“Waiting for the Unicorn”
Chin Jen-Jui (Sheng-t’an), scholar, literary critic and theorist, and poet was a native of Wu-hsien (Soochow), Kiangsu province. Little is known of his immediate forebearers, or for that matter, of the actual details of his own life. His father was apparently a learned man, but we known nothing of his degree status or of precisely how he earned a living. There are indications that the Chin family was living in straitened circumstances during Chin Sheng-t’an’s youth (he is usually known by his tzu, Sheng-t’an), and he was sent to the village school for his education, rather than being tutored at home as was then common among the well-to-do. He is said to have shown considerable intelligence as a student, and sometime during his late teens or early twenties he succeeded in earning the first or hsiu-ts’ai examination degree. Independent of mind and somewhat unconventional in behavior, he may well have decided not to pursue the traditionally accepted route to social status and financial rewards, the examination career and subsequent appointment to public office for the successful. Instead, he chose to devote himself to a life of scholarship, but with an important difference. The disciplined philological analysis of the Confucian classics was then coming into vogue, but Chin Sheng-t’an’s inclinations were more strictly literary. Thus it was that he undertook to produce several major works of textual emendation and commentary that have justly earned him a secure place in Chinese letters as a literary critic of unique sensibility and lasting influence.
During a time when the new Manchu government was still heavily engaged in the task of completing the conquest of China proper, and when it was anxious to impose its authority on the prosperous Chiangnan region, a major center of loyalist sympathies, Chin Sheng-t’an, perhaps somewhat impulsively, joined a student protest demonstration against the harsh methods then being employed by local and regional officials to enforce the payment of delinquent taxes. As a result, he became involved in the famous k’u-miao (Lamenting in the Temple) incident and this eventually led to his arrest, his trial for “disturbing the peace of the lately deceased emperor,” and his execution by decapitation, along with seventeen other defendents in the case. Moreover, the family property was confiscated and his survivors transported to Manchuria.2
As a result of his endeavors as a literary scholar, Chin Sheng-t’an was instrumental in enhancing the critical standing of two major works of the popular tradition; namely, the novel Shui-hu chuan (Water Margin Story, better known as Tales of the Marsh, also translated as All Men are Brothers) and the celebrated play Hsi-hsiang chi (Romance of the Western Chamber). In this respect, he was perpetuating critical concepts recently given voice by Li Chih and the so-called Kung-an School, who advocated an evolutionary view of literature and championed popular literary forms. Chin Sheng-t’an, however, went beyond his predecessors in converting theory into practice with his careful analysis and critical emendations of these two works, which, like Li Chih and Yüan Hung-tao, he placed on a par with such venerated classical texts as the Shih-ching (Book of Songs) and the Tso-chuan (Tso Commentary). He designated the two above-mentioned literary works, along with the Chuang-tzu, the Shih-chi (Records of the Historian), and the works of the ancient poet Ch’ü Yüan (the Li Sao) and those of the great T’ang poet Tu Fu, the “Six Works by and for Men of Genius.” For Chin Sheng-t’an, great literature is preeminently an expression, spontaneously and sincerely voiced, of personal emotions. At the same time, the expressive element is moderated by the learned values of moderation (wen), gentleness (jou), sincerity (tun), and profundity (hou). As a practicing critic, he was the first to undertake an extensive critical analysis of popular literary works. However, in addition to the writing of prefatory and interlinear critical comments on the Shui-hu chuan and the Hsi-hsiang chi, he also made extensive emendations in the texts themselves. In the case of the former, he dropped most of the last fifty chapters which he believed to be artistically inferior. The seventy-chapter version of the novel which resulted from his labors is generally speaking a more coherent, dramatic, and readable work than the complete 120-chapter original. Although he also took unusual liberties with the text of the Hsi-hsiang chi, once again the result was a tighter, more consistent work. When he met his untimely death, Chin Sheng-t’an was engaged in a third major critical study, namely, a detailed examination of the poetic works of Tu Fu.
Ching Sheng-t’an is little remarked today as a poet, quite possibly because his eminence as a practicing critic has tended to overshadow his own works of a creative nature. Whatever the reason for his neglect in this regard, his poetry merits serious consideration for its clear and precise diction, its congenial and temperate manner, and its occasional flashes of humor. Radical though he was as a critic-scholar, as a poet he was apparently content to conform to the established boundaries of form and genre.
(William Schultz)
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1. Chao-ying Fang, ECCP, 1:164–66.
2. Ibid., p. 165.
Beneath the leaf a green insect, and frost upon the leaf;
The tiniest of lives, having come to this, is most to be pitied.
Had I the strength of high heaven and rotund earth,
I’d make you live a thousand autumns, ten thousand years.
(CYLSH, p. 61)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
Capricious was the guest of another day;
Now hungry and cold is this six-foot man.
