The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World Community

In this chapter, I offer three examples of how three different Chinese and Japanese works may be read to illustrate the question asked by the preceding chapter: “What Is Classic?”

WHY WE READ THE ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS

Although this section will speak mostly to why and how I read the Analects of Confucius, the reason I entitle it “Why We Read the Analects” is not that I claim to speak for everyone but only that my personal reading follows from what others have thought and said about it. Ever since Confucius’s disciples recorded his sayings, teachings, and examples in the fifth century c.e., later generations have been inspired to pass it on, to share it with others who have read, reflected on it, and discussed it together. Thus the Analects are still read because they have survived this scrutiny and reexamination over the centuries, which is why we read it today—not because it became part of a fixed canon (though in some places it did) or because it was required reading imposed by one generation upon the next.

I have read and discussed the Analects with students in my Asian Humanities class for sixty years, and their response to it is much the same, whether they are majoring in the natural or social sciences or in the humanities. So, for practical purposes, when I speak of “Why We Read the Analects,” it means “how I and my students have read the Analects together,” and especially how one’s first impressions are formed by the early chapters. Indeed, it is no different for other audiences of any age or at any level, including adult education. If this is what is meant by “general” education, then the Analects speak to the generality of human beings—to their common, perennial, “core” concerns more than to the farthest outreaches of abstract thought.

This is why I avoid speaking of what I do as “teaching” the Analects. No doubt, a teacher can help students with their reading and reflection upon the text, but basically students are rediscovering it and learning it for themselves. The book teaches itself, as most genuine “classics” do. Whatever may be done by a teacher is only an enhancement of the reader’s own personal encounter in recognizing that the text speaks directly to him- or herself.

For me, the latest confirmation of this fact comes from the valedictory address of a Columbia College graduate in 2008 who chose to sum up his four years’ learning experience by drawing on the model of the Analects and some of its key sayings.1 Understandably, our valedictorian drew first on the opening lines, which read: “The Master said: To study and at times to practice what one has learned, is that not a pleasure? To have friends coming from afar, is that not a joy? To be unembittered even if one is not recognized, is that not to be a truly noble person?” If one wishes to know more of what our valedictorian made of these lines, one can refer to the Proceedings just cited. In what follows, despite my disclaimer of any originality or unique expertise, I shall offer my own thoughts on these lines and other key passages that mark the Analects as classic.

Taken together, these opening lines tell us much about the nature and context of the Analects. The first lines could be addressed to and understood by any literate human being, but the last line points more specifically to “the noble person” (junzi). Here junzi refers to the traditional leadership elite, an aristocratic class born to a privileged status of would-be rulers. But Confucius emphasizes the learning process for what it takes to be worthy of a leadership role or become an exemplary person; in other words, what it means to command respect as a person, whether or not one finds oneself in a position to lead or rule. Thus he reconceives the traditional concept of junzi from that of “nobleman” to one that emphasizes “the noble man (or person)” as one whose personal character, not status, establishes him as a model to be followed—a true leader in any social role whatever, even if not successful politically.

(In the context of the times, one understands that junzi refers most directly to male heirs of the aristocracy, but the second half of the compound, zi, is literally “child” and not gender specific. Thus later Japanese empresses could appropriate to themselves the expression tianzi, normally understood in China as “Son of Heaven” but for them clearly open to their own claim to be a “child of Heaven” regardless of gender. Still later in China, jun could be a suffix applied to women as well.)

The same multifaceted expression zi also appears as the very first word in the Analects: “The Master said (zi yue).” As “Master,” zi could be applied to other authority figures, such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, and here it clearly refers to a teacher, but the language that follows marks Confucius as distinct from any teacher who is simply dictating or preaching to his students or disciples.

Note the rhetorical cast of all three of the statements above: they are not outright assertions, much less forceful dictates. They invite and expect an implicit response from the hearer as if one’s own experience would immediately confirm the truth of what Confucius is saying—he is only telling them in a sense what they already know, without invoking any higher authority. This is not the thunderous voice of the prophet, nor is it a pronouncement from the pulpit or podium. Old Testament prophets spoke first of all to God, and then they delivered God’s word to His people. Confucius speaks directly to us and asks us to recognize Heaven within and around us.

His appeal to ordinary human experience is also the ground on which he talks of studying or learning. What he says may be addressed to the individual, calling on one personally to achieve fulfillment as a truly noble person, but his hearers are learning from others as well as from their own experience and practice, and their “others” here include teachers, examples from the past, as well as “friends coming from afar” with whom one can share one’s experience—it is learning that can be gained from (being open to) both the past and others able to confirm and expand on one’s own knowledge.

But if I have distinguished Confucius’s voice from that of the Old Testament prophet, this does not mean that there is no common ground between them. Both speak to an ideal standard by which to measure and judge the conduct of kings and rulers and, by implication, anyone else who bears a responsibility for others—which means just about all of us. In Confucius’s case, however, the approach is most characteristically on the means of self-cultivation by which one can develop the virtues of the Noble Person, understood as a fulfillment of the human ideal. And most characteristic of Confucianism too is the way that the Analects explain this as an organic growth following the pattern of ordinary human life.

Accordingly, in the passage immediately following that quoted above, the Analects speak of that process as grounded in the life of the family, wherein, initially by acquiring habits of respectful conduct toward others—first of all toward parents and then to one’s siblings—one engenders traits essential to human life, whether one’s own—in the self—or in others. Thus the second passage concludes: “The noble person concerns himself with the root, when the root is established, the Way is born. Being filial and fraternal—is this not the root of humaneness?” (1:2).

Again the rhetorical mode—appealing to anyone’s first experience of life conveys the sense that the living process is interactive and interpersonal. But here the process is identified as one by which “the Way” is born, takes life. And in the context of the preceding passages, this is also understood to be the Way that a truly noble person follows.

At the same time, this Way is centered in humaneness as the prime virtue of the Noble Person, a virtue that links the self-fulfillment of the exemplary person to the fulfillment of others. But fulfillment is the product of a sequential process for anyone and everyone. Filiality is the seed from which, with due cultivation, the growth process can be fulfilled in the flowering of humaneness or true humanity. In this respect, filiality may be considered the genetic virtue of Confucianism—important in its priority—but its full fruit or flower is humaneness (consummate virtue).

