3: Terms of Art (and Religion)

Yesterday I introduced the basic tenants of Buddhism, and discussed how it arrived in China and became a part of Chinese thought by the time when our poets lived and wrote. Today I'm going to focus the poem's Buddhist language.

The first of these is the second line of the first couplet:

滞虑洗孤清
zhì lǜ xǐ gū qīng
sluggish consider wash alone clear

The character 滞 zhì dictionary-translates as "sluggish," but can also be read as "congealed" (which is its meaning in Japanese). Thoughts, the detritus of experience, accumulate in the mind as karma; they attach to things, and cause suffering. To alleviate suffering, we wash those accumulated thoughts away. This doesn't mean that a Buddhist wants to eliminate cognition--quite the opposite. Think of thought as blood. When blood flows freely through the body, the body is healthy. When blood clots and hardens, though, it is life-threatening. Buddhism observes that human thought is mostly clotted: when we see the world we see our preconceptions of it to the exclusion of the world itself. The monk, by "washing" his thoughts, returns their clear and liquid state.

空意 kōng yì, in the third couplet, is another interesting example. In order to liberate the mind from suffering, Buddhism advocates realizing that things as you think of them have no independent, eternal identity. Everything is causally connected to everything else. No phenomenon can be isolated from other phenomena. As such, the world is "empty" - nothing exists in and of itself. (In this way Buddhism has a lot in common with certain threads in Catholic thought, though I'm sure any good theologian would have serious issues with this position of mine.)

In the poem, 空意 kōng yì might mean "the meaning of emptiness," or else "the emptiness of meaning" - that is to say, the emptiness of inherent meaning. I chose to translate it as "emptiness" alone, relying on the degree to which the association between Buddhism and emptiness exists in American culture. This also saved me from having to decide one way or the other on the meaning of 空意, and then having to fit "meaning" into the weird rhythm structure I attempted in this translation. Then again, maybe the elision is too convenient. What do you think?