China and the West

Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar [Jiang Kanghu]. [ID D32411].
In suggesting that, after an interval of many years, I again contribute to The Occident, its editor wrote me that the autumn issue "is to focus upon Asiatic literature" and added that "this theme was given impetus by a sense of its necessity in our present Western thought."
With more time and space, I should have liked to dwell on the theme as it relates to that necessity, our present political involvement with Asia making acutely necessary our understanding of the Oriental spirit; but I hope that a brief factual account of my connection with Chinese poetry and philosophy will not only record experience pertinent to the theme and to the impetus prompting it—as well as incidentally pertinent to the University of California—but will help to indicate the fact that human emotion and thought are of sympathetic kinship the world over and that such thought in Chinese philosophy as has lasted from the 6th century B.C. and in Chinese poetry from the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries A.D. is basically close to what is likely to last of "present Western thought."
In 1918, when I was a member of the faculty at Berkeley, I met a fellow member, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, to whom I was at once drawn. What he had recently done as a man of principle and brave action was enough to evoke my interest even before I learned to know him as a gentle scholar and stimulating companion. He had been secretary to Yuan Shih-k'ai, China's first president after Sun Yat-sen's provisional presidency and patriotic withdrawal. When in 1916, Yuan schemed to make himself emperor, Dr. Kiang, denouncing the plot and instrumental in blocking it, had to flee for his life and, landing in the United States, speedily learned enough English to become an able and popular teacher at the University of California. Like most Americans, I had been trained exclusively in the European culture which stems from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. Until 1917, the best part of which year I spent in Japan and China, I had known next to nothing of the world's Asiatic background; and now at Berkeley I was finding myself moved by it as it reflected in Dr. Kiang, especially by fragments of Chinese poetry with which he would now and then illuminate his conversation. I had been superficially familiar with the ethical teachings of Confucius, had respected his sense of order, his successful rejection of divine attributes, and his intelligent concern with one world at a time, but had been a bit chilled by his preoccupation with domestic and social etiquette, his elaborate anticipation of Emerson's findings that in some respects manners are morals. Through glimpses of the calm, kind, almost democratic thinking, the intuitional sense of oneness in man, nature and eternity, which permeates many of the T'ang poems, I began seeing for the first time into an ancient society of individual spirits not shackled by dogma, by fixed commandment or code, not shadowed by jealous deity. Against the burdens and buffets of life, these poets had found an inner peace and a good will toward men at least as sure and sweet, it seemed to me, as any peace or good will found in a later world.
Jesus says, Leave all else and follow Me, which no all-powerful God would need to say and no man, impotent against change, should assume to say. His followers say, God died for us. It's the Me and the me. T'ang poets, living their Taoism, had eased meship into the whole current of life itself, no god or man intervening. They acknowledged the melancholy natural to man over his predicaments, but had not let it become anything like the morbidly mystical egotism in which Christianity has mythologized it. Wang Wei says, I shall some day meet an old wood-cutter And talk and laugh and never return.
Han Hung asks,
Who need be craving a world beyond this one?
Here, among men, are the Purple Hills!
Meng Chiao asks,
What troubling wave can arrive to vex A spirit like water in a timeless well?
Liu Chang-ch'ing confesses,
Mingling with Truth among the flowers,
I have forgotten what to say.
A wisdom was here, I thought, relaxed and open, of which Christian civilization—perhaps Buddhist civilization also—stood in need for a simplifying and cleansing and strengthening of life; a wisdom which, I felt, some unnecessary screen had been hiding from us of the West. Perhaps the screen was the fact that, through priesthood and pathetic credulity, Taoism had degenerated from a pure philosophic faith into superstition and claptrap, much as the teachings of Jesus have done; some of the Christian mythology seeming to me as savage as that of Greece but less engaging. Perhaps Jesus needs Laotzu over here, I won¬dered, and Laotzu needs Jesus over there. I tried to find Laotzu in translations of his sayings; but the translations only clouded him for me, whereas Kiang's oral Anglicizing of T'ang poets, and of their Taoism, illumined him. So I asked Kiang if he and I might not try collaborating in translating poems by Wang Wei. I wish we had then thought of trying to translate the source, the Tao Teh Ching itself. But Kiang proposed an 18th century anthology, Three Hundred Pearls of the T'ang Dynasty (618 to 906 A.D.) the compiler of which had remarked in his preface, "This is but a family reader for children, but it will hold good until our hair is white": a collection of far wider popularity in China than, say, The Golden Treasury here. 170 Chinese Poems, the first book of translations by Arthur Waley, Britain's distinguished Sinologist, had not then appeared and resounded, or I might have quit my project; and earlier translations, except a few by Helen Waddell, had not held what I wanted. Ezra Pound's small sheaf, Cathay, printed in London three years before, contained passages arrestingly fine, as well as prophetic of Waley's direct manner; but Kiang, wondering why the American poet should call Li Po only by his Japanese name, Rihaku, recited off-hand versions of the same poems Pound had chosen, which I found, even in Kiang's halting English, still finer.
