1. Barnstone, “The Poem behind the Poem,” 3.
2. Ibid., 4–5 (italics mine).
3. Ibid., 4. See also Geoff Waters’s insightful essay, “Some Notes on Translating Classical Chinese Poetry,” in the on-line publication Cipher Journal. Waters writes: “Liu wrote this poem after he was demoted in 815 to a minor post in the far southern town of Liuzhou, where he died a few years later. Liu’s career had been in ruins since September 805, when the Shunzong Emperor abdicated suddenly after only six months on the throne. Shunzong had appointed the reformer Wang Shuwen to be Grand Councilor, temporarily ousting Wu Yuanheng and his powerful party. Wang, in turn, appointed a number of idealistic younger scholars to senior positions in his government, including Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi. When Shunzong was forced out, Wang Shuwen fell and Liu Zongyuan’s official career was effectively over. I see in this poem, beneath the striking visual, an ironic self-commentary: Liu was growing old, banished, alone, and wasting his talent far from Court, in a deep southern backwater town where snow never fell.”
4. Yeh, “The Chinese Poem.”
5. Lucas Klein offers a provocative reading of Liu’s use of a technique called aojue 抝絕, which Klein defines as “roughly equivalent to either feminine rhymes or off-rhymes in English. Rhyming on three ‘entering’ tones—as they were called—the rusheng 入聲 no longer a part of standard Chinese, this poem cross-cuts against the grain of expected Tang poetry versification, leaning as it does on the clipped notes of dzhiuεt, miεt, and siuεt. The effect, no longer attainable without special training, would have been jarring to poetry readers of the day, signaling an undercurrent of disquiet beneath the otherwise tranquil scene of the poem” (see Klein, “Liu Zongyuan & Fishing in the Snow of Translation”). This reading suggests that Liu was not simply offering a scene of Buddho-Daoist “emptiness” in the abstract.
6. Yeh, “The Chinese Poem,” 251.
7. I will discuss this point further in Chapter 4.
8. Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 33.
9. Ibid., 31.
10. Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 3.
11. Ibid., 4. For Greenblatt’s full argument, see his Marvelous Possessions, 99.
12. See Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality.
13. Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” quoted in Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 17.
14. Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 17.
15. Ibid., 18.
16. Zong-qi Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 249–50.
17. Ibid., 250.
1. Droit, The Cult of Nothingness, 9.
2. Loy, Nonduality.
3. See Loy, A Buddhist History of the West, for an interesting expansion of this idea.
4. This is not to say that “nothingness” is uniformly a binary construct in the West. In the final chapter of Ron Schliefer’s book, Intangible Materialism, for instance, he offers a Peircean semiotic reading of such “nothingness” in relation to pain that replaces binarity with a Peircean triad: sensuousness (experience without “meaning” and hence “empty”); reference (indexicality); and meaning. The book also spends some time following the semiotics of “zero” (which I discuss in the following paragraph) as something more than “simply” nothing.
5. Hugo, Les misérables, pt. 2, bk. 7, chap. 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/135.
6. A good example of the equation of evil to nothingness can be found in the writing of St. Augustine in particular (see Williams, “Insubstantial Evil”). There are instances in Western literature and negative theology where the opposite is posited, as in, for example, Yeats’s short story “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God.” See also Jin Y. Park’s discussion of “nothingness” in the philosophy of Heidegger in “The Logic of Nothing and A-Metaphysics.”
7. Heidegger wrote the “Letter on Humanism” in November, 1946, about three months after he cooperatively translated the Daodejing with the Chinese scholar, Paul Shih-yi Hsiao. See Paul Shih-yi Hsiao’s essay “Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao Te Ching,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987, 93–104.
8. See Derrida’s early essay on Bataille and Hegel, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.”
9. It is important to note that this poem’s lamentation of the lost center offers a different pathos than much of Yeats’s other work.
10. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 299. Slavoj Žižek comments on this negative view of nothingness: “In order to account for the nihilistic denial of the assertive will to life, Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, introduced the well-known distinction between someone not willing anything at all and someone willing nothing itself.” Nihilistic hatred of life is “a revolt against the most fundamental presuppositions of life: yet it is and remains a will! … Rather than want nothing, man even wants nothingness” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 107).
11. See Yeats’s early short story “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God,” in which he offers a negative theology in part drawn from his study of Irish occultism.
