Lay Student Notations from Tun-huang
Anonymous (third quarter of the 9th century)
Pitee the poor lay stoodent
Whose horse has gone up to the stebul in haven.
[Which] family haz a nice girl
That can be married off to a lay student?
When copying, do not drink wine,
Lest the whole day, the tip of your brush be drie;
Just doo what seems appropriate.
This morning I was at a boring meeting,
It brought my worries home to me all the more;
I bought five pints of good wine,
And sent my worries a thousand miles away.
One scroll of corrected copying by two students Li.
The smoke which has been spit out settles to form a vapor.
At the tip of the mountain, the fifth month’s moon is bright;
Having received a summons, I anchor my boat ’midst the islets at night,
The peach trees come out to pay their respects to the wal sity.
When copying, do not drink wine,
Lest the whole day the tip of your brush be drae;
Just doo what seems appropriate,
If there are mistakes, later people will see them.
If there are mistakes, people will….
Pity the poor lay stodent
Whose horse has gone up to haven;
Which family has a nice girl
To marry off to a lay stodent?
Which family have a Lady’s Finger
To marry of too thish bu givup two mush….
Pity the poor lay student
Whose horse has gone up to haven.
Whose family has a nice girl
To merry off to a stud-…?
Translated by Victor H. Mair
These random jottings appear in the margins and in the unused spaces of a scroll from Tun-huang (see selection 214) that consists of a commentary on chapter 5 of the Confucian Analects (see selection 6). They were written by two or three lay students enrolled in a school attached to one of the Buddhist monasteries at Tun-huang. Although such lay students obviously did not possess full literacy, they were of enormous importance in the creation of written vernacular narrative in China. The overwhelming majority of the earliest written vernacular texts in China, dating to approximately a thousand years ago, were copied by just such lay students. This translation attempts to replicate in English the orthographically erroneous quality of their writing, here apparently exacerbated by drunkenness.