China and the West

Ezra Pound composed at St Elizabeths Hospital Cantos 85-89. Zhang Junmai was taken to the hospital by William McNaughton, a student at Georgetown University and a regular visitor. Zhang Junmai was at work on The development of Neo-Confucian thought (1957). He was enthusiastic as Pound about their meetings and their exchange of ideas. Zhang made the usual objections to Fenollosa's treatment of the Chinese written character. The talk then turned to James Legge and Arthur Waley. Pound remarked : "The trouble with Legge's versions is, whenever Confucius disagrees with St Paul, Legge puts in a footnote to say that Confucius must be wrong."

William McNaughton's Memoir: /
"What Pound and Carsun Chang [Zhang Junmai] Talked About at St Elizabeths".
I met Dr Chang through mutual friends in the intellectual Chinese community in Washington, DC. Chang then had a private cubicle at the Library of Con¬gress, where he was working on his book on neo-Confucian philosophy. When he heard that I was acquainted with Pound, he asked if it would be possible for me to introduce him to Pound. Having received Pound's permission to do so, I took Dr Chang with me the next time I went to St Elizabeths. It was almost certainly the second or third Tuesday in November 1953. Over the next eighteen months Dr Chang went to see Pound many times. I would judge that there were a total of about ten interviews between the two men, all taking place not later than May 1955.
During their first meeting Pound told Chang—rather frankly, I thought, in view of Chang's absorption at that time in his work on neo-Confucianism - that he (Pound) wanted Confucianism as Confucius had it and that he "found little of interest in later dilatations." Among "late dictations" it was clear that Pound intended to include neo-Confucianism.
Pound and Dr Chang talked about Pound's work ; about Leopoldine reforms ; and about Thomas Jefferson. Chang knew a good deal about Jefferson. He told Pound how he had come to draft a constitution for China on Jeffersonian principles. The draft later became the basis of the Constitution which was adopted and which is still supposed to be in effect in Taiwan.
On one of my visits to St Elizabeths with Carsun Chang. Pound said to him, "if there were only four Confucians in China who would get together and work with each other, they could save China." "Four ?” Dr Chang laughed. "One is enough." In the exchange Chang showed himself, perhaps, to be the more orthodox Confucian. But into the Rock-Drill cantos, Pound did write from the Canonic Book of History the idea that it may depend on one man. Before Dr Chang and I left that day, Pound said to me, "Bring him out again. He is somebody you can talk to. He is interested in the definition of words." Mrs Pound also asked me to bring Chang out again. "Eppy," she said, "is very hungry for adult company out here."
Later on Chang asked Pound to write an introduction for his book on Chinese philosophy. Pound wrote one page in which he said he thought that the reader would be delighted with a book about a thinker who once clapped his hands with joy at the sight of a leaf. Chang dccided not to use the introduction. He had wanted something more scholarly, and Pound had written the introduction "like a poet". (In addition to his formal Chinese education, Dr Chang had been a post¬graduate student in Germany, and his attitude perhaps had been colored by Germanic ideas of scholarship.) From Chang's manuscript Pound got the "rules for a man in government" which appear at the beginning of Canto 89 : To knew the histories / to know good from evil / And know whom to trust.

Conversations between Ezra Pound and Fang Baoxian about the mysterious Naxi rites that fuse Confucian ancestral worship with Taoism and Buddhism. Their conversations, along with Joseph Rock's descriptions of the Naxi rites, inspired Pound's haunting poetry about the'wind sway' ceremony that focuses on possibilities of life after death.

Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Fang Achilles about the Confucian Odes [Shi jing] project. In 1948 Pound consulted Willis Hawley about typesetting the characters of the Odes. Hawley sent Pound the photocopies of three Chinese texts. Pound chose the seal script text for his edition. In 1949-1950 the Odes seal text supplied by Hawley passed from James Laughlin of New Directions to Laughlin's printer Dudley Kimball. Numerous letters concerning the layouts of the project were exchanged between Pound, Hawley, Laughlin and Kimball. 1951 Pound was losing patience. At that point Fang Achilles came to his rescue. He approached the director of Harvard University Press, Thomas Wilson, and succeeded in stirring an interest. The letters provide a detailed record of Pound's and Harvard's conflicting desires and of Fang's role as a mediator. Harvard's enthusiasm was for Pound's translation. Pound absolutely would not pull out from his manuscript the singing syllables and the characters. The negotiation of a contract broke down in 1952. In 1953 John Kasper reported to Pound Macmillan's and Twayne's interest in this project. Meanwhile, Fang assured Pound that Harvard University Press would carry out his wishes. Pound changed his mind. Harvard Press offered him two contracts in 1953, first to publish a 'trade edition' and then to bring out a three-way 'scholar's edition'. Pound signed both contracts.
In 1955 Fang Achilles corresponded with Pound's family and friends in efforts to get Pound released from St Elizabeths Hospital. In 1956 he put aside all other projects to work on the sound key and the seal text. Fang neglected to inform Pound of the progress of the project in 1957. Pound questioned Wilson as to what was holding up the 'proper edition of the Confucian anthology'. Wilson's reply was that the press did not yet have the complete manuscript. Pound turned to Fang for an explanation : "this put ALL the blame on you for the delay in publication of the Odes in the ONLY form that interested me in the least". According to Fang, everything essential had been held in the office of the Harvard Press editorial department. The only thing that he had not turned in was an introduction. For Pound, this was an excuse. In his last letter to Fang in 1958 he wrote : "The sabotage, the blocking of my work remains… The infinite vileness of the state of education under the rump of the present organisms for the suppression of mental life is not your fault." In a reply Fang assured Pound that Harvard University Press would start working on the project after summer vacation. By then Pound had lost confidence in Harvard. He wrote 1958 to Wilson from Italy requesting return of the manuscript and photographs of the complete edition of the Odes. With the termination of the contract regarding the scholar's edition the correspondence with Fang also came to a close.