There is a widespread impression that filiality is the most characteristic virtue of Confucianism, and this notion is not just a modern misconception or misreading by foreign observers. The early critic of the Confucian school, Mozi, seized on this family virtue as almost an obsession of the Confucians he knew. And the early Legalists also took issue with the Confucians on this point, seeing a family ethic rooted in filiality as prejudicial to public-mindedness on a wider scale (as indeed Mozi had). Moreover, the powerful hold of filiality on Confucian culture was demonstrated by the resistance that it showed to Buddhism upon the latter’s introduction to China.

But before we pursue this issue further, we do well to note another early reference to filiality in the Analects. When a disciple, Meng Wu Bo, is quoted as asking Confucius about filiality or filial piety (xiao), the terse answer given is somewhat perplexing in its obliqueness: “Parents’ only concern should be lest their children be sick” (2:6). Traditional commentators have tended to interpret this as implying primarily an obligation on the child to take proper care of itself—attending to one’s own person in bodily and moral health. No doubt this was a distinct and enduring feature of Confucian teaching and practice, and its strong sense of the person as a bodily self is what offered resistance to Buddhist questioning of the reality of any substantial self. But one should not ignore the underlying assumption here that the filial child is responding to the loving concern of his parents. Filiality is a reflection of parental love. It partakes of the basic Confucian principle of reciprocity, in the light of which filiality is to be seen not as an absolute value requiring blind obedience to parents but as a relative one to the extent that it is qualified and conditioned by a parental love that is taken for granted in the passage just quoted—one of the many natural assumptions underlying Confucian discourse.

Another later anecdote in the Analects underscores the same point. Confucius’s disciple Zai Wo asks him about the customary three years’ mourning for one’s parents, expressing the thought that one year’s mourning should be enough. Confucius asks him: “If you were to eat good food and wear fine clothing, would you feel at ease?” Zai Wo responds: “I would feel at ease.” “If you would feel at ease, then do it. But the noble person throughout the mourning period derives no pleasure from the food that he eats, no joy from the music that he hears, and no comfort from his dwelling. But you would feel at ease and so you should do it.” After Wo leaves, the Master adds: “How inhuman Yü [Zai Wo] is! Only when a child is three years old does it leave its parents’ arms. The three years’ mourning is the universal custom everywhere under Heaven. And Yü, was he not the darling of his father and mother for three years?”

In this case, Confucius shows a basic respect for the essentially voluntary character of ethical behavior while also upholding the standards of reciprocity that should ordinarily apply. The standard, however, presumes that natural feeling should underlie and prompt one’s actions. It would do no good to make a pretense of virtue. Thus natural feelings of reciprocity engendered in the normal process of life, from birth and infancy to maturity, are the root of humaneness, as in the earlier example.

The primacy of natural sentiments born in the bosom of the family is underscored by another episode, in which the Duke of She tells Confucius: “In our part of the country there is one upright Gong. His father stole a sheep and the son bore witness against him.” Confucius says: “In our part of the country, the upright are different from that. A father is shielded by his son, and a son is shielded by his father. Uprightness lies in this” (13:18). In other words, the intimacy of the family is privileged over the claims of the state, for the state cannot stand if trust within the family—the root of public trust—is undermined.

Soon after this, the primacy of sentiment or feeling over rational discourse was reaffirmed for Confucians in the Mencius, where Mencius defined the goodness of human nature as moral awareness (literally, “good knowing” or natural knowledge, liang zhi), and further when he defined the basic relationship or bond between parent and child not in terms of filiality but as one of “intimate affection” or mutual love to be cultivated (of course) in the light of reason (the sense of right and wrong, yi).

But since from the outset of the Analects, as in all the literate discourse that its readers are engaged in, there is the possibility that verbalization and rationalization might intrude on one’s ordinary conduct, it is important that what one learns and says be guided and informed by both one’s own feelings and one’s consciousness of right and wrong (yi). Thus the Analects’ early exposition of the Way of Humaneness includes the following: “A young man is to be filial within his family and respectful outside it. He is to be earnest and faithful, overflowing with love for all living beings and intimate with those who are humane. If after such practice he has strength to spare, he may use it in the study of literate culture (wen)” (1:6). Although the importance of study and learning had already been asserted in the opening lines—and Confucian scholarship became widely known among East Asian teachings as the most rational—here the priority of moral cultivation over literate discourse (wen), essential though the latter was to civilized life, is established early on in the Analects.

We saw in the opening lines how the process of learning started first by interaction with others but ended with the Noble Person able to stand, so to speak, on his own. He knew where he stood regardless of the approval or disapproval of others. This is not the same as a radical individuality asserting its complete autonomy but is rather a self in a state of personal balance or poise. The same conception then informs our understanding of other Confucian values connected with the Noble Person as a model of humaneness. In chapter 1:4, one of Confucius’s closest disciples is quoted approvingly as follows: “Every day I examine myself on three things: In planning on behalf of others, have I failed to be loyal? When dealing with friends have I failed to be trustworthy? In receiving what has been transmitted, have I failed to practice it?”

Among each of these cases there is a connection or continuity that involves more than an obedient adherence to or following of others. “Loyalty” (as zhong is usually translated) is represented by the graph for “center” underlain by the graph for “mind-and-heart”; it bespeaks a centered mind and heart, one in a state of balance within the self but also balanced with others. It means being true to oneself as well as to others (not just following or obeying the latter). This then connects up with the other two values cited. “Trustworthiness” is our rendering here for xin, sometimes also translated as “good faith,” both of which express the idea that one’s actions and conduct are consistent with one’s stated professions, being true to one’s word. (Ezra Pound, as a poet and amateur translator playing around with the Analects, notes that the character for xin [trust] included the graph for man or person at the left and the graph for “word” or “saying” beside it on the right, which suggested to him the felicitous rendering of it as “man standing by his word.”)

This same notion is implicit in Confucian “loyalty,” being true at once to one’s self and others, and it connects up with the faithful practice of one’s professions in service to others. Another notable passage in the Analects speaks of the “man of service” (shi), here roughly equivalent to the “noble person,” in the following terms: “The man of service cannot but be stout-hearted and enduring; for his burden is heavy and his way is long. To be truly humane is the burden he bears; is it not heavy? Only in death does his practice of the Way come to an end; is that not long?” (8:7).

