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?
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
3: Boo-dhism
Sorry about that; I needed to fit some kind of Halloween reference, and it's hard to shoehorn thrills and chills into Zhang Jiuling!
Matt asked me to talk about Buddhism in the third Poem of Encountering. For those of you with no experience of Buddhism whatsoever, the Buddha's most basic teachings are:
The "path" is the Middle Way of moderation, care, and compassion. Buddhism first came to China in the Han dynasty, carried by traders along the Silk Road and by pilgrims from India. It reached full flourishing under the Tang dynasty, when our poets lived and wrote. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China, came from the West (that is, India) in the 5th century, and his movement flourished under the Tang alongside native religious and philosophical movements like Daoism and Buddhism. In fact, the three traditions were seen as complementary, and a term, Three Teachings (三教), arose to refer to all at once.
When I was a child, learning about this stuff for the first time, the fact that these three religious existed side by side without sectarian violence blew me away. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the fact of the matter is that Zhang Jiuling was educated in the Confucian system, and surrounded by and familiar with Buddhist and Daoist teachings. The tension between Confucian thought, which emphasized engagement with the official world and duty, and Daoist or Buddhist thought, which placed less importance on worldly affairs, can be seen throughout these three poems. Daoism, with its emphasis on natural behavior and "flying free," is all through the first of these three poems; the image of the hermit-monk stretches between Daoism and Buddhism, but the poem's language, especially its emphasis on washing the mind and on freedom from attachment to worldly affairs, seems explicitly Buddhist to me. The anxiety I mentioned yesterday, though, is all Confucian.
Tomorrow, I'll focus on the way the specific words Matt mentioned, and the role they play in the poem. As per usual, this topic could consume another week all by itself!
Matt asked me to talk about Buddhism in the third Poem of Encountering. For those of you with no experience of Buddhism whatsoever, the Buddha's most basic teachings are:
- There is suffering in life.
- Suffering comes from attachment to things.
- Suffering can cease when attachment to things ceases.
- There is a path out of suffering.
The "path" is the Middle Way of moderation, care, and compassion. Buddhism first came to China in the Han dynasty, carried by traders along the Silk Road and by pilgrims from India. It reached full flourishing under the Tang dynasty, when our poets lived and wrote. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China, came from the West (that is, India) in the 5th century, and his movement flourished under the Tang alongside native religious and philosophical movements like Daoism and Buddhism. In fact, the three traditions were seen as complementary, and a term, Three Teachings (三教), arose to refer to all at once.
When I was a child, learning about this stuff for the first time, the fact that these three religious existed side by side without sectarian violence blew me away. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the fact of the matter is that Zhang Jiuling was educated in the Confucian system, and surrounded by and familiar with Buddhist and Daoist teachings. The tension between Confucian thought, which emphasized engagement with the official world and duty, and Daoist or Buddhist thought, which placed less importance on worldly affairs, can be seen throughout these three poems. Daoism, with its emphasis on natural behavior and "flying free," is all through the first of these three poems; the image of the hermit-monk stretches between Daoism and Buddhism, but the poem's language, especially its emphasis on washing the mind and on freedom from attachment to worldly affairs, seems explicitly Buddhist to me. The anxiety I mentioned yesterday, though, is all Confucian.
Tomorrow, I'll focus on the way the specific words Matt mentioned, and the role they play in the poem. As per usual, this topic could consume another week all by itself!
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