POETRY, CALLIGRAPHY, PAINTING—at their deepest level, the three arts that come together in Stone-Waves’ composition enact the experience of dwelling here in the beginning, identity woven wholly into the tissue of existence. In this they were forms of spiritual practice, forms of cultivating an empty mind, but an empty mind given the emotional depth of a full heart. They usually involve some personal dimension, as Inkstone-Wander’s composition describes himself isolated and far from home, alive in a landscape of mountain distances and city ruins in the aftermath of a war that left the Ming Dynasty broken and China ruled by foreigners, an isolation Stone-Waves shared deeply. But whatever else is happening in these artistic practices, whatever human concerns they express, dwelling here in the beginning is the foundation, the experience of dwelling as an empty mind and a full heart. And it makes sense: existence doesn’t just want to explain itself; it wants to feel itself too.
Poetry was sometimes referred to as “poetry-Ch’an.” Although made of words, it is at its most profound level a spiritual practice opening consciousness to an immediate experience of the existence-tissue that precedes thought and language. Ancient artist-intellectuals saw in their pictographic language a world of living images, even if the pictographs were stylized and simplified, transformed and combined with phonetic material. This kept them close to the beginning always, allowed them to dwell here before all of the words and explanations and stories, empty mind mirroring the ten thousand things, for the language constructs meaning from the immediate experience of that mirroring. And poetry is the language’s most distilled expression:
Pictographic images are everywhere here in this first line from Inkstone-Wander’s poem. 搔 (scratch) looked like this in its earlier, more organic form: 
, an ideogram constructed from a combination of a wrist and hand with five fingers on the left, and on the right an insect (
) beneath another hand. 首 is a stylized simplification of early forms showing a head with eyes, mouth, ears, forehead and hair: 
. 青, which is a range of blue-green colors found in nature, from forests to distant mountains and skies, includes a plant sprouting from the ground: 
. 天 generates an image for “sky/heaven” by placing a line above the image for a person seen from the front (大, oracle-bone form: 
): hence, that which stretches out above humans. 近 includes a stylized image for a foot on the left (derived from 
, which is a schematic picture of a foot, showing: heel on the bottom left, toes to the right, leg above with an ankle indicated to one side), suggesting walking (and so, coming “near to”). The other element is the image for an axe formed of the tool itself and perhaps a curling chip of wood on the right: 
(a phonetic element, but which is also the very image of nearness and immediacy: the blade cleaving cleanly into wood). 紫 derives from: 
, where its primary image on the bottom renders silk, showing a pair of cocoons with silk emerging in the form of three strands that would have been spun into thread and dyed colors like purple: 
. Above this is the image for foot again, and to its right a side-view image of a person walking, which together form a phonetic element. Finally, the early form of 虛 is 
, containing a pair of mountain peaks (
) and, in the space above those peaks, a tiger: 
, its image showing a head at the top right, tail at bottom right, and left of the body curving between them, four legs. This ideogram can be traced back through more organic forms, such as 
, where the whole image has the fluid feel of a tiger in motion, to earlier incarnations rendering the thing in and of itself: 
. Hence: emptiness as “mountain tiger-sky,” the emptiness of mountain skies that are also alive with the dynamic energy of a tiger.
In line after line, poetry constructs meaning like this—empty mind mirroring things in and of themselves. And in addition, distinct from the pictographic nature of the language, Chinese poets mostly think in images, in the things we encounter as the everyday world of immediate perceptual experience. Poems are full of landscape, like Inkstone-Wander’s mountain ridgelines and sea-mist, abandoned orchards and city ruins. And so, the spiritual practice of Ch’an empty-mind mirroring is always present as a poem’s most fundamental dimension, for it is in immediate day-to-day experience that one dwells here in the beginning: that primal gaze, a gaze of such clarity it is the gaze of existence looking out at itself.
Mirror-deep images and pictographs embody Lao Tzu’s tzu-jan, “occurrence appearing of itself,” a principle we can understand more deeply in terms of Absence and Presence. Emphasizing the particularity and thusness of individual things in and of themselves, tzu-jan is Lao Tzu’s name for the ten thousand things emerging spontaneously from Absence, the generative source, each according to its own nature, independent and self-suffcient, then eventually dying and returning to Absence, only to reappear transformed into other self-generating forms. And the full structure of this cosmology is replicated in the grammatical structure of the language. As we have seen, this grammar is minimal in the extreme, leaving a great deal of open space in the poem: all words can function as any part of speech, subjects and pronouns are often missing, verbs have no tense, function words (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, etc.) are rare, there is no punctuation, etc. This open space feels like an extension of the open space that surrounds the poem, and together they are a single tissue of emptiness: Absence, the source-tissue. And emerging from that Absence is text with its individual pictographic words: Presence in exactly the same way that the ten thousand things are Presence. In this, poetry participates in that more primal experience of time as an ongoing generative moment, which also defines the texture of the poem, for the wide-open grammar and absence of verb tenses creates a sense that the events of a poem occur in a kind of boundless present.