Here the burden of humaneness is heavy because service to others that is also true to oneself can be exacting and demanding of one’s own inner resources. Whether in a position of leadership or sharing in the responsibilities of government, to be truly reliable and trustworthy meant to be fully honest with oneself and unflinchingly forthright in advising others. Often, it would involve courageous honesty in counseling rulers who might resent hearing the truth, especially about themselves.

In the Confucian tradition of civil service, especially in ministerial roles, this courageous honesty was the hallmark of true loyalty on the part of those who were “stout-hearted and enduring” even to the point of martyrdom, when the true scholar-official’s Way ended in death at the hands of a despotic ruler. But being true to one’s word and professions had an importance beyond the individual in Confucius’s whole scheme of things. A prime vocation for the man of service was the business of human governance, and the Analects has much to say about this. Here a few examples may suffice: When a disciple asked Confucius about government, the latter replied tersely, “Sufficient food, sufficient military strength, and the confidence (trust) of the people [are the three requisites].” When asked further “if unavoidably one had to dispense with any of these three, which of them would you forego?” the Master replied: “Let go of the military strength.” The disciple next asked: If one had, unavoidably, to dispense with one of the remaining two, which should go first? The Master said: “Do without the food, for from of old there has always been death, but without such confidence (trust) a people cannot stand” (12:7).

Mutual trust among the people and their leaders is thus the most essential ingredient of any human society—a principle that underlies another response of Confucius to the question of what is essential to government: “Should you try to lead them by means of regulations or keep order among them through laws and punishments, the people will evade these and lack any sense of shame. Lead them [on the other hand] by personal virtue (de) and keep order among them through rites (li), then the people, having a sense of shame, will correct themselves” (2:3).

Here Confucius’s depreciation of laws and punishment fits with his eschewal, from the passage just cited before, of coercive force (“military strength”) except as a possible backup to civil action. For him, voluntarism is the basic predicate of any human society, as it had been traditionally in households cooperatively engaged in family-managed agriculture. One can rely better on a person’s or people’s sense of self-respect (the corollary of “the sense of shame” referred to here) to motivate people’s cooperation with their leaders, just as the latter’s personal virtue should exhibit exemplary self-respect combined with respect for others.

Note, however, that personal virtue and respect alone are not enough; the rites are especially involved and indispensable. This is because rites and proper customs establish practical norms of conduct that are themselves voluntaristic, cooperative, educational—and not coercive. They are the means by which the self, in the normal process of life, engages with others. They give form to things, forms and norms naturally conducive to the harmonious development of human relations or political action.

This is the basis for the “harmony” that others have seen as the keynote of Confucianism, regardless of whether they always understood its voluntarism or reciprocality in the same terms. When in seventh-century Japan Prince Shōtoku tried to incorporate Confucianism in his nation’s first formal constitution, the first word that he used was “Harmony,” followed by his exhortation on behalf of a consensual society. Much later, after the Communists in China recoiled from the vicious class struggle of the Cultural Revolution, they turned back, at least in name, to Confucian harmony as an essential Chinese value to undergird “Chinese Socialism.”

Much more is said in the Analects about the rites (or ritual decorum) in daily life as they relate to personal and social health. But I am limiting myself in this section only to a few key themes that one encounters in a first reading that give us initial bearings on what follows in the text.

In the remainder of this section, I wish to focus on something no less important to one’s reading of the Analects than the key teachings: the character of Confucius and his sense of personal vocation and mission. This image of him in the pages of the Analects comes through as almost more compelling and memorable than his teachings and aphorisms, to such an extent that, despite his own disclaimers of his disciples’ attributions of sagehood to him, among latter-day Confucians the picture of him as he appeared in the Analects became the very model of the Sage (though none could hardly boast of emulating the modesty of the Sage).

The first thing to note is his becoming modesty and lack of pretension to great personal authority, which are already implicit in the conversational mode of the opening lines. He did not claim to be pro-claiming any new order or teaching. “I am a transmitter, not a creator,” he said (7:1). Whether he was actually creative in the process of transmitting, that is, in his interpretation and exposition of ancient ideals, is another question, but posterity has generally judged him so. One must also allow for the possibility that “in transmitting” what he had received from past tradition he was being more than just conservative. The posture of “upholding past ideals” could also appear as a critique of existing institutions that fail to measure up. Thus one episode in Confucius’s teaching career portrays him, in the course of his travels, sending a disciple to ask directions from a farmer who, when he learns that the disciple’s master is Confucius, recognizes the latter as a would-be counselor to rulers, going from state to state looking for one who would take his advice.

The farmer has a skeptical view of this mission; he regards the world as so unruly that the best one can do is tend to his own field. “Instead of following a scholar who distances himself from one ruler after another, it would be better to follow one who withdraws from the whole world of men” (18.6). When the disciple reports this to Confucius, the Master sighs: “One cannot herd with the beasts or flock with the birds. If I am not to go along in the company of other human beings, with whom should I associate? If the Way prevailed in the world, I would not be trying to change things” (18.6). Mere “transmitter” though he was, Confucius did see his mission as trying to change things. Received tradition itself contained the seeds of reform, but it was Confucius who saw the need to rectify the evils that would not just resolve themselves.

Confucius was known in his time as a scholar persistent in his call to be of public service, but he was equally known for his diffidence in serving any ruler whose actions were inconsistent with his own principles. On another occasion someone asked Confucius: “Why does the master not take part in government?” The master said: “What do the Documents [The Classic of History] say about being filial? Be filial. Just being filial and being friendly with one’s brothers contributes to governance. Why should one have to take office to do this?” (2:21).

Again Confucius’s answer is somewhat terse and a little oblique, but it takes us back to where we started in the Analects: filiality as the value underlying all social and civic virtue. Public service is not performed only by those in office; anyone who practices and promotes such civic virtues is rendering a public service. And, indeed, the practice of such values is the precondition for anyone who might qualify for office. Elsewhere, Confucius says: “One should not be anxious about having an official position but about having the wherewithal to hold office. One should not be anxious about not being recognized [for office] but about not being worthy of such recognition” (4:14).