Gary Snyder studied Oriental culture and languages (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French) at the University of California, Berkeley under Peter A. Boodberg and Chen Shixiang. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Chen Shixiang.

Moore, Marianne. "Teach, stir the mind, afford enjoyment". [From a series of commentaries on selected contemporary poets, Bryn Mawr, 1952 ; betr. Ezra Pound].
Mr. Pound admires Chinese codifyings and for many a year has been ordering, epitomizing, and urging explicitness, as when he listed "A Few Don'ts" for Imagists…
Confucius says the fish moves on winglike foot ; and Prior, in his life of Edmund Burke, says Burke "had a peculiarity in his gait that made him look as if he had two left legs…
"As for Cathay, it must be pointed out", T.S. Eliot says, "that Mr. Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry of our time" ; and seeing a connection between the following incident and "the upper middlebrow press"…
In The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius, as in his Analects, Ezra Pound has had a theme of major import. The Great Digest makes emphatic this lesson : He who can rule himself can govern others ; he who can govern others can rule the kingdom and families of the Empire.
The men of old disciplined themselves.
Having attained self-discipline they set their houses in order.
Having order in their own homes, they brought good government
To their own state.
When their states were well governed, the empire was brought
Into equilibrium.
We have in the Digest, content that is energetic, novel, and deep : "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart or enduring rancor, the mind will not attain precision ; under suspicion and fear it will not form sound judgment, nor will it, dazzled by love's delight nor in sorrow and anxiety, come to precision." As for money, "Ill got, ill go". When others have ability, if a man "shoves them aside, he can be called a real pest." "The archer when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of error in himself." There must be no rationalizing. "Abandon every clandestine egoism to realize the true root." Of the golden rule, there are many variants in the Analects : "Tze-kung asked if there was a single principle that you could practice through life to the end. He said sympathy ; what you don't want, don't inflict on another" (Book Fifteen, XXIII). "Require the solid of yourself, the trifle of others" (Book Fifteen, XIV). "The proper man brings men's excellent to focus, not their evil qualities" (Book Twelve, XVI). I am not worried that others do not know me ; I am worried by my incapacity' (Book Fourteen, XXXII). Tze-chang asked Kung-tze about maturity. Kung-tze said : To be able to practice five things would humanize the whole empire – sobriety (serenitas), magnanimity, sticking by one's word, promptitude (in attention to detail), Kindliness (caritas). As for "the problem of style. Effect your meaning. Then stop" (Book Fifteen, XL).

Letter from Marianne Moore to Dorothy Pound and Ezra Pound ; July 31, 1952.
I take an avid interest in Mommsen, in the zealous Achilles Fang ; could he be a relative of Mei Lan Fang ? a masterpiece of whom I would be ignorant had it not been for Gilbert Seldes, who warned me not to miss him. And (an interest in) The Great Digest – one of the principal reasons for my coming to Washington (and in facsimiles of Vivaldi manuscripts).

