Gems of Chinese Literature/Su Tung-P‘o-A Rat’s Cunning

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The Red Wall: Autumn

Gems of Chinese Literature (1922)
translated by Herbert Allen Giles

A Rat’s Cunning by Su Tung-P‘o

The Prince of Literature

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SU TUNG-P‘O.

a.d. 1036-1101

[An almost universal genius, like Ou-yang Hsiu, this writer is even a greater favourite with the Chinese literary public. Under his hands, the language of which China is so proud may be said to have reached perfection of finish, of art concealed. In subtlety of reasoning, in the lucid expression of abstractions, such as in English too often elude the faculty of the tongue, Su Tung-P‘o is an unrivalled master. On behalf of his honoured manes I desire to note my protest against the words of Mr. Baber, recently spoken at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and stating that “the Chinese language is incompetent to express the subtleties of theological reasoning, just as it is inadequate to represent the nomenclature of European science.” I am not aware that the nomenclature of European science can be adequately represented even in the English language; at any rate, there can be no comparison between the expression of terms and of ideas, and I take it the doctrine of the Trinity itself is not more difficult of comprehension than the theory of “self abstraction beyond the limits of an external world,” so closely reasoned out by Chuang Tzŭ. If Mr. Baber merely means that the gentlemen entrusted with the task have proved themselves so far quite incompetent to express in Chinese the subtleties of theological reasoning, then I am with him to the death.

There is one more point in regard to which I should be glad to cleanse the stuffed bosoms of some from a certain perilous stuff―the belief that Chinese sentences are frequently open to two and even more interpretations. No theory could well be more mischievous than this. It tends to make a student readily satisfied with anything he can get out of an obscure paragraph rather than push on laboriously through the dark passages of thought until the real sense begins to glimmer ahead, and finally to shine brightly upon him. I wish to place it on record, as my opinion, after the arduous task of translation now lying completed before me, that the written language of China is hardly more ambiguous than English; and that an ordinary Chinese sentence, written without malice aforethought, can have but one meaning, though it may often appear at the first blush to have several. There are exceptions, of course; but the rule remains unchanged. I have frequently been trapped myself, and may be again; trapped into satisfaction with a given rendering which I subsequently discovered to be wrong, and which I could then feel to be grammatically wrong though I had previously accepted it as right. The fault in such cases, I venture to suggest, should be sought for outside the text. (I leave this to stand as it stood in 1884, merely suggesting that it is the extreme difficulty of the book-language which is mistaken for ambiguity.)

To revert to the subject of this note, Su Tung-P‘o shared the fate of most Chinese statesmen of the T'ang and Sung dynasties. He was banished to a distant post. In 1235 he was honoured with a niche in the Confucian temple, but his tablet was removed in 1845. After six hundred years he might well have been left there in peace.]

Su Tung-P‘o1524174Gems of Chinese Literature — A Rat’s Cunning1922Herbert Allen Giles

I was sitting up one night when suddenly a rat began to gnaw. A rap on the couch stopped the noise, which however soon began again. Calling a servant to look round with a light, we noticed an empty sack, from the inside of which came a grating sound, and I at once cried out, “Ha! the rat has got shut in here, and can’t get out.” So we opened the sack, but there was apparently nothing in it, though when we came to throw in the light, there at the bottom lay a dead rat. “Oh!” exclaimed the servant in a fright, “can the animal that was just now gnawing have died so suddenly as this? Or can it have been the rat’s ghost that was making the noise?” Meanwhile, he turned the rat out on the ground, when——away it went full speed, escaping before we had time to do anything. “’Tis passing strange,” said I, with a sigh, “the cunning of that rat. Shut up in a sack too hard for it to gnaw its way out, it nevertheless gnawed in order to attract attention by the noise; and then it pretended to be dead in order to save its life under the guise of death. Now I have always understood that in intelligence man stands first. Man can tame the dragon, subdue the mastodon, train the tortoise, and carry captive the unicorn. He makes all things subservient to his will; and yet here he is, trapped by the guile of a rat, which combined the speed of the flying hare with the repose of a blushing girl. Wherein then lies his superior intelligence?”

Thinking over this, with my eyes closed, a voice seemed to say to me, “Your knowledge is the knowledge of books; you gaze towards the truth but see it not. You do not concentrate your mind within yourself, but allow it to be distracted by external influences. Hence it is that you are deceived by the gnawing of a rat. A man may voluntarily destroy a priceless gem, and yet be unable to restrain his feelings over a broken cooking-pot. Another will bind a fierce tiger, and yet change colour at the sting of a bee. These words are your own; have you forgotten them?” At this I bent my head and laughed; and then, opening my eyes, I bade a servant bring pen and ink and commit the episode to writing.