Again we are taken back to the starting point of our reading: the Noble Person who can stand on his own even if he is not recognized. The course that he has followed (and we in following the Analects thus far) is summed up in Confucius’s own brief summation of his life experience: “At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I was established in its pursuit. By forty I had no great doubts [about what I was doing]. At fifty I heard what Heaven commanded of me. At sixty I could heed it. At seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing” (2:4).

In the light of our previous discussion, we may be able to fill in the spaces in this spare outline of his personal history. That it starts with learning we already know. That it takes time to learn from the past and others’ experience we can readily understand. Confucius’s growing from adolescence to increasing security at thirty and maturity at forty—these are familiar stages in the life process. What may be somewhat unexpected is that only at fifty did he “hear” what Heaven expected of him. The language used here for “Heaven’s command” is itself not unfamiliar, but earlier it had referred to what is usually translated as the “Mandate of Heaven” (tianming), a claim made by rulers or their spokesmen to justify their taking power and exercising authority, ostensibly in the name of Heaven. For Confucius, that claim could only be considered legitimate if in fact the ruler or his dynasty ruled virtuously on behalf of the people. And it is this sense of responsibility attaching to the claim of legitimacy or public trust that is crucial to Confucius’s understanding of Heaven’s command or charge.

Confucius himself was in no position to rule. At some point, nevertheless, he must have felt that he had some capacity and obligation to make use of what he had learned on behalf of the public good. (Whether or not this occurred exactly at fifty in this schematic sequence is not the point.) More significant is that Confucius takes this charge upon himself personally; it is not just a political concept applying to dynastic rulers but a commission that Heaven was entrusting directly to himself. We are already aware from other references to Heaven in the Analects that Confucius felt some personal relation to it—a kind of religious relationship between Heaven theistically conceived (a divine creator) and its creation. Heaven spoke directly and personally to him, and he had a filial obligation to listen.

Confucianism may not be thought of as a “religion” in the usual sense, but Confucius bespoke a reverential attitude toward Heaven, and the deep respect in which he held all life was a reflection of this. In response to questions put to him by disciples about the Noble Person, he said: “He cultivates himself with reverence” (14:45), and even more to the point here: “Without knowing (or understanding) what Heaven has ordained (tianming), i.e., its charge or command, one has no way to become a Noble Person” (20:3). Indeed, the attitude and virtue of reverence remained a key element in later Confucianism. It was not a purely secular ethic, as some have supposed it to be.

But if Heaven charged Confucius personally with a responsibility for public service, we know already how conflicted he was about taking office, and we can understand the difficulty that he might face in trying to carry out that charge. This is perhaps why it took him time (here, another ten years) actually to “heed” what we he had heard earlier, that is, to find a way to resolve his conscience in this regard. My own supposition is that his resolution of the matter was in keeping with the response that he gave to those who had questioned him about his refusal to take office: both in the given circumstances and in the larger scheme of things, taking office was not the only way to fulfill one’s obligation to be of service to Heaven and humankind. Teaching was also a public service when it contributed to the individual’s and people’s education on behalf of the public trust.

Finally, when we are told that at seventy Confucius had satisfied his heart’s desire, we are reminded that at fifteen he had “set his heart on learning,” and so, in carrying out Heaven’s charge to him, the outcome—his satisfaction as a scholar and teacher in lieu of an official career—fulfilled not only that early aspiration but also any political ambitions he might have had. This was not accomplished without a struggle of the kind that one who had to bear the burden of humaneness to the end might endure. But that end was, after all, marked by some measure of satisfaction and fulfillment.

To be sure, this was not exactly a supreme epiphany or sudden moment of enlightenment but rather a threshold of accumulated learning and experience. Nor does it, on the other hand, result from the sort of profound confrontation with evil and suffering that we see, say, in St. Augustine or Dostoyevsky. Including Confucius in such a range of perspectives, one can see his as a relatively optimistic or even idealistic view of life. But it is reassuring for those who have followed him in the Analects to believe that this good man could live out a life worthy of a truly Noble Man—the goal he set out for himself at the start.

The foregoing is just one among several ways of explaining why or how we read the Analects. There are others. However important it is to read the text directly and personally, the one we read always bears the imprint of the tradition that has passed it on. And if we want to know how others have received and understood it, showing a decent respect for the opinions of readers and writers before us in other places and times, we might go on to consider how it was understood by those who had a major impact on other civilized peoples.

This would be especially true of those East Asian peoples whose education was structured in the form given by the pervasive Neo-Confucian movement from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. Over the course of this long premodern period, the Analects was read as one of the so-called Four Books, a special packaging of the Confucian classics mainly attributed to the great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200). In that form, the Analects was not the first thing one read. It came after the text of the Great Learning, a chapter from the Record of Rites (Liji) attributed to Confucius’s disciple Zengzi, which was provided with a special preface and commentary by Zhu Xi that he thought propedeutic to any reading of the other classics included in the Four Books. Thus how one read the Analects itself was conditioned by Zhu’s own way of introducing us to “How to Read a Book.” The book is still a classic, but now it is the product of a subsequent tradition, and this is not exactly the same as “reading it in the original.” Zhu Xi was now presenting it in a form adapted to his own age, in which “new age” Confucians, that is, Neo-Confucians, responded to the challenge of Mahāyāna Buddhism by providing a metaphysical explanation to accompany the text. The basic message remained the same, as Zhu Xi summed it up in his preface: “Self-cultivation for the Governance of Humankind” (xiuji zhiren), a memorable slogan in later literature. Now, however, it was elaborated upon in terms of a new cosmology and a more sophisticated philosophy of human nature (dao xue and xingli xue). (Incidentally, this is how the Analects was reported on by the American art critic Ernest Fenollosa, who read it in a Japanese edition of the Four Books and handed it on to people like Ezra Pound. But this is what we all do—read it on the recommendation of someone else in a form more or less adapted to the latest scene.)

However, it did not take long for even this Neo-Confucian version of the traditional classic to be called into question by textual critics of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, who pointed out differences between these supposed “classic” or traditional Four Books and the versions that had been “classic” before. This led inevitably to efforts by modern critics to rediscover or reconstruct “the original Analects.” If we want to incorporate any of these new versions into our own core curriculum, however, which are we to choose? No working curriculum that tries to provide a humanities component for undergraduate education (or even alongside graduate training) can get into all of the complexities that this historical development entails.