Iris Murdoch general : books in her private library. Kingston University Library.
Blyth, Reginald Horace. Zen and Zen classics.Vol. 1-2. (Tokyo : Hokuseido Press, 1960-1964).
China in transformation. (Cambridge : American Academy of Arts and Science, 1993).
The Chinese reader. Ed. by Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell. Vol. 2 : Republican China. [ID D13390].
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. Hinduism and Buddhism. (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1971).
Evans, Leslie. China after Mao [ID D32055].
Harvey, Andrew. A journey in Ladakh. (London : J. Cape, 1983).
Herrigel, Eugen. The method of Zen. (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the art of archery. (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953).
Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the art of flower arrangement : an introduction to the spirit of the Japanese art of flower arrangement. (London : Routledgte & Kegan Paul, 1958).
Hyers, M. Conrad. Zen and the comic spirit. (London : Rider, 1974).
Kapleau, Philip. The three pillars of Zen : teaching, practice and enlightenment. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1966).
Kongtrul, Jamgon. The torch of certainty. (Boulder : Shambhala, 1986). = (1977).
Merton, Thomas. Mystics and Zen masters. (New York, N.Y. : Dell, 1967).
Merton, Thomas. Thomas Merton on Zen. (London : Sheldon Press, 1976).
Miura, Isshu. The Zen koan : its history and use in Rinzai Zen. (New York, N.Y. : Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1965).
Reps, Paul. Zen flesh, Zen bones. (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1961). = (Tokyo : C.E. Tuttle, 1957).
Ryokan. The Zen poems of Ryokan. (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1981).
Sekida, Katsuki. Zen training : methods and philosophy. (New York, N.Y. : Weatherhill, 1975).
Sangharakshita. The religion of art. (Glasgow : Windhorse, 1988).
Santideva. Entering the path of enlightenment : the Bodhicaravatara of the Buddhist poet Santideva. (London : Allen and Unwin, 1971).
Shibayama, Zenkei. Zen comments on the Mumonkan. (New York, N.Y. : Harper and Row, 1974).
Shih ; Hui-k'ai. Two Zen classics : Mumonkan and Hekiganroku. Transl. with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida. (New York, N.Y. : Westherhill, 1977.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. (New York, N.Y. : Schocken Books, 1963).
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Zen Buddhism : selected writings. (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1956).
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis. (London : Allen & Unwin, 1960).
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen mind, beginners mind. (New York, N.Y. : Walker/Weatherhill, 1970).
Trungpa, Chögyam. Glimpses of abhidharma : from a seminar on Buddhist psychology. (Boston : Shambhala, 1987).
Trungpa, Chögyam. Journey without goal : the trantric wisdom of the Buddha. (Boston : Shambhala, 1985).
Watts, Alan. The way of Zen. (London : Thames and Hudson, 1957).

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."

Bradbury, Ray. The flying machine [ID D32683].
In the year A.D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.
Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, "Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!"
"Yes," said the Emperor, "the air is sweet this morning."
"No, no, a miracle!" said the servant, bowing quickly.
"And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle."
"No, no, Your Excellency."
"Let me guess then - the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles."
"Excellency, a man is flying!"
"What?" The Emperor stopped his fan.
"I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a Voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, coloured like the sun and the grass."
"It is early," said the Emperor, "and you have just wakened from a dream."
"It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too."
"Sit down with me here," said the Emperor. "Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight." They drank tea.
"Please," said the servant at last, "or he will be gone." The Emperor rose thoughtfully. "Now you may show me what you have seen."
They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.
"There!" said the servant.
The Emperor looked into the sky. And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons. The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning. "I fly, I fly!" The servant waved to him. "Yes, yes!"
The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.
"Tell me," he said to his servant, "has anyone else seen this flying man?"
"I am the only one, Excellency," said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.
The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, "Call him down to me."
"Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!" called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth. The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood. The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.
"What have you done?" demanded the Emperor.
"I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency," replied the man.
"What have you done?" said the Emperor again.
"I have just told you!" cried the flier.
"You have told me nothing at all." The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.
"Is it not beautiful, Excellency?"
"Yes, too beautiful."
"It is the only one in the world!" smiled the man. "And I am the inventor."
"The only one in the world?" "I swear it!"
"Who else knows of this?"
"No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the son. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it."
"Well for her, then," said the Emperor. "Come along."
They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.
The Emperor clapped his hands. "Ho, guards!" The guards came running. "Hold this man." The guards seized the flier. "Call the executioner," said the Emperor. "What's this!" cried the flier, bewildered. "What have I done?" He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.
"Here is the man who has made a certain machine," said the Emperor, "and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do."
The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask. "One moment," said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted his key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going. The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, the birds sangs in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.
"Is It not beautiful?" said the Emperor. "If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done."
"But, oh, Emperor!" pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. "I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels! Th at is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!"
"Yes," said the Emperor sadly, "I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?"
"Then spare me!"
"But there are times," said the Emperor, more sadly still, "when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man."
"What man?"
"Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear."
"Why? Why?"
"Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?" said the Emperor. No one moved or said a word.
"Off with his head," said the Emperor. The executioner whirled his silver ax.
"Burn the kite and the inventor's body and bury their ashes together," said the Emperor. The servants retreated to obey. The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. "Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour."
"You are merciful, Emperor."
"No, not merciful," said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw he dark smoke climb into the sky. "No, only very much bewildered and afraid." He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. "What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought."
He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny faces loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow colour, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.
"Oh," said the Emperor, closing his eyes, "look at the birds, look at the birds!"

[Twain, Mark]. Yi ge bai huai liao Hadelebao di ren. Make Tuwen zhu ; Liu Yizhu yi. [ID D29628].
Liu Yizhu writes : "Although his works are anthologized in our senior high school textbooks, most Chinese readers still are not too familiar with Twain's works. We should first introduce to the people his major works, especially thouse later works that revealed the ugly reality of capitalistic society and opposed imperialistic policies of expansion."

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