The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a
Fourteenth-Century Chinese Hermit. Translated by Red
Pine. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1999, xvi + 231
pages, ISBN: 1–56279–101–X, US $14.95. Red Pine is the nom-de-plume of Bill Porter, whose love of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist hermit culture has previously given us a translation of Han Shan’s works (The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain) and a literary-ethnographic travelogue of hermit life in the Zhongnan mountains (Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits). This latest volume of translations presents poems and lectures by the Yuan dynasty Chan monk Shiwu (“Stonehouse,” 1272–1352). Porter divides the book into three parts: “poems,” “gathas” (Buddhist verse), and “Zen talks.” The distinction between the poems and gathas is often quite slight because the natural imagery of his poems blends into the doctrinal exposition of his religious verses and vice versa. The Zen talks also feature poems and natural imagery. Stonehouse draws upon the previous examples of Tao Qian (the quintessential literati hermit in Chinese culture) and Han Shan (the specifically Buddhist equivalent). Stonehouse’s work is often more explicitly doctrinal than Han Shan’s, which is understandable as Stonehouse was more involved with Buddhist institutions. Whereas the persona of Han Shan is more marginal, even anarchic, Stonehouse served as abbot of Fuyuan Temple (near Hangzhou) for eight years. His attitudes toward the monastic life in larger institutions were nonetheless ambivalent. He clearly preferred solitude and sniped at “mediocre monks” and their “would-be masters” (p. 13), “the slackers who wear a robe to get food” (p. 23) and those who “study koans to death” (p. 89). The themes of the poetry include the brevity of life, the vanity of ego, and the benefits and hardships of solitude. In the gathas and talks, there are more explicit exhortations to diligent practice, advanced instruction on meditative cultivation, and commentaries on koan literature. These poems superimpose natural imagery and doctrinal expositions so that both become highly coded. Porter supplies succinct annotation, identifying proper names and helping with intertextual references, but the dense intertextuality and coding again brings up the issue of how much these poems can be taken as reflective of any immediate experience. Every flower, every cloud, all the natural elements have their coded doctrinal meaning so that nothing is ever just itself. For example, “as soon as drifting clouds start to linger / the wind blows them past the vines” (p. 5). Porter explains, “Clouds are often used as metaphors for thoughts, while vines represent the convoluted logic of the mind” (p. 4). According to one popular image, Chinese nature poetry flows spontaneously from enlightened creativity. For example, Wai-lam Yip asserts of another (semi-)hermit, Wang Wei, “Wang Wei is Phenomenon itself: no trace of conceptualization”; furthermore, “[t]he poet does not step in; he views things as things view themselves” (Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei, vii and vi). When we see how this direct perception of phenomena is expressed in highly structured and semiotically loaded verse, we can recognize this “rhetoric of immediacy” (to use Bernard Faure’s well-known phrase). Porter does not address this issue, but this translation shows Chan poetry as complex, intertextual, and doctrinally sophisticated. In most Western scholarship and popular writing, the narrative of “Zen” in India ceases with the transmission to China, and the narrative of “Chinese Zen” ceases with the transmission to Japan. Heinrich Dumoulin’s two-volume Zen Buddhism: A History is a perfect example of this sectarian/nationalist distortion. It is time to stop saying “Zen” when referring to China, though publishers of books aimed at a wider readership may disagree for tactical (marketing) reasons. This is a minor quibble, but one that is highlighted by this book, which, on the one hand, is subtitled The Zen Works of Stonehouse, but at the same time, displays the beauty and subtlety of Chan discourse long after the dominant narrative has turned away from China. Porter is occasionally a little curt with terminology. For example, in one verse he makes reference to “buddhas,” where the Chinese has “the tathagatas of the three worlds” (sanshi rulai) (p. 75). Converting tathagatas to buddhas is quite normal, but he ignores the phrase “of the three worlds.” This is a minor point. He also translates “entering dhyāna at night” (yeru channa) as “practicing zazen at night” (p. 91). To render “dhyāna” as “zen” (or “chan”) would be fine since they are the same words (“zen” is the Japanese pronunciation of the first syllable of channa, which is the modern standard pronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyāna). But there is no za- (“seated”) in the text, and “practicing zazen” has a very different feel from “entering dhyāna.” Again, it is a minor point, and all translators have to barter with words. Still, there are enough of these abbreviations and glosses that I would probably want to add some commentary when using this book as a class text. Fortunately, Porter supplies the Chinese text and his own notations (on the even-numbered pages, opposite his translation). On the whole, this is a valuable offering and a delight to read. It would be fun to use in classes on Chinese religion or Buddhism, and I plan to use it when I next teach “East Asian Views of Nature.” It would also be just the right book to take with you the next time that you enter the mountains. Copyright 2000 |