There is no perfect solution to this educational dilemma, but if we are willing to think of working solutions rather than final ones, we can try to provide a repertoire of approaches by which one can adapt these resources to different educational situations and different levels of learning. The important thing is that the first reading be a personal encounter with a classic text (however “classic” may be interpreted) and that it be understood as only a first reading, one to be followed up as best one can by more or other readings.

PASSION AND POIGNANCY IN THE TALE OF GENJI

Opening lines are usually significant clues to almost any classic work, and this is no less true of the Genji. Lady Murasaki’s first words are uncertain but nevertheless indicative: “In whatever reign it might have been” (izure no on toki ni ka). Beginning on such an indefinite, questioning note (ka), the Tale could be about almost any time or place. Then, after this indefinite start comes an anonymous reference to a low-ranking court lady whose favor by the emperor exposes her to the jealousy of higher-ranking court women; in other words, instead of being introduced to a typical heroine whose noble character commands our attention if not respect, we meet a lady who simply attracts our natural sympathies. There is some necessary specificity of narrative detail, but rather than fixing our attention on that particular scene or social context, the story appeals primarily to ordinary human sentiments. In this case, the grand Imperial Court of Lady Murasaki’s time simply serves as a stage for eliciting universal human feelings that provide the essential themes of the novel.

In this opening passage, the narrator shows interest in a character of somewhat marginal status. The context is courtly, aristocratic, hierarchical, and imperial (out of which contextual details professional critics or historians can make whatever they wish), but the author herself, and I think most ordinary readers, recognize the essential poignancy of the human situation being described—the conjunction of love, loss, and suffering.

My own teacher Ryūsaku Tsunoda once defined the Japanese sense of beauty in a rather offhand remark as “love touched by death.” By this I think he meant “loss” in general and not just physical death. I don’t think he had the Genji specifically in mind, but it certainly fits. Love and loss prove to be a major theme of the Genji. True, it is about much else as well, but given the very amplitude of the story and its diversity of incidents, we must necessarily focus here on what is most revealing of our chosen theme.

For me, one of the most telling passages is an early episode, in which Genji, at an idle moment, is casually conversing with close friends about the women they have known who have most attracted them. These include a variety of types. Physical beauty is, of course, an obvious subject of conversation, but the discussion ranges over other aspects of human affectivity that join the psychological to the physical and less often the sentimental and sensual to the practical.

In a way typical of the Japanese proclivity for indirection, the conversation that sets the tone for the whole of The Tale of Genji takes place as if by happenstance: on a rainy night when nothing much is going on, Genji’s good friend Tō no Chūjō catches him sorting through some old letters and suspects that he might find in them some intriguing secrets of Genji’s most intimate life. It ends up in an exchange of views, among them and other companions, concerning different women they have known, each of whom has some attractive features but each of whom also has some offsetting and off-putting defect.

The terms in which the discussion is couched are those given by the aristocratic court culture: categories of social class, to each of which attaches the presumption that it represents a certain standard of high-class taste or virtue. Initially at least, the question is assumed to be whether the individuals being described are truly “classy” or not, but the judgment is usually that they fall short somehow—whether by society’s standards or by more fundamental human ones.

Traditionally, this episode has been spoken of in Japanese as shina no sadame, wherein shina can be understood as “quality,” “qualities,” or “goods” and sadame as “judging,” “determining,” or “rating.” Although described here as a very casual, if not desultory, process, the scene is one that reflects the strong Japanese penchant for erecting hierarchies of qualitative judgment or standards of quality, and although the manner is loose and low key, one should not be surprised to learn, as the Tale unfolds, that this “idle talk” in fact anticipates much that is to follow.

Tō no Chūjō prefigures this when he leads off with the observation: “I have at last discerned that there exists no woman of whom one can say ‘This is perfection,’ ‘This is indeed she.’” The rest of this long rambling Tale relates how Genji’s own search for perfection brings similar results, but with a much deeper awareness of the ambiguities in these relationships.

Intimations of this appear early on in Genji’s comments on a judgment offered by Tō no Chūjō, who says: “I divide women into three classes. Those of high rank and birth are made such a fuss of and their weak points are so completely concealed that we are certain to be told that they are paragons. About those of the middle class everyone is allowed to express his own opinion, and we shall have much conflicting evidence to sift. As for the lower class, they do not concern us.”2

The completeness with which Tō no Chūjō disposes of the question amuses Genji, who says, “it will not always be so easy to know into which of the three classes a woman ought to be put. For sometimes people of high rank sink to the most abject positions; while others of common birth rise to be high officers, wear self-important faces, redecorate the inside of their houses and think themselves as good as anyone. How are we to deal with such cases?” (23).

The range of possible outcomes is further projected in a comment by Uma no Kami: “However high a lady may rise, if she does not come of adequate stock, the world will think very differently of her from what it would of one born to such honors; but if through adverse fortune a lady of the highest rank finds herself in friendless misery, the noble breeding of her mind is soon forgotten and she becomes an object of contempt” (23).

Tō no Chūjō goes on:

No doubt the perfect woman in whom none of those essentials is lacking must somewhere exist and it would not startle me to find her. But she would certainly be beyond the reach of a humble person like myself, and for that reason I should like to put her in a category of her own and not count her in our present classification. But suppose that behind some gateway overgrown with vine-weed, in a place where no one knows there is a house at all, there should be locked away some creature of unimagined beauty—with what excitement should we discover her! The complete surprise of it, the upsetting of all our wise theories and classifications, would be likely, I think, to lay a strange and sudden enchantment upon us.

(23)

Here adverse circumstances may confound one’s normal expectations, and we become aware that subjective factors enter into the “objective” picture to complicate and compound the judgment.

“The conversation went on. Many persons and things were discussed.” Uma no Kami contends that perfection is equally difficult in other spheres:

But when the mistress is to be selected, a single individual must be found who will combine in her person many diverse qualities. It will not do to be too exacting. Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities which we admire, and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind the qualities which first induced us to begin our courting.

