Twenty-Two Quatrains on Receiving the Obituary Notice for My Son Shih-ch’ü1
T’ang Hsien-tsu (1550–1617)
My son, you loved telling the story of Prince Naṭa2
who stripped off his own flesh, returned it to his mother,
and gave his father his bones!
Now your flesh has gone to the Ninefold Springs3
—does your mother understand?
and your father must gather your bones
and bring them home.
Translated by Jonathan Chaves
Possibly the greatest dramatist of the Ming dynasty, T’ang Hsien-tsu is especially well known for his masterpiece, The Peony Pavilion (Mu-tan t’ing) (see selection 217). He was a friend of Yüan Hung-tao (see selection 78) and other figures in the late Ming individualist movement and shared with them an appreciation for romantic love. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the arias in The Peony Pavilion are, if anything, more erudite and even bookish than the writings of the orthodox masters themselves—virtually every line has embedded in it a literary allusion, and the play is therefore a kind of scholary tour de force. T’ang’s poetry, far less familiar, is beautifully crafted and shares with his arias an interesting fusion of lyrical tone and density of diction.
One poem from the group of twenty-two.
1. The poet’s son died in 1600 in Nanking, where he had gone to take the official examinations.
2. According to a Buddhist text of the Sung dynasty, Combined Essentials of the Five Lamps (Wu-teng hui-Yüan) (ch. 2), “Prince Naṭa [the son of the guardian king of the north, Vaiśravaṇa] stripped off his own flesh and returned it to his mother, and took out his bones and returned them to his father. Only then did he manifest his True Body, wield his great spiritual power, and expound the dharma [law/doctrine] to his parents.”
3. The underworld.