Gems of Chinese Literature/Su Tung-P‘o-Square-Cap the Hermit

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

Square-Cap the Hermit by Su Tung-P‘o

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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‘o1524148Gems of Chinese Literature — Square-Cap the Hermit1922Herbert Allen Giles

Old Square-Cap was a hermit. In his youth he had been a knight-errant, and the leader of knight-errantry in his hamlet. He was also an enthusiastic student of all kinds of books, hoping by these means to make his mark upon the age. But he never succeeded, and retired late in life to the hills. He lived in a hut. He was a vegetarian. He held no intercourse with the outer world. He would have neither horse nor carriage. He destroyed his official uniform. He walked by himself on the hills. No one knew who he was; but his tall square hat, apparently a survival of the ancient head-piece of the Han dynasty, earned for him the sobriquet of Old Square-Cap.

When I was banished I lived in the neighbourhood, and one day came suddenly upon him. “Good gracious!” I cried, “my old friend Ch‘ên! What are you doing here?” Old Square-Cap replied by asking me what I did there; and when I told him, he bent his head in silence and then quickly looked up and smiled. He took me to sleep at his home, a quiet little place with a mud wall round it, where, nevertheless, his wife and servants all seemed very contented and happy. I was astonished at what I saw. For I remembered how, in his wine-bibbing, swash-bucklering youth, he had flung away money like dirt. Nineteen years before, I had seen him out shooting on the hills with a couple of attendants. A jay rose in front of them, and he bade one of the attendants shoot, but the man missed; at which he urged his horse forward, drew an arrow, and shot the bird dead. Then, as he sat there on horseback, he held forth on military matters, and discussed the victories and defeats of ancient and modern times, calling himself the warrior of his age.

And now, after all these years, the old determined look is still to be seen in his face. How then is he what we mean by a hermit of the hills? Yet he was of an illustrious house. He would have had grand opportunities. He would have made himself famous ere this. His home was at the capital, a home of luxury and splendour, like the palace of a prince. He held an estate which gave him yearly a thousand pieces of silk; so that the pleasures of wealth were in his grasp. All these things he put aside, and retired to penury and solitude on the hills. He did not turn his back upon the world because he had failed to secure the material blessings of life.

I have heard that there are many weird beings on those hills, though I never caught a glimpse of one. Doubtless Old Square-Cap, himself of that clique, has made their acquaintance long ago.