(23)

If these other perspectives thus complicate the “objective” picture, this final remark suggests that the most fundamental difficulty still lies in the realm of subjectivity: the emotional complications that beset every loving relationship. Among these, jealousy is a prime factor. The games that lovers play with each other and the strategies they adopt all affect how one perceives or looks for a “perfect solution,” which always remains elusive. The problem is already aired in this early conversation, but it is perhaps most vividly acted out later in the case of the young Evening Glory (Yūgao). A beauty hidden in the poorest, most unpromising circumstances, she is rescued from her shabby surroundings by Genji and installed in a more pleasant pavilion only to be struck dead by the vengeful spirit of another of Genji’s lovers, Lady Rokujō, whose humiliation and embitterment, as ghostly disembodied karma (or unappeased obsession), works its own violence on Evening Glory and puts an end to this unlikely affair.

Jealousy and personal insecurity assume great prominence in Genji, equal almost to the intensity of love itself, because the court aristocracy is polygamous and a double standard for men and women contaminates things. The “perfect wife” is expected to suppress her own monogamous feelings and act with tolerance and forbearance toward her husband’s promiscuous impulses. As Tō no Chujō puts it: “when all is said and done there can be no greater virtue in a woman than this: that she should, with gentleness and forbearance, meet any wrong whatever that falls to her share.” So obvious and unexceptional was this idea to the young gentlemen present that Genji himself dozes off in the midst of it and, as the narrator observes, takes no exception to what Tō no Chūjō is saying.

Genji, however, might well have been more alert had he not already resigned himself to the idea that perfect love was impossible to find. At the end of this long evening, the story concludes:

All this while Genji, though he had sometimes joined in the conversation, had in his heart of hearts been thinking of one person only [his first wife, Princess Aoi] and the more he thought the less could he find a single trace of those shortcomings and excesses which, as his friends had declared, were common to all women. “There is no one like her,” he thought, and his heart was very full. The conversation indeed had not brought them to a definite conclusion, but it had led to many curious anecdotes and reflections.

So they passed the night, and at last, for a wonder, the weather had improved. After this long residence at the palace Genji knew he would be expected at the Great Hall and set out at once. There was in Princess Aoi’s air and dress a dignified precision which had something in it even of stiffness; and in the very act of reflecting that she, above all women, was the type of that single-hearted and devoted wife whom (as his friends had said last night) no sensible man would lightly offend, he found himself oppressed by the very perfection of her beauty, which seemed only to make all intimacy with her the more impossible.

(27)

In other words, there was nothing wrong with his own No. 1 wife, Princess Aoi herself. It was rather her perfection that made her unapproachable and drove his restless heart to look elsewhere.

If we leap past the intervening incidents in Genji’s subsequent affairs, much later in the Tale we find him taking stock of his amatory adventures in a way that he mistakenly thinks will be reassuring to Murasaki, his young protégé and later wife, who is now ailing. He reviews his affairs with other women, as if by citing their flaws he is thereby comparing them unfavorably to her. Little does he think of them as infidelities; they were simply diversions for him and imply no lack of appreciation for her. This is how he puts it to her:

What a strange life mine has been! I suppose few careers have ever appeared outwardly more brilliant; but I have never been happy. Person after person that I cared for has in one way or another been taken from me. It is long since I lost all the zest for life, and if I have been condemned to continue my existence, it is (I sometimes think) only as a punishment for certain misdeeds that at all times still lie heavily on my mind. You alone have always been here to console me and I am glad to think that, apart from the time when I was away at Akashi, I have never behaved in such a way as to cause you a moment’s real unhappiness.… However, you are very observant, and I cannot believe you are not perfectly well aware.

(651)

To this Murasaki replies, as the ideal long-suffering wife should, by bearing with her husband: “I know that to any outside person I must appear to be the happiest of women, fortunate indeed far beyond all my deserts.” Then she adds a few words that reveal her true feelings: “But inwardly I am wretched … every day” (651).

Try as she might, there is no way Murasaki can hold back her true feelings. All she can do is break down in uncontrollable sobbing. Genji tries to console her, but he has no idea what he has let loose within her heart. Her hero, her ideal, who should be the soul of sensitivity and sensibility, is indeed upset but still uncomprehending. He tries to divert and distract her by talking about other women he has known who did not measure up to her, as if these left-handed compliments would take the sting out of his philanderings. Instead it only makes things worse. He recalls Lady Rokujō: “Despite all that happened, I always think of her as the most brilliant creature that was at court. Never have I encountered a sensibility so vivid and profound and this, as you can imagine, made her a most fascinating companion. But there can never have been anyone with whom it was more impossible to have relations of a permanent kind.” Eventually Murasaki does regain control of herself and carries on in a dutiful way. The author, however, has let us know what is really going on.

Most of this exchange is described in the language of daily life experience rather than in overtly philosophic or religious terms. Yet it should not be difficult to see in all this the underlying tensions that had arisen in Japanese culture owing to the continuing interaction between native traditions and the influx of Buddhism and Confucianism, especially Buddhism in both its original formulations and its Mahāyāna adaptations. If this early idle chat among Genji and his companions focuses on the nature of desire and the possibilities for its satisfaction, the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, with their radical questioning of desire and pessimistic view of the possibilities for its satisfaction, must have been in the back of their minds, as well, of course, as in the narrator’s. Nor can the portrayal of intense passions encountered in the Genji have been oblivious to the turn taken by Mahāyāna Buddhism as it reckons with the qualified reality of the sensual world and concedes after all that the passions too can be a means to enlightenment. The concession to such feelings would also serve prospectively as an adaptation to the received Japanese tradition by Lady Murasaki’s time.

For a classic example of the latter, we might turn to the Manyoshū, an imperially sponsored collection of native Japanese poetry, as much a classic for the Japanese as the Confucian Book of Odes was to the Chinese. As an example of how closely akin the Genji is in feeling to the Manyoshū, we may take a poem composed by an earlier court lady, Princess Nukada, in answer to a question posed by Emperor Tenji to his prime minister Fujiwara Kamatari, who had played a major role in the great Taika reform that attempted to convert the Japanese system to the up-to-date model of a unified Chinese bureaucratic state. Although the issue has nothing to do with government policy, it is in sharp contrast to some critics who read the Manyoshū, with its imperial sponsorship, as having a strong ideological (that is, political) subtext. In the Manyoshū, the poem is introduced as follows:

When the Emperor Tenji commanded Fujiwara Kamatari, Prime minister, to judge between the luxuriance of the blossoms on the spring hills and the glory of the tinted leaves on the autumn hills, Princess Nukada decided the question with this poem.

