The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (46 page)

THE SILENCES OF CONFUCIUS

In the short essay he wrote on Confucius, Elias Canetti (whom I quoted earlier) made a point that had escaped most scholars.[
4
] He observed that the
Analects
is a book which is important not only for what it says but also for what it does
not
say. This remark is illuminating. Indeed, the
Analects
make a most significant use of the unsaid—which is also a characteristic resource of the Chinese mind; it was eventually to find some of its most expressive applications in the field of aesthetics: the use of silence in music, the use of void in painting, the use of empty spaces in architecture.

Confucius distrusted eloquence; he despised glib talkers, he hated clever word games. For him, it would seem that an agile tongue must reflect a shallow mind; as reflection runs deeper, silence develops. Confucius observed that his favourite disciple used to say so little that, at times, one could have wondered if he was not an idiot. To an
other disciple who had asked him about the supreme virtue of humanity, Confucius replied characteristically, “He who possesses the supreme virtue of humanity is reluctant to speak.”

The essential is beyond words: all that can be said is superfluous. Therefore a disciple remarked, “We can hear and gather our Master’s teachings in matters of knowledge and culture, but it is impossible to make him speak on the ultimate nature of things, or on the will of Heaven.” This silence reflected no indifference or scepticism regarding the will of Heaven—we know from many passages in the
Analects
that Confucius regarded it as
the
supreme guide of his life. But Confucius would have subscribed to Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He did not deny the reality of what is beyond words, he merely warned against the foolishness of attempting to reach it with words. His silence was an affirmation: there
is
a realm about which one can say nothing.

Confucius’s silences occurred essentially when his interlocutors tried to draw him into the question of the afterlife. This attitude has often led commentators to conclude that Confucius was an agnostic. Such a conclusion seems to me very shallow. Consider this famous passage: “Zilu asked about death. The Master said, ‘You do not know life; how could you know death?’” Canetti added this comment: “I know of no sages who took death as seriously as Confucius.” Refusal to answer is not a way of evading the issue but, on the contrary, it is its most forceful affirmation, for questions about death, in fact, always “refer to a time
after
death. Any answer leaps past death, conjuring away both death and its incomprehensibility. If there is something
afterwards
as there was something
before
, then death loses some of its weight. Confucius refuses to play along with this most unworthy legerdemain.”

Like the empty space in a painting—which concentrates and radiates all the inner energy of the painting—Confucius’s silence is not a withdrawal or an escape; it leads to a deeper and closer engagement with life and reality. Near the end of his career, Confucius said one day to his disciples: “I wish to speak no more.” The disciples were perplexed. “But, Master, if you do not speak, how will little ones like us
still be able to hand down any teachings?” Confucius replied, “Does Heaven speak? Yet the four seasons follow their course and the hundred creatures continue to be born. Does Heaven speak?”

I have certainly spoken too much.

1997

*
The Analects of Confucius
: translation and notes by Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997).

Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics

C
HASING
bits of truth is like catching butterflies: pin them down and they die. “As soon as one has finished saying something, it is no longer true.” This observation by Thomas Merton[
1
] could serve as a warning for the reader and should indicate the proper way of perusing this little essay.

In Chinese classical studies, it is necessary to specialise. It is also impossible.

Specialisation is necessary. The wealth, scope and diversity of Chinese culture wildly exceed the assimilating capacities and intellectual resources of any individual—and more particularly, they should drive to despair the wretched Western sinologists who, unlike their Chinese colleagues, did not have the chance to start their training in early childhood and thus approach their discipline at least fifteen years late.

Specialisation is impossible. China is an organic entity, in which every element can be understood only when put under the light of other elements; these other elements can be fairly remote from the one that is under consideration—sometimes they do not even present any apparent connection with it. If he is not guided by a global intuition, the specialist remains forever condemned to the fate of the blind men in the well-known Buddhist parable: as they wanted to figure out what an elephant actually looked like, they groped, one for the trunk, one for the foot, one for the tail, and respectively concluded that an elephant was a kind of snake, was a kind of pillar, was a kind of broom.

Conversely, the global intuition that alone can grasp the essential
nature of the subject (we shall have much need for it here) is invariably accompanied by a shocking neglect—if not downright ignorance—of surface details. This problem should not worry us too much, if we remember Lie Zi’s story about the connoisseur of horses.[
2
] This parable was quoted earlier in this volume
†
: it should be used as an introductory warning whenever we attempt to make general statements, not only on Chinese culture but also on any rich and complex issue in the field of the humanities.

In the course of this inquiry, I may well become guilty of simplifications verging on distortion that could at times induce the reader to suspect that here too the colour and the sex of the beast have been mistaken . . . Anyway, I shall seek no further excuses; after all, what is an enterprise like this but an attempt to prolong or to echo, however clumsily, those moments of bliss that we sometimes experience in our encounters with poems and paintings? (Can artistic and literary criticism have any other justification?)

China is a world. Any tourist who has just spent two weeks there will tell you that much. (Though, in this case, I wonder if it is not a misunderstanding, as I doubt that the People’s Republic has actually succeeded in preserving the
universality
that defined Chinese culture for some 3,000 years. Of course, it is obviously too early now to attempt an evaluation of thirty years of illiterates’ rule. But this is another story.)

Still, when it is applied to traditional China, this old cliché—as is often the case with commonplace statements—covers a truth that runs much deeper than one usually suspects while uttering it.

More exactly, one should say that China is a certain world view, a way of conceiving the relations between man and the universe—a recipe for cosmic order.

