Friendship is a perennial
preoccupation in Classical Chinese poetry. Many aspects of what friendship
meant to the ancients are familiar – shared histories or experiences, common
interests or ideas or beliefs – but they knew another dimension of friendship
that is less familiar. It’s a dimension deeper than words, deeper even than
identities we think of as the subjects of friendship, and it explains how
friendship could infuse this experience of being utterly alone here on Hunger
Mountain watching the moon rise. It also explains why friendship was so
compelling for China’s ancient intellectuals. In fact, it gives Tu Fu’s poem
its form, though the poem doesn’t mention friendship or even people who might
be friends. Like any other aspect of ancient China’s human culture, this dimension
of friendship was shaped by the cultures deep conceptual framework – most
notably its language and cosmology.
…(a bit about Chinese
language and etymology, Taoism and Cha’an / Zen)…
And this is indeed a
profoundly lonely Cosmos. In it, the loneliness of this mountaintop moonrise
takes on depths beyond the usual sense of a self isolated from others, for I am
most essentially an emptiness that is separate from all that I typically think
of as my identity. It is loneliness in this sense that makes friendship so
powerful for the ancients; but at the same time, that emptiness opens a new
possibility for friendship. As Absence, empty mind attends to the ten thousand
things with mirrorlike clarity, making the act of perception a spiritual act:
empty mind mirroring the world, leaving its ten thousand things utterly simple,
utterly themselves, and utterly sufficient. In that perceptual act, identity
becomes whatever sight fills the eye and mind, that mirrored opening of
consciousness. This may sound like mysticism, but it seems much closer to
observational science. In any case, it was common for friends to sip wine
together and watch the moon rise, for example, or mountain peaks among clouds
or plum blossoms in evening light. In this, they were doing nothing less than
sharing identity.
…Most would call it
coincidence rather than an act of friendship, but if you are awake and watching
this early moonrise , you share my mind at a deeper level than the stories we
tell about ourselves, stories that define who we are: our personal thoughts and
histories, the cultural histories and mythologies and metaphysics that shape
ethnic and religious and political identities, or even this story I am telling
here. I share Tu Fu’s mind the same way, however long ago and far away it was
that he gazed at this moon. And I share it in his poem, too, when [ancient
chinese pictogram for moon] rises into empty space.
… And by the time that Tu
Fu wrote his poem, the graph had become, quite simply, a pair of moons. At its
deepest level, any poetic utterance may grow out of a desire to overcome
loneliness, to share experience; but when Tu Fu speaks in a poem like
‘Moonrise,’ he shares an identity at the most elemental level. Because empty
mind is nothing other than Absence, its loneliness is the elemental loneliness
of the Cosmos itself, which suggest a variation on the graphic meaning of
(symbol for Ch’an, which is the Chinese version of Zen): “The Cosmos alone
simple and exhaustively with itself”. This friendship of you and mean and Tu Fu
sharing the moon – its more than lonely people sharing an experience, or even
an identity. It is a matter empirical fact the Cosmos is keeping itself
company, sharing crescent moon with itself, and empty mountains, and the Star
River (Chinese term for Milky Way) stretched silver and changeless across them.
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