When, loosened from the winter’s bonds,

The spring appears,

The birds that were silent

Come out and sing,

The flowers that were prisoned

Come out and bloom;

But the hills are so rank with trees

We cannot see the flowers,

And the flowers are so tangled with weeds

We cannot take them in our hands.

But when on the autumn hill-side

We see the foliage,

We prize the yellow leaves,

Taking them in our hands,

We sigh over the green ones,

Leaving them on the branches;

And that is my only regret—

For me, the autumn hills.3

If there is political significance to this, it lies in the Japanese court being “the high court” in which such “delicate” aesthetic matters would be judged. The prestige of the court is much involved in its standing as the arbiter of high culture.

As for the poem itself, it fits the pattern of the Manyoshū: a strong attention to the natural world, the passing of the seasons and attendant emotions, and the pervasive nostalgia for past moments of intense longing—in short, the aesthetic response to life. Later writers and critics have identified this same feeling in the Genji as mono no aware,⁴ variously translated as “the sadness or pathos of things” but here rendered by me as the “poignancy of things,” because it is concerned with the recollection of a momentary experience of intense beauty and deep feeling. Thus it encapsulates a spiritual experience that responds on one level to the Buddhist sense of impermanence and ephemerality and on another to the distinctive involvement with nature characteristic of Shinto as well as with the passionate response to life that becomes a hallmark of both the Japanese aesthetic and Japanese religion.

In the Genji itself, this aesthetic feeling appears against the background of a more traditional Buddhist conception of the religious life as “leaving the world” or “leaving home,” that is, breaking one’s attachments by the formal act of withdrawal to monastic seclusion. This possibility occurs to many of the principals in the story, including Genji and Murasaki. Generally, however, traditional monastic discipline is not considered a viable option. Although Murasaki thinks of the religious life as a possible surcease for her sufferings, she will not do this without Genji’s permission, and he is unready to face life without her. That she obeys him, despite all the pain he has caused her, tells us that she is still bound by her primary attachment to him as a dutiful wife.

When Genji (and others like him) contemplate a monastic retreat, they doubt that they can succeed in breaking off their attachments to the world. This is not only because they are emotionally dependent on others (as in Genji’s case) but because, as Genji sometimes puts it, in his own way he still feels a genuine concern for those he would be abandoning. Even in monastic seclusion, he would be worrying about them (and, indeed, from a human point of view that would not be seen as such a bad thing).

There are enough such cases in the Tale that we have reason to believe that the author takes the same view of formal religion as no real solution to the problem of desire. Part of the problem for Murasaki, however, is that human feelings, no matter how painful they may sometimes be, have a value that goes beyond any of the desires spoken of in the Four Noble Truths of early Buddhism. Just as in the Mahāyāna, the passions themselves can be made conducive to enlightenment; in the Japanese case, they can attain the level of a religious experience in themselves.

At this point, we would do well to consider how Murasaki deals with the matter when she has Genji speak for herself about the liberating function of literature. In another one of those casual encounters that prove to be so revealing, Genji happens to catch one of the court ladies in the midst of reading a novel, and at first he is inclined to dismiss fiction as frivolous literature. Later he qualifies this judgment and ends up taking it very seriously: “There is, it seems, an art of so fitting each part of the narrative into the next that, though all is mere invention, the reader is persuaded that such things might easily have happened and is as deeply moved as though they were actually going on around him.”

He continues:

“So you see as a matter of fact I think far better of this art than I have led you to suppose. Even its practical value is immense. Without it what should we know of how people lived in the past, from the Age of Gods down to the present day? For history-books such as the Chronicles of Japan show us only one small corner of life; whereas these diaries and romances which I see piled around you contain, I am sure, the most minute information about all sorts of people’s private affairs.…” He smiled, and went on, “But I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author’s telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. That is my view of how this art arose.”

(500–501)

There are several points in these observations that may help us come to some conclusion about the Genji. First of all, in his discussion of the novel Genji is no doubt made to speak for the present author to express self-consciously what she thinks she is doing as she writes. Second is the idea that fiction, though an invention, best tells us about ordinary life; reading it, one is “deeply moved” as though these “inventions” were actually going on around one.

It is not so much that the novel may actually preserve the facts of life and history, as Genji concedes, and thus serve as a veritable record of a certain time and place; more important is that the author, instead of simply telling “a story about the adventures of some other person,” writes “because the storyteller’s own experience of people and things, whether for good or ill was moving him [or her, in this case] to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it bound up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he [or she] cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion” (501).

“Oblivion” might satisfy the need for a kind of detachment, if one could actually put love, loss, and grief out of one’s mind. But Murasaki, as Genji’s creature in the novel (that is, adopted and brought up in court by him) was not free; she was only at a loss for words, sobbing uncontrollably in her grief. As the author, however, Murasaki could give voice to that grief in literature that is timeless. True liberation for her means cherishing the deepest of one’s feelings as being profoundly meaningful in themselves and, by putting them into words, preserving them for, and sharing them with, all posterity.

At this point, one can relive, and perhaps even create, a reality that defies the vicissitudes of time. Impermanence and “emptiness” are overcome in a moment, and that is what gives such poignancy to the experience, which now breathes and feels with an intense reality of its own. Time stands still at that moment. “Love is touched by death,” or better, “death is outdone by love,” with deep pain or passion now recollected as poignantly beautiful.

THE PILLOW BOOK

It is notable that two of the undoubted classics of the Japanese cultural tradition have been written by women: Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi). It is also striking that they appeared at almost the same early moment in history, the products of the same age, the same aristocratic society, and a culture that drew on similar religious traditions, both indigenous and imported. No less striking, however, is the marked difference between what became equally classic models; the one, The Tale of Genji, a narrative spread over a vast canvas of time and range of human experience, taking its time to probe into the depth of human feelings, and the other, the Pillow Book, no story at all but timeless in its momentary reflections on much the same life, restlessly pursuing its insatiable appetite for new aesthetic perceptions. The difference between the two, so apparent in their style of writing, was already intimated in Murasaki’s unadmiring comments on Sei Shōnagon as a person:

Sei Shōnagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction, yet if we stop to examine these Chinese writings of hers that she so presumptuously scatters all over the place, we find that they are full of imperfections. Someone who makes such an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people’s esteem, and I can only think that her future will be a hard one. She is a gifted woman, to be sure, yet if one gives free reign to one’s emotions, even in the most inappropriate circumstances; if one has to sample each interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a woman?5

Readers of the Pillow Book will see enough therein of Sei Shōnagon’s cockiness and her supreme confidence in her own judgments, often unallayed by compassionate sentiments, to recognize much of what Murasaki reports of her. What may be less evident is the acute irony involved in Murasaki’s own boldness in passing judgment on Shōnagon—on the latter’s own home ground no less—in chiding her for her incompetence in “Chinese writings,” given that Sei’s own family, the Kiyowaras, had long been recognized as hereditary custodians and supreme authorities in all matters Chinese.