People today make heroes of thieves and robbers;
I alone am fit to weep for a unicorn.2
Days grow so long that they never seem to dusk,
My wicket gate is facing an empty spring.
Night after night the fish-dragon3 frolics;
Who are those surfeited of wine and meat?
(CYLSH,, p. 37)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
Don’t ask what it has been like in my old garden:
The blooming season for flowers has passed.
The intruding bees4 devoured clean all the young insects;
Stupefied rats brazenly seized the swallow’s nest at the altar.
No longer does the warm breeze come to my window,
Nor is there a secluded place to sit and sing.
What use is there in writing petitions to Heaven?
So bidding farewell to the God of Spring, I weep my tears.
(CYLSH, pp. 100–101)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
The miraculous part of our relationship is being apart;6
Like Form following Shadow7—this is found only in books.
After today, “being apart” means we can never again be parted;8
Unattached either to Heaven or to parents9 is true happiness.
(No. 2 from a series of 3; CYLSH, p. 92)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
NOTES
1. The title of this poem—hao-tang—is taken from Ch’ü Yüan’s (343?-278 B.C.) poem, Li Sao, line 44. David Hawkes translates it as “waywardness” (“What I do resent is the Fair One’s waywardness:/Because he will never look to see what is in men’s hearts.” The Songs of the South, p. 24). Originally applied to water, the term has a broad connotation in referring to the qualities of being indiscriminate and heedless.
2. That is, to lament its absence. The unicorn (ch’i-lin), a mythical animal even in ancient times, is considered by the Chinese as a symbol of universal peace. According to the Lun-yü, Confucius once remarked that he would stop writing when a unicorn appeared.
3. Fish-dragon Game (yü-lung hsi) is kind of a magic diversion according to the “Account of the Western Regions” in the Han-shu. It was performed by a large animal, also called man-yen, said to be from India, which would first frolic in the courtyard before jumping into the water. Then it would be transformed first into a paired-eyed fish (pi-mu yü) and finally into a sixty-foot-long dragon of dazzling brightness. The term “Fish-dragon” could also be alluding to a line by Tu Fu, from the fourth of the series of eight poems entitled “Autumn Meditation”: “While the fish and the dragons fall asleep and the autumn river turns cold” (translation by A. C. Graham).
4. The word translated as “intruding” here is hu, which denotes a “barbarian from the north of China,” and often occurs as a prefix to designate anything of foreign origin, as in hu-ch’in (a string instrument), hence “intruding.” The first word in the next line, exactly parallel to it, is hun, which also means “evening.” Double entendre is clearly intended in the use of both words.
5. This series, entitled “Chüeh-ming tz’u” (“Songs Sung as Life Comes to an End”), was composed in 1661, before the poet was led off to the execution ground to be decapitated on a charge of sedition. This is the second of three quatrains, and it alone carries a subtitle. It reads as follows: “My son Yung [born 1632] is not only the seedling of a true scholar [tu-shu chung-tzu], but also an authentic student of the Tao [pen-se hsüeh-tao-jen].”
6. This line contains two unusual words in describing a father-son relationship. “Miraculous,” or miao, is a word Chin frequently used in his literary criticism to indicate approval or admiration, meaning “wonderful, miraculous.” “Apart” or “distant” (shu), in describing human relationships, means “not frequently together, distant, or aloof.” This does not necessarily mean that the father and son in this case were distant from each other. In Wang Yi’s (ca. 89-ca. 158) commentary on the Li Sao, line 44, (see Chin’s poem “Hao-tang” above), there occurs this passage (following a quotation from the Meng-tzu): “When a parent has glaring faults, and the son does not utter his grievance (yüan), this is known as growing more ‘distant.’ ”
7. “To cling together like one’s form and shadow” (hsing-yin hsiang yi) is a common Chinese expression.
8. Literally, the last five words of this line may be translated as: “Being apart has now reached the land where there will be no more ‘separation.’ ”
9. The first four words of this line— Wu-cho t’ien-ch’in—very probably conceal a pun in that Wu-cho (and) T’ien-ch’in (literally, “heaven” and “parent”) are also the transliterated names of two Buddhist saints of the fifth century A.D., two brothers who were the founders of the Fa-hsiang or Dharmalaksara Sect. Wu-cho, according to W. E. Soothill, means “unattached” (A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms [London: Kegan Paul, 1937], p. 382) and is the name of Asanga, the brother of Vasubandhu, or T’ien-ch’in, by whom he was converted to the School of Mahāyāna. These two names occurred in a poem by Wang Wei entitled “Kuo Ch’eng-ju Ch’an-shih Hsiao-chü-shih Sung-ch’iu Ianjo” (Wang Yu-ch’eng chi ch’ien-chu [Shanghai: Chung-hua, 1961], 1:188). We are indebted to Professor Hans Frankel, Yale University, for elucidating this line and calling our attention to the poem by Wang Wei.
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