The key concept of Chinese civilisation is
harmony
; whether it is a matter of organising human affairs within society or of attuning individuals to universal rhythms, this same search for harmony equally motivates Confucian wisdom and Daoist mysticism. In this respect, both schools appear complementary rather than antagonistic, and
their main difference pertains to their area of application—social, exterior and official for the former; spiritual, interior and popular for the latter.

The various currents of Chinese thought all spring from one common cosmological source. This cosmology (its system is schematically summarised in the most ancient, precious and obscure of all Chinese canonical treatises,
The Book of Changes
) describes all phenomena as being in a ceaseless state of flux. Permanent creation itself results from the marriage of two forces that oppose and complement each other. These two forces—or poles—represent a diversification of “having.” “Having,” in turn, is a product of “non-having” (
wu
),[
3
] a concept that is constantly mistranslated as “nothingness,” whereas it rather corresponds to what Western philosophy would call “being.” The Chinese thinkers have wisely considered that “being” can only be grasped
negatively
: the Absolute that could be defined and named, that could
have
qualifications, properties and characteristics, or that could lend itself to all the limitations of a positive description, obviously cannot be the true Absolute—it merely belongs to the realm of “having,” with its ephemeral and kaleidoscopic flow of phenomena. The process that we just sketched here does not form a mechanical chain, nor is it the outcome of a causal sequence. It could be better described as an organic circle within which various stages can simultaneously co-exist. In the earliest texts, “non-having” seems sometimes to precede “having,” but in later commentaries their relation is described in the form of an exchange, a dialectical union of complementary opposites, giving birth to one another.[
4
] “Being” is the fecund substratum, the field where “having” germinates—or, to put it in other words, emptiness is the space where all phenomena are nurtured. Thus, “being” can only be grasped in its hollowness; it is only its absence that can be delineated, in the same fashion as an intaglio seal shows its pattern through a blank: it is the
absence
of matter that reveals the design. The notion that the Absolute can be suggested only through emptiness presents momentous implications for Chinese aesthetics, as we shall see later.

It is by cultivating the arts that a gentleman can actually realise the universal harmony that Chinese wisdom ascribes as his vocation: the
supreme mission of a civilised man is to grasp the unifying principle of things, to set the world in order, to put himself in step with the dynamic rhythm of Creation.

The arts are essentially poetry, painting and calligraphy; music should also be included here (for the Chinese scholar, music means only the zither
qin
); however, my incompetence in the latter field shall unfortunately prevent me from making more than passing reference to it.

A gentleman practises the arts in order to realise his own humanity. For this very reason, unlike all crafts (sculpture, carving, architecture, music played on vulgar instruments and so forth), no art could constitute a professional, specialised activity. One should naturally be competent in all matters pertaining to poetry, calligraphy and painting inasmuch as one is a gentleman, and no one,
unless
he is a gentleman, can achieve this competence. By definition, such fundamental activities can only be pursued by non-professionals; when it comes to living, aren’t we all amateurs?

PAINTING AND POETRY

One exemplary figure embodied the union of painting and poetry: Wang Wei (699–761). He was one of China’s greatest poets, and as a painter he has been credited with the invention of a new style that was eventually to constitute what is conventionally described today as “Chinese painting”—monochrome ink landscape executed with a calligraphic brush.

Su Dongpo (1036–1101), himself a very versatile literary and artistic genius of no lesser stature, commented on this subject: “In every poem by Wang Wei there is a painting, and in every one of his paintings there is a poem.” This observation was subsequently quoted so often that it became a cliché. We must attempt to rediscover its original meaning and restore its full impact.[
5
]

First, this famous statement can be taken as a factual description. Consider, for instance, the following verses:

When we read these words, they immediately conjure a vision that countless paintings have made familiar to us: a river flows towards a destination that lies beyond the page, carrying away a lonely little boat or a couple of drifting ducks, whereas in the empty expanse of the silk, a few faint touches of ink hint that, somewhere above the invisible riverbank, a mountain must be hiding in the mist.

However pertinent such a visual association may appear, we should keep in mind that this type of pictorial parallel is based on an anachronism: what the Tang poem just suggested is in fact a Song painting, which came into existence only some 300 years later! As for Wang Wei’s own paintings, although no original survives, the kind of image that various indirect witnesses enable us to reconstruct seems oddly out of place with the type of vision suggested by his poems. In contrast with the fluid and subtle economy of the poems, most probably his pictorial style was still painstakingly detailed and not yet free from archaic linear stiffness.

Moreover, if it is not wrong to say that painting and poetry express two sides of the same inspiration, it should be observed that it was only in the Yuan period—six centuries after Wang Wei—that scholars began to inscribe poems on their paintings, or to trace paintings under their poems, with the same brush and under the same impulsion. Wang Wei, painter and poet, may provide a convenient symbol of the union of these two arts; yet, in fact, his historical activity has very little relevance for our topic. The real meaning of Su Dongpo’s statement lies elsewhere—and it could be summarised in a double axiom, which we shall try to analyse:
The aesthetic principles and expressive techniques of poetry have a pictorial character. The aesthetic principles and expressive techniques of painting have a poetical character.

Whereas any poem, by its very nature, is normally expressed in the form of a sequence unfolding
in time
, Chinese poetry attempts, in a way, to fit words
in space
.[
6
] The spatial potential of the Chinese poem can be grasped first on a superficial level, if we simply consider the fact
that the poem can, and should, be calligraphed; in this calligraphic form it can be exhibited and contemplated just like a painting. However, the spatial quality of the poem is not merely an outcome of Chinese writing; it has a much more essential origin, which is to be found in the very structure of the language. This could be well illustrated, for instance, by the use and technique of the “parallel verses,” which constitute a basic device of Chinese poetry.