Against Murasaki’s contrarian judgment, it will seem even more ironic and unexpected that the Pillow Book itself should belie the fate predicted for its author by Murasaki when she says: “Things could not turn out well for such a woman.” Instead, things turned out extremely well for the Pillow Book, and that it could survive circumstances initially quite adverse to its perpetuation tells us something of its intrinsic strengths. As a collection of random notes that did not conform to any established category of literature, the inherent appeal of its contents enabled it eventually to become a model for the informal writings known in Japan as zuihitsu. The Pillow Book appeared long before printing became available, and thus it would not have survived had it not exerted enough appeal for many individuals to have found it worth the effort to copy out by hand.

What made it worth that effort—and still makes it attractive to us as readers? The Pillow Book lacks many of the recognized features of the traditional classic, especially unity of time and place, plot, and sustained narrative. Yet this is, at the same time, what renders it both traditional and classic: the strong sense of place, of local color, of particularity and endless variety, to which Shōnagon responds with her own acute sensibility. It may irritate and even offend so deep a sensitivity as Murasaki’s, but it is precisely the insistent self-revelation of Shōnagon herself that is endlessly attractive and impressive. Considering the formidable handicaps and disabilities that she and Murasaki both suffered in the male-dominated class system of Heian Japan, in her own way, simply by asserting herself, Shōnagon triumphed over them.

As Murasaki testifies, Shōnagon “gave free rein” to her own feelings and held nothing back, unconstrained by the polite conventions of her time or even by her conscious inhibitions. Sometimes this may seem a kind of hypocrisy on her part, as when she catches herself giving vent to feelings in conflict with the social and cultural norms of her day, which she is at one and the same time conscious of yet not bound by in her writings. This should not be taken to mean that Sei Shōnagon is engaged in social protest—that she is an early but premature advocate of women’s liberation from an oppressive social system. Shōnagon is engaged in self-liberation, not social or class protest, and this is probably why she has not been claimed as a feminist by later scholars of women’s resistance to the political and social discrimination so pervasive in their society.

Ivan Morris has explained Shōnagon’s situation and cultural environment as one dominated by good taste, and one can understand her success as taking advantage of the predominant aesthetic culture to break through her social limitations. He writes:

Not only did the rule of taste extend to every sphere of life and apply to the smallest details, but (with the single exception of good birth) it took primacy over all else. Artistic sensitivity was more highly valued than ethical goodness. Despite the influence of Buddhism, Heian society was on the whole governed by style rather than by any moral principles, and good looks tended to take the place of virtue. The word “yoki” referred primarily to birth, but it also applied to one’s beauty or aesthetic sensibility; the one implication that it lacked was one of ethical rectitude. For all their talk about “heart” and “feeling,” this stress on the cult of the beautiful, to the virtual exclusion of any concern for charity, sometimes lends a rather chilling impression to the people of Genji’s world.6

Here the world that Morris writes about is no less Shōnagon’s than Murasaki’s, but we also know that what Murasaki saw of Shōnagon left a “chilling impression” on her. Murasaki’s own depth of feeling led her to perceive a certain sharpness in her opposite number. Thus despite the accuracy of what Morris says about their shared world and about Heian society in general, it may not be quite the whole truth of the matter when we see how these two react so differently to it.

Part of what needs to be considered here is the role of religion, particularly Buddhism. Morris says, this time about Shōnagon herself:

Contemporary literature suggests that for many Heian aristocrats religion had become mere mummery. The temples had become crowded with visitors, but the motives that brought them there often had little connection with the Buddhist faith. This is a subject that lends itself to satire, and … no one has treated it more pungently than Sei Shōnagon, whose mordant wit was, as far as we can judge, uninhibited by any religious feelings.⁷

Morris goes on to quote a memorable passage from the Pillow Book in which Shōnagon says: “A preacher ought to be good looking. For if we are properly to understand the most worthy sentiments of his sermon, we must keep our eyes fixed on him while he speaks; by looking away we may forget to listen. Accordingly an ugly preacher may well be a source of sin.”⁸

The thing to note here is Shōnagon’s frankness in admitting the actual conflict that she experiences at that moment. Her observation is psychological and confessional; she does not express any real doubt about the “worthy sentiments” she is sure the preacher has to offer but only how she may be distracted from them. It may be true, as Morris says, that Shōnagon’s “wit is … uninhibited by any deep religious feelings,” but the apparent conflict is actually obviated by the religion itself.

To understand this, we have to go back to the sources of Heian religiosity itself, and for this a well-known quotation from Kūkai (774–835) may serve our purpose. Kūkai was the leading exponent of Esoteric Buddhism in the form of the True Words (Shingon) Sect, which probably gave Heian culture its most distinctive cast as well as its inherent ambiguity. “Esoteric” signifies that it was a mystery religion, and “True Words” means that despite its inherent mystery—that it is not definable in words—words of a kind still can convey some suggestive meaning. Words may be problematic, but they still can perform some kind of magical communication.

Here the teachings of Mahāyāna Buddhism through its doctrine of expedient or convenient means (hōben) convert its sense of compassion into some tangible form. Thus, it could adapt itself to the traditional tastes of the Japanese. As Kūkai says:

The law [dharma] has no speech, but without speech it cannot be expressed. Eternal truth [tathatā] transcends color, but only by means of color can it be understood. Mistakes will be made in the effort to point at the truth, for there is no clearly defined method of teaching, but even when art does not excite admiration by its unusual quality, it is a treasure which protects the country and benefits the people.