This textual cosmology was experienced both by the writer and reader of a poem. The writer experienced composition as words emerging from Absence, both the Absence of the blank page and the Absence of empty mind, much like thought seen emerging in meditation. And although it becomes second nature and routine, the structure of few words in a field of grammatical emptiness means a reader is always coaxing meaning out of the open depths of Absence, always inhabiting that originary moment between Presence and Absence, meaning and meaninglessness. This is important: text and emptiness are not symbols or metaphors for the way Absence and Presence operate in the empirical realm. They operate in exactly the same way, and text was experienced as a living organism of image and meaning and sound. There is no fundamental distinction between language and reality, mental and empirical. They are both part of a single generative existence-tissue.
Here we see at a deeper level than before the fundamental difference between how language operates in the West and China. In the Western mimetic model, language is experienced as a transcendental realm of arbitrary (alphabetic) signs that refer to reality. This referential relationship fundamentally separates us from reality, distancing it as a kind of elsewhere, and its rigid category of nouns ossifies things into static and lifeless entities. By contrast, classical Chinese was understood as part of the existence-tissue’s movements. In Chinese with its empty grammar, Absence appears as the space surrounding ideograms, and ideograms emerge from that empty source exactly like Presence’s ten thousand things—a fact emphasized in the pictographic nature of ideograms, and no doubt the ultimate reason for that pictographic nature. Indeed, the ideograms are themselves infused with that emptiness, as they are images composed of lines and voids, Presence and Absence, a fact that becomes important in calligraphic art, as we will see. So, rather than referring mimetically to some empirical fact, an ideogram shares that fact’s embryonic nature. And again, this makes the true dimensions of a Chinese poem impossible to render in English where the language (thought/experience) undergoes a fundamental ontological shift from non-mimetic to mimetic.
This sense was no doubt often lost in day-to-day utilitarian uses of the language by artist-intellectuals in their highly textual bureaucratic and intellectual lives. That routine use of language would have created a rupture in the existence-tissue much like Western languages do (though without the West’s metaphysical divide), hence the need for the spiritual practices of ancient China. One purpose of poetry (and, as we will see, calligraphy) as a spiritual practice was to carry words back to their source in Absence, the origin-tissue, and so to carry us back to our own source in the origin-tissue. It does this by investing language with as much emptiness as possible, distilling expression to the fewest possible ideograms, even as it animates that space to deepen the poem’s spiritual depth and resonance. In addition, the most artistically engaged poems tend to be small, generally only four or eight short lines. Much like the movement of thought arising and then falling silent in Ch’an meditation, a classical Chinese poem is a glancing gesture that returns us promptly to that generative field of silent Absence. Here, one of Ch’an’s most fundamental insights is revealed quite literally: when there are words, there is no Absence. Words replace the deepest insight, which is simply the immediate experience of Absence itself. And so, poets often felt that a poem, however wise, was in the end a failure of wisdom.
But it was the least failure possible in language. By opening and animating the emptiness infusing and surrounding words, poems are always expressing the wordless. You can feel origins in such poems, dark origins where human culture and change itself begin. You can feel mind participating in that cosmological process of appearance emerging from mystery suffused in a shadowy field of Absence. It is another way of weaving identity and existence together into a single tissue here in the beginning.
Inkstone-Wander’s poem doesn’t distinguish Inkstone-Wander as an isolate center of consciousness. The I is an empty presence, as we have seen. It is as much Stone-Waves as Inkstone-Wander, especially when written in Stone-Waves’ own distinctive calligraphic style, and it is as much us as either of those ancients. At the same time, the textual cosmology of Absence and Presence infuses that empty presence with vast cosmological depths; for in that empty grammatical space, identity is indistinguishable from Absence. And so, the poem returns identity to the source-tissue, meaning the empty I we share in this poem is nothing other than the source-tissue acting at the generative heart of the Cosmos. It is the source-tissue scratching its head in wonder, the source-tissue that is so near purple emptiness and gazing into sea-mist, that trails out the indigo-blues and kingfisher-greens of mountain ridgelines, wanders separated and cut-off far from home and civilization in wild southlands beyond the Yangtze River. Poetic practice works exactly like landscape practice, weaving consciousness and landscape together, returning us to dwell here in the beginning where the existence-tissue is whole and not only aware of itself through the opening of consciousness, but also thinking itself, feeling itself.