So we went to work, believing that in a year's time we could string the three hundred Chinese pearls on English thread. Two years later we sailed for China together, planning continuance through the summer of our far from finished task. By a freak of fortune we lost each other. He was to spend a fortnight with relatives and on business in Shanghai. He had given me as his address a Chinese hotel there; but he had advised my going ahead with the Arthur Davison Fickes, our travelling companions, to Si Wu, the lake resort near Hangchow where he would join us later, for escape from Shanghai's terrific heat. When we still had to flee heat, we wrote giving him our address on Mokan-shan, a comparatively cool mountain, still farther from Shanghai. His hotel, being full as we learned afterwards, not only had no room for him but apparently took no interest in his mail, though he called there again and again and I wrote there again and again all summer, he thinking as ill of an American as I of a Chinese. In the autumn, we met by accident on a Shanghai street. Since he had left with me his rough literal texts of the poems and I had been hard at work on them, we were able to go over them for accuracy, as we had done before and were to do again many times.
The publishers' announcement of The Jade Mountain for 1921, when we had expected it to be ready, led to an amusing literary panic of which I knew nothing until 1946 when, asked to review a volume of correspondence between Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, I discovered how hard Miss Lowell had driven her collaborator in order to issue their translations from the Chinese ahead of ours. As it happened, Fir-Flower Tablets appeared in 1921 and The Jade Mountain—after eight more years of work on it—in 1929.
Meanwhile the popular welcome given Arthur Waley's and Shigeyoshi Obata's translations, as well as magazine publication of nearly all our three hundred "pearls," had shown a marked Western interest in Chinese poetry, not as something exotic or picturesque but as a record of human feeling and thought so simply and rightly expressed as almost to conceal its artistry. I often wish that among our own contemporary poets there were more of the T'ang awareness that "a poem can be tipped over by one heavy word." In poetry, apart from political comments, officially commanded tributes or playful literary games, those old boys used no ponderous or intricate symbolism, no foppish babble, but the grace of an art in which a man's mind never grows childish and a child's heart never dies.
It is of course gratifying to me that Dr. Kiang's work and mine, as translators, stays alive; and I attribute its vitality to the fact that in spirit and expression the poems remain as close as we could keep them to what the originals mean in China. Mr. Waley, who knows Chinese, greeted the book warmly and took generous pains to point out a number of initial errors which have been corrected in later editions. I trust that the vogue of flashy, deliberately false translations, like those of Powys Mathers in Colored Stars, is past. I used to argue with Miss Lowell and Mrs. Ayscough against their exaggerated use of root-meanings in Chinese characters, so that under their hands what was natural, direct, every-day expression in the Orient would become in English odd or complex or literary. The temptation to dart toward such glitter is easy to understand; but I early agreed with Kiang that for translators the bright fly concealed a hook. I quote from one of Mrs. Ayscough's letters: "Take, for instance, yu, formed of the two radicals 'the wind' and 'to speak'; instead of just saying 'a gale Miss Lowell has rendered this 'shouts on the clearness of a gale.' One must be careful not to exaggerate," continues her collaborator, "but it makes lovely poems." Though it may gratify Mrs. Ayscough's weakness for "lovely poems" and though Chinese scholars may have sensitive feelers for the roots of their written characters, such translation does not give the reader or auditor in English the equivalent of what a Chinese reads or hears in the original. Poets write for people, not for etymologists. Whether or not Po Chü-yi, as is said, tested his poems by reading them to his cook, they are as human and simple as if he had done so and can be finally as appealing in Canton, Ohio, as in Canton, Kwangtung. On Second Avenue in New York I noticed years ago a Chinese restaurant called The Jade Mountain and, told by a waiter that the owner had taken the title from a book of translated poems, I hoped it was because they were well translated. But it was more probably because of magic in the name, Kiang Kang-hu. I had already been shown respect by the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Santa Fe due to my connection with "a great scholar." These days when Kiang is mentioned in The New Canton Cafe, my friend there shakes his head sadly and observes, "Maybe he was too ambitious, but he is still a great scholar."
It happened that, during the Sino-Japanese war, Dr. Kiang joined the puppet government at Nanking as Minister of Education. He wrote me that he considered his act not political but a means of serving his people in captivity, as a scholar should. Unfortunately, when he became later a captive of the Nationalists, they did not relish his explanation and sentenced him to death. Because of appeals from many sources, including two American generals who had met and admired him, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. There had to be more appeals before he was permitted brush and paper for writing.
