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Yeh Ts’ai (c. 1190–1240) was a native of Shaowu in Fukien province. Although he was a famous Confucian scholar of his day and director of the Palace Library in Hangchou, he makes fun here of his own immersion in the philosophy of change and his failure to pay attention to the changes taking place in the world around him. The Yiching (Book of Changes) was the primary text used by neo-Confucians during the Sung dynasty for developing something comparable to Taoist cosmology and Buddhist psychology. The book dates back to the beginning of the Chou dynasty, or 1100 B.C., and divides the dynamic forces in the world into sixty-four modes, each represented by a series of six lines and explained by a written commentary. But the sight of swallows busy building their nests, and willow fuzz in his inkwell, suddenly brings Yeh back to the mundane world. During the Sung the Chinese still sat on floor mats, and scholars used a small table or bookrest about one foot high for their texts and writing materials. The Chinese version of the inkwell consisted in a depression at one end of a slate slab, where ink accumulated once it was ground with drops of water on the slab’s surface. The small window suggests poverty. Often the mouth of a broken pottery container was used for the frame. It also suggests the narrow-minded focus on studies characteristic of those preparing for the civil service exams.

Events of Late Spring

YEH TS’AI

House swallows swoop in pairs above my desk

willow fuzz floats in my inkwell

below my small window reading the Book of Changes

I wonder how long spring has been over