The Foundling

The principal feature and charm of this book lay not so much in its literary style, or more than 200 sketched Chinese brush paintings, or complete poetic works translation, or in the extent and usefulness of the knowledge it conveys, as in its simple sincerity. In this respect the acute reader will notice how the images here are themselves the speech, and the poetry as a whole is an ideographic construction of the book, Chinese words and terms in which are romanized according to the Wade-Giles system of transliteration, rather than the more modern Pinyin Chinese Phonetics, to stick to the style of classical prose. The following pages form the record of events that, according to tradition, really happened in the T’ang-period China late 7th – early 8th century at Kuo-ch’ing temple in the T’ien-t’ai Mountains. All that has been done is to colouring them in black-and-white, because the spectrum of visible light at the extremes would inevitably be black and white, yin and yang. This is the spectrum of the Way (Tao), both physical and metaphysical, when the spectrum of light inevitably breaks into the identifiable ranges of the colours; life breaks down into certain primal situations, equivalent to the colours of the Tao, which recur time and again in the eternal vibration between the extremes of yin and yang, black and white, two opposite forms that continuously feed one another. For this no extra charge has been made with the exception of delightful insight into the background of the four figures: three eccentric persons and the forth—the unnamed tigress, a creature on the back of which Ch’an monk Feng Kan usually rode. All the four were not poetic ideals, but sentient beings of flesh and blood, and the forth one in particular, the beast, which weighed about five Chinese stones (about seven hundred English pounds). At another level, Feng Kan, Han Shan, and Shih Te are also examples, prototypes, if you wish, of the crazy saints, wise men, sages, and itinerant hermits who contrast so markedly with the ordinary monastic brotherhood and worldly society lifestyles of the vast majority in any culture or civilization. Now we sometimes look to these fellows, real and imaginary, asking them rhetorically: “So, old fellows, what have you learnt that can help us?” We listen to their advices, methods, and teachings, and, sometimes, follow their poetic prescriptions. When one of his rivals snidely predicted that Han Shan’s poems would soon be relegated to the kitchen, where it would be used as scrap to cover soy sauce pots, he only smiled and said nothing. As successive generations of readers find many observations preserved in his poetry fresh and ever new, perhaps Han Shan has had the last laugh after all. Sometimes we laugh at him and bang his birch bark headband. In moments of whimsy and frenzy we give all the three magical and marvellous powers—skills in taming beasts and healing by means of incantations, ability to disappear and reappear at will, power to penetrate into cliffs and cross the stream on one single leaf, techniques for defeating the “six internal thieves,” methods for calming troubled souls, staying the natural process of decay, and so forth. In addition, such stories, if they are good, lead the reader into the solemn presence of some truth which most of us enjoy indirectly, not having paid the heavy price out of our hearts, in their most secret gleanings, the precious and inconvertible treasures of our own dreams. Working on this book, I frequently felt myself strangely pleased, as though an honour had been conferred on me. Enveloped as I was in the familiar, reassuring ambience of the monastery cells, grounds, and cellars where I had spent so many hours with the characters of this text, as a kid playing around with such simple toys as fruit stones, the yarrow stalks, fly whisks, hand-scrolls, cookware, the masters’ dreams, and old fables, with all their unsettling implications receded to a distance and took on a kind of unreality, as though completely unconnected with my own self. The whole things read like a treatise from Han Shan’s hand-scroll written by Shih Te’s brush or, rather, his crude broom, with that special feeling that mysteriously refreshes and makes me glad again, because it is not my way of suffering—I’m just called upon to witness. And indeed, having escaped the fate of the protagonists, I have some reason to be thankful for my own. I should be truly thankful for help to my Oriental spiritual guides, to a number of friends for various assistances: locating valued reference material, commenting on and correcting my manuscript, etc. My thanks are also due to the team of Trafford publishers. Above all I am thankful to my wife for constant encouragement and support of every kind; though ultimately I must take responsibility for all that appears here.