which precedes and
underlies all duality, the true mind obscured
by the fleeting dust of delusion, as the 5th century First Chan
Patriarch Bodhidharma puts it in the Essence
of Mahayana.
The book is fascinating, with a wealth of
ideas to contemplate about language, translation issues, Chinese art and
culture, the relationship between Daoism and Chan, the evolution of the Chinese
writing system and the meaning of individual characters, the practice of
calligraphy, dragons, the tumultuous history of the transition between Ming and
Qing, the biography of Shi Tao. Along the way, Hinton offers us different,
provisional translations of the poem in the painting, based on his and our
evolving understanding of the deeper issues involved in bridging two widely
differing cultures. It’s rather like being part of a translators workshop. What
lifts the book above mere cultural commentary, however, is Hinton’s brave
decision to use a prose style that reflects as nearly as possible what happens
in Chan meditation. It’s one thing to be
told that a painting and poem is a meditative practice, and quite another
to become a part of that process
itself, to be drawn in to the process by means of a style which is circular,
elliptic, recursive, and poetic rather than academic, and which never tries to
impose (a delusory) clarity of expression onto something that is ultimately
inexpressible by means of language and that must be experienced personally.
Many readers might be put off by this indirectness, but a reader who is also a
meditator will instantly grasp what Hinton is trying to do.
The book is lavishly and beautifully
produced by Shambhala, with a full color pull-out of the painting under
discussion, 9 more full color plates of some of the greatest paintings in the
genre, and copious black and white illustrations of details from those
paintings, and examples of calligraphy. A singular and unclassifiable
masterpiece by the greatest translator of Chinese poetry and philosophy of our
age.
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