It was after his imprisonment that, still unsatisfied with English versions of the Tao Teh Ching, even with Arthur Waley's and Lin Yutang's which were published after my earlier research, I decided that I must attempt one by myself, must try to uncover in Laotzu's book the secret of his profound influence on China's loftiest thinkers and doers. Without Kiang's help, except for the general perception due to our eleven years of collaborating, I pondered and worked for many months, digging out from a dozen or so translations in English what I felt Laotzu must have meant; and for better or worse the resultant "American version" has maintained remarkable popularity in the United States through the past decade. Innumerable letters have certified a readiness among all sorts and conditions of Americans to add Laotzu's wisdom to the wisdom of the West.
Partly because Arthur Waley had thought my turns of expression too smooth and had questioned some of my interpretations, partly because I feared that I had been presumptuous, but finally because I would rather have my readings in The Way of Life approved by Kiang than by anyone else, I needed most the letter which came from his Nanking prison, dated August 13, 1948, four years after I had sent him the book. I have heard nothing from him since; and for several years his wife and children have received no answer concerning him from Chinese authorities. But through the silence I hear again, in his letter, the gentle scholar I first heard in Berkeley thirty-five years ago.
"As to your interpretation of Lao-tse" (he uses the older English spelling, instead of my Anglicized form, comparable to our spelling Kung Fu-tze, Confucius) "I can only say that it was entirely your insight of a 'fore-Nature' understanding that rendered it so simple and yet so profound. Lao-tse's text is direct, and we have to go around about it. It is impossible to translate it without an interpretation. Most of the former translations were based on the interpretations of certain commentators, but you chiefly took its interpretation from your own insight, which I term the 'fore-Nature' understanding or, in Chinese, Hsien-T'ien. This Hsien-T'ien understanding is above and beyond words. As the Chinese say, 'All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason.' If this reason was not sidetracked by anything of an 'after-Nature,' then everyone would come to an identical or similar understanding. So the translation could be very close to the original text, even without knowledge of the words. I am grateful to you indeed for your kind dedication, but rather shameful for not being able to assist you in any way."
Though he does not commit himself to my interpretation, this gentle comment from Kiang Kang-hu has assisted me in more ways than one. I have tried to thank him in China, and I thank him here.
It is a warming phenomenon that our having been to all purposes at war with the present government of China's mainland—this fact has not turned our people against the Chinese as people. Russia, behind China, has been our real dread. And I doubt that the Chinese people will long be docile to foreign-inspired masters. Docility to any master is not in their nature nor in their history. Although the Soviet system, insofar as it means local government by guilds, originated in China, the Soviet system as developed by Russia into a police state is alien to Chinese character and tradition. From earliest times scholars and poets have held high place in Chinese government and, though often punished for individualism and candor, have seldom feared to criticize and to oppose and undo tyranny, as Dr. Kiang opposed and helped to thwart the attempted tyranny of Yuan Shih-k'ai. It is notable today that not only a statesman like Syngman Rhee but many thousands of Korean and Chinese soldiers are gallantly, stoutly opposing both Communist tyranny and our own powerful, disgraceful and unprecedented tyranny in imprisoning and tormenting our declared friends. I have a feeling that our own people at large are ashamed of our captains and bargainers. At least there is no surging popular sentiment among us favoring assault on the people of China. And I am convinced that under similar circumstances our feeling would have been less civilized fifty years ago, that among people in the Occident an understanding of people in the Orient has subtly and surely arisen and that this understanding is due more than we realize to the fact that Asian thought and art has reached and touched the West, that we now know Chinese civilization, for instance, to be not only the oldest civilization still vigorous but to be a civiliza¬tion profoundly informed as to lasting values.
At the moment the element which controls China would seem to have set its face against the wisdom of philosophers and poets who have made China great in the past and who have lately come alive anew in conveying a sense of its greatness to a wider world. But are we less fluctuant, we in the West?
Three years ago I was calling on the Minister of War in London. He had recently returned from an official trip in the Orient and said that during his stay there he had written a poem which was to have been published in The London Observer. The Prime Minister, happening to notice a proof of it on the War Minister's desk, had to ask and be told what it was. He advised that it be withdrawn, since poetry writing was beneath the dignity of a Cabinet Member. He probably did not even know that for centuries Chinese Emperors, Premiers and Generals had been proud to write poetry, nor had he any suspicion that his own successor as Prime Minister in Britain would receive a Nobel award for literature.
Cabinet Members come and go. But Li Shang-yin, a gentle scholar, continues saying, as he said in the 9th century:
Literature endures, like the universal spirit,
And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.
And Kiang Kang-hu continues quoting, even in prison: "All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason."