Jao Tsung-iâs activities spanned many fields of Chinese culture, but the writings included in this volume suggest one of the themes that unifies his scholarship, art, calligraphy, and poetry: his tireless search for the traces of spiritual forces underlying numberless phenomena of this world. What he meant by the âspiritualâ is not entirely fixed, but encompasses both Daoist and Buddhist principles, identifying a unity to our experience, whether we term it the Way or Emptiness or something else. This spiritual goal, even if often ineffable or obscure, motivated Jaoâs artistic pursuits in various media, as can be seen throughout this volume. He was profoundly versed in the classics of Chan Buddhism, in particular, and was inspired by how Chan masters had sought to convey a message that transcended language by means of concrete artistic expression, by verbal teachings, and by poetry.
Jao was a prolific poet, and I first focused my attention on Jaoâs oeuvre through my study and translation of his original classical-style poetry. But his creative work is the obverse side of his scholarly achievement, both of which are closely tied to the sources of Chinese tradition, as he describes in his own poem #82 in the great âCheung Chauâ
He found creative inspiration from throughout his surroundings, constantly; but not least from his own recollection of the Chinese classics and the literary tradition (though not exclusively, as his erudition extended to many other languages as well).
At the same time, Jaoâs very manner of attention to literature also showed that for him it was only one artistic medium among many. He disagreed profoundly, as this volume reveals, with the modern linguistic turn which sees language as preceding meaning. Instead, he saw verbal expression as parallel with many other kinds of human expression, not least the Chinese characters themselves, to which he accorded their own significance apart from words alone, not least through their use in the single art in which he most excelled: calligraphy, such as that which adorns the cover of this very volume. Through the aesthetic resonance of calligraphy we can appreciate that Chinese writing is not merely a tool for conveying words, but rather a different path towards, again, some kind of spiritual inspiration.
As with calligraphy, so with the other arts, in particular music and painting. Probably only Jao would respond to a question about Buddhist enlightenment by thinking of late Ming Dynasty instructions for painting (as he does in dialogue with Shi Yidui in chapter 2 of this volume). As anyone who has seen the gorgeous lotus blossoms Jao painted late in life can attest, though, for him the coordination of line and color could easily be a visual guide towards awakening as potent as any verbal teaching. Similarly with his devotion to the music of the qin zither, already articulated in a previous volume in this series: music had its own independent truth for him, never reducible to a verbal or visual summary. It is telling that Jao, as he does in the fourth chapter of the volume, would have been able to identify musical terminology and structure even in the classic âRhapsody on Literature,â a verbal artifact par excellence.
Though Jao probably did not, ultimately, privilege literature qua literature over any of the other classical Chinese arts, this volume makes a case for the special importance of the Chinese concept of wenxue within his work. Wenxue is the modern translational equivalent of the English âliterature,â but its literal meaning in Chinese is much broader, referring to âletters and scholarship,â or alternatively, âthe learning associated with cultural refinement.â In its original sense, it certainly lacks any implication of something done for entertainment or having fictional content, as with the modern word âliterature,â but instead refers to the tradition of Chinese written scholarship, which preserves and transmits a living cultural legacy to us in the present. In this sense, I think, wenxue did possess a singular prominence in Jaoâs life and work, because, as we see in this volume, it encompassed not just the creative impulse but also the study and practice by which one mastered the classical Chinese tradition.
That is not to say that literary or scholarly achievement is an end in itself, however. It is one indirect way of accessing something else, a state of spiritual freedom that can never be described or represented fully. Dealing with Jaoâs writing and legacy one is often awed by his productivity, but he makes clear within this volume that he sees productivity alone as of only limited value compared to spiritual attainments. Perhaps most memorably, he comments to Shi Yidui that it is not the case that a writer or artist can be truly inspired at every occasion. Instead, âthat kind of opportunity does not come often, perhaps no more than a few times in a lifetime. To be able to write just seven or eight fine poems is already a great thing.â Thus, charmingly, he suggests that it may not be the vast tomes and acres of canvas that he filled with his own productions during his lifetime that give him the greatest pride. It is only those select works in which he was truly moved by some grace beyond the ordinary, of a kind that may only come along a few times in a century-long life. In this volume Jao shows us that even though scholarship and repetition, production and representation, are all worthwhile activities, they are only part of a greater journey in search of spiritual illumination.
As my description above is intended to suggest, I do not see the writings in this volume as having solely a scholarly value. That is, they are expressions of Jao as artist as well as Jao as scholar, and are full of intuitive, transhistorical insights, beyond their erudite assemblages of citations. For this reason, the translation here has presented these texts more or less as they were originally. It would certainly be possible to add citations to more recent scholarship on most of these topics in Chinese, English, Japanese, and other languages. But even Jaoâs original citations are rarely comprehensive. To the contrary, he tends to cite only what is useful to him, whether to pick over an error or to borrow a correct judgment. Thus, to update the scholarly apparatus would have transformed these essays into something quite different, closer to our own contemporary mode of scholarship. While we have borrowed from previous translations of original texts, and cited them appropriately when used, we have generally not added references to additional scholarship sources, unless necessary to clarify a point in the translation.
I am profoundly grateful to all the individuals and organizations that have sponsored this translation, as detailed in the series introduction above, but I would like to single out in particular the Jao family, whose support of this and other projects has done so much to preserve Jaoâs legacy. I am also grateful to my co-editors Chen Zhi, for his incredible energy in promoting serious scholarship on China in so many different venues; and Adam Schwartz, for his many casual insights into scholarship and life. This volume could hardly have been undertaken without the assistance of Dr. Frankie Chik, Dr. Xu Zhenxu, and Fu Xinci, who made the initial translations of chapters three to eight. I am also keenly appreciative of the last-minute proofreading of Dr. Chan Chok Meng. This entire series has been able to achieve consistency in quality due to the scrupulous editing of Dr. Linda Yuet Ngo Leung, who has a remarkable ability to correct a misquotation or to identify a missing source. However, I have further revised all the translations, and must take the burden of blame for the mistakes that surely remain.
Williams, The Residue of Dreams: Selected Poems of Jao Tsung-i, 154.