12. For an interesting discussion of the image qua negativity, see Calichman, “Nothing Resists Modernity.”
13. Auden, Collected Poems, 247.
14. Fredmen, “Neo-Paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity,” 203.
15. So the present study is not broadly focused upon different concepts of emptiness that have migrated (by way of heterocultural transformation) into American poetry, which would necessarily need to concentrate on the incredibly influential works of Phillip Whalen, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Allen Ginsberg, for instance. But these poets, and many more (I will offer a longer list in a moment), do not come to their own poetics of emptiness through concepts of principally Chinese poetic and philosophical textuality, and therefore will have to be taken up at a later time.
16. OED, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50040044?query_type=word&queryword=zero&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place=1 (accessed 31 August 2007).
17. In verse 18 of the Mūla, Nāgārjuna writes:
Whatever is dependently co-arisen,
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way.
(Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 48)
Jay Garfield, who translated Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, comments: “These are the two truths: on the one hand they are conventionally existent and the things we say about them are in fact true, to the extent that we get it right on the terms of the everyday…. On the other hand, they are not (independently) existent. These two truths seem as different as night and day—being and non-being. But … their ultimate nonexistence and their conventional existence are the same thing—hence the deep identity of the Two Truths. And this is true because emptiness is not other than dependent-arising, and hence because emptiness is empty” (Garfield, Empty Words, 39).
18. While clearly leaving much to be desired, I will be using short dramatic dialogues for two reasons: first, because philosophical dialectics is an important rhetorical device in many schools of Buddhism; and second, because I believe that they work well to clarify points that might otherwise take a long time to develop through standard scholarly forms. I benefited early on from David Loy’s use of this trope in his book Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy.
19. See The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra.
20. Chapters 1 and 2 will explore Pound’s deletions and discuss their relationship to Fenollosa’s Buddhism in detail.
21. Drawing a distinction between the two schools, D. T. Suzuki writes in the introduction to his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra: “The Ālayavijñāna of the Yogācāra is not the same as that of Laṅkā and the Awakening of Faith. The former conceives the Ālaya to be purity itself with nothing defiled in it whereas the Laṅkā and the Awakening make it the cause of purity and defilement. Further, the Yogācāra upholds the theory of Vijñaptimātra and not that of Cittamātra, which belongs to the Laṅkā, Avataṁsaka, and Awakening of Faith. The difference is this: According to the Vijñaptimātra, the world is nothing but ideas, there are no realities behind them; but the Cittamātra states that there is nothing but Citta, Mind, in the world and that the world is the objectification of Mind. The one is pure idealism and the other idealistic realism” (see Lirs*Ru website, http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-intro.htm#introduction).
22. Tathāgatagarbha - inspired concepts, like the Tibetan concept of rigpa, may differ from one another in nuanced ways, but most point to a vast non-dual consciousness that undergirds all things.
23. See Pruning the Boddhi Tree, 3–29.
24. See the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana-sutra. The Nirvana Sutra argues that beings are embryonic Tathāgatas (thus-come ones, or “Buddhas,” by virtue of the pervasiveness of the buddha-dhātu, Buddha-nature).
25. See Suzuki, Lankavatara Sutra.
26. Once again, W. B. Yeats is interesting to note in the context of cosmogony since in his early and intense study of Irish mythology and the occult he drew upon notions of “nothingness” informed by a similar pathos, one that sees nothingness as a generative monism, definitely different from Daoism but nonetheless interestingly similar in tone. For example, Yeats would define “nothingness” in terms of a “phaseless sphere,” which Heather Marin traces to his friend AE’s (George Russell’s) book, The Candle of Vision, in which Yeats would come to find a description of a generative monist void/deity called “Boundless Lir”: “In the beginning was the boundless Lir, an infinite depth, an invisible divinity, neither dark nor light, in whom were all things past and to be. There at the close of a divine day, time being ended, and the Nuts of Knowledge harvested, the gods partake of the Feast of Age and drink from a secret fountain. Their being there is neither life nor death nor sleep nor dream, but all are wondrously wrought together. They lie in the bosom of Lir, cradled in the same peace, those who hereafter shall meet in love or war in hate. The Great Father and the Mother of the Gods mingle together and Heaven and Earth are lost, being one in the Infinite Lir” (Russell, The Candle of Vision, 153). For a commentary that connects this passage to Yeats, see Martin, W. B. Yeats, 37.
27. Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching, 14.
28. Ibid., 42.
29. Ibid., 1.
30. Ibid., 40.
31. The term ziran appears in the Daodejing, 25: “dao follows the law of ziran.”
32. The term wuwei appears in chapter 63 of the Daodejing in the phrase “weiwuwei” 為無為, and the actual phrase “wuwei” shows up only three times in the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi but becomes a term of major philosophical and aesthetic import in and after Neo-Daoism.
33. This idea also parallels Michael Saso’s description of “kenotic emptying of mind, heart, and emotions for the encounter with the Dao” (see Saso, Blue Dragon, White Tiger, 19; also, Saso, Teachings of Master Chuang, 225–33). Saso traces his notion of Kenotic practices to the Zhuangzi Neipian.
34. Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching, 16.
35. See “Keeping the One,” a chapter in Schipper, The Taoist Body, 130–59.
36. The first volume in this series was published in 2009 and is entitled The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature; there are more volumes forthcoming. See Storhoff, Understanding Charles Johnson, for another example of this expanding field.
37. See my essay “Listen and Relate: The Buddho-Daoist Poetics of Jackson Mac Low,” which will appear in a forthcoming volume in the SUNY Press series on Buddhism and American Culture.
38. Sausy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination.”
39. From their conception, both the present volume and The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition were designed to complement one another. For example, for all of my citations to the original archival folders of Fenollosa’s unpublished materials I have included the page numbers where these can be found in the Critical Edition, so that readers can easily move back and forth between the two published volumes. The introduction to the Critical Edition also offers a preview of the basic outline of my Buddhist reorientation of Fenollosa’s famous essay, explored in the present work.
40. Alan Watts came to use this term to describe his loosely constructed Buddho-Daoist philosophical orientation. “Zennist,” for Watts, therefore, is somewhat different from how I want to use it, but much of Watts’s writing reveals “Zennist” reading habits, which interpret Chinese poetry, and even Daoism, through a hermeneutic influence by Zen (see Watts, Tao).
41. Emerson, “Nature.”
1. “Japan’s Tribute to Fenollosa.” Boston Evening Transcript, Dec. 24, 1920, A1.
2. See Hayot, “Critical Dreams.” There is an updated version of this essay in Hayot, Chinese Dreams.
3. Ezra Pound, headnote to the 1936 edition of Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry; Pound’s note and the entire essay are reprinted in The Chinese Written Character as Medium of Poetry: A Critical Edition, 41–74.
4. Davie, Articulate Energy, 33.
5. Charles Olson discusses the CWC in his own poetry manifesto, “Projective Verse” (1950); see also his 1951 poem “The Gate and the Center.”
6. Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, 38.
7. Kenner, The Pound Era, 158.
8. Ibid.
9. Huang defines “transpacific displacement” as “a historical process of textual migration of cultural meanings, meanings that include linguistic traits, poetics, philosophical ideas, myths, stories, and so on.” I would like to preserve this sense of “transpacific textual migration” without necessarily limiting my exploration to the cultural studies emphasis that follows: “And such displacement is driven in particular by the writers’ desire to appropriate, capture, mimic, parody, or revise the Other” (Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 3). Working through this overarching frame of mastery of Otherness, developed in the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas and carried on in the later work of Jacque Derrida, has saturated the hermeneutical habits of literary criticism to such an extent that other “reasons” for “transpacific displacement” are increasingly difficult to presence.
10. Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 7. Kern’s use of this “Adamic language” frame can also be found without a great deal of modification in Alexander Walsh’s Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics.
11. Ibid., 7. If Kern means (which I believe he does) that there is little to no East Asian element in Fenollosa’s thinking, he has far overextended himself, since he shows little to no interest in reading Fenollosa’s own writing about Asia.
12. This is a point I will return to toward the end of the chapter.
13. Pound, The Cantos, 687. Pound would have come to this bias through the Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑑綱目 (A comprehensive mirror for the aid of government), by the eleventh-century Chinese historian Sima Guang. Pound read in Père Mailla de Moyriac’s condensed French translation, Hisoire genérale de la Chine, names like “bhud-foes” and “hochangs” (Buddhists and monks), described as symptoms of societal decadence. Thank you to Haun Saussy for this point (and the quotation being annotated) (see Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded,” 19). I will return to Pound’s particular “Confucian” interpretation of Fenollosa’s essay at a later point in the chapter.
14. Also written in Chinese as 帝釋網 and 帝網 (see Soothill and Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms).
15. While Fenollosa did not officially study Kegon Buddhism with a Kegon priest or scholar, he would have been familiar with “Indra’s net” from the writing of his student and friend Kakuzo Okakura, who discusses this metaphor in his 1903 book Ideals of the East. Okakura writes, “For art, like the diamond net of Indra, reflects the whole chain in every link. It exists at no period in any final mould. It is always a growth, defying the dissecting knife of the chronologist. To discourse on a particular phase of its development means to deal with infinite causes and effects throughout its past and present…. We must pass in review the various phases of Confucian philosophy; the different ideals which the Buddhist mind has from time to time revealed” (Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan, 9; again, gratitude to Haun Saussy for this reference).
16. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Language as the Medium for Poetry” [final draft, ca. 1906, with Pound’s notes, 1914–1916], 97.
17. Ibid., 102.
18. Ibid., 103.
19. I will return to Pound’s reading of Fenollosa after I explore the Buddhist epistemological and ontological undercurrents of Fenollosa’s poetics.
20. On the political and intellectual conditions surrounding Fenollosa’s university appointment, see Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan.
21. While Fenollosa’s ability to study under such a master was largely due to the drive to Westernize, it is important to note that Fenollosa helped both Kanô Hôgai (1828–88) and Hashimoto Gaho (1835–1908) reestablish themselves as major artists of the period. He even made Kanô Hôgai into a character embodying the synthesis of East and West in his epic poem “East and West.”
22. In the course of these travels he was able to acquire a massive collection of Japanese art, which was purchased by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
23. For more information on Fenollosa’s life, see his biography, Ernest Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture, written by Lawrence Chisolm. See also Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture; Yamaguchi, Fenollosa; and Fenollosa, Murakata, and Houghton Library, The Ernest Fenollosa Papers (the published version of Fenollosa’s papers deposited at the Houghton Library, Harvard University).
24. Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West, 2.
25. Fenollosa, “Contemporary Japanese Art,” 580.
26. See Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West, 32; and the Japan Weekly Mail for January 30, 1892, for an original account of this assertion.
27. For representations of this art, see the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Tokyo National Museum, April 3–May 11, 1997: “World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 Revisited.” For an interesting connection between Japanese “modernism” and American “modernism” in architecture, see Nute, “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanese Art”; Nute uncovers the fact that Lloyd’s first employer was Fenollosa’s first cousin, and speculates on how Japanese art theories would have entered Lloyd’s own architectural ideas.
28. Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West, 33.
29. Ibid., 2.
30. Inoue, Bukkyo katsuron. This work is reproduced in the journal Meiji bunka zenshu, vol. 9, Shukyo (1954): 377–416. An English translation can be found in the appendix of Staggs, “In Defence of Japanese Buddhism,” 398. See also Staggs, “Defend the Nation and Love the Truth”; and Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West, 142.
31. For an overview, see Jansen, “Modernization and Foreign Policy in Meiji Japan.”
32. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound [1918, 1936], 42.
33. Ibid., 75. Ezra Pound deleted the paragraph from which this quote was taken.
34. Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West” [1898].
35. In his “Notes for a History of the Influence of China upon the Western World,” Fenollosa situates his work within the context of European aggression in the settling of the Boxer Rebellion: “Through all my work in the East, I have felt it as a cold, sarcastic repression and scorn, on the part of Europeans. And it is this unfortunate prejudice against the most serious understanding of the East that is responsible for many tragic features in the present imbroglio at Peking” (174).
36. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Language as the Medium for Poetry” [final draft, ca. 1906, with Pound’s notes, 1914–1916], 76.
37. Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West” [1898], 155.
38. See “yellow peril” arguments like that found in Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
39. Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West” [1898], 155.
40. See “Analysis and Synthesis,” Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am 1759.2 (50), Houghton Library, Harvard University; “Idealism and Realism,” Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am 1759.2 (36); and “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” in Fenollosa, Murakata, and Houghton Library, The Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, 135–70.
41. Paul Carus also promoted this view; see Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 60–68. While Fenollosa held Western science as its most valuable asset to a global culture, he still viewed it with significant ambivalence.
42. Fenollosa gives a detailed account of Kang Yuwei’s (1858–1927) attempts at East/West synthesis and political reforms in Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art (V.II 21). Kang argued that China should imitate Meiji Japan in its program of reform, including the adoption of a constitutional government. The Emperor Guangxu 光緒 (ruled 1875–1908) appointed Kang as the head of the government in June 1898, and Kang immediately began the “One Hundred Days of Reform,” which issued edicts ranging from the inclusion of Western studies in all Chinese education, to reforms throughout the army and government. The edicts were implemented in only one province, however, and after only three months in power, a coup d’état returned authority to the conservative administrators led by the Empress Dowager.
43. Seventh Report of the Class Secretary of the Class of 1874 of Harvard College. June 1889–June 1899 (Boston: Geo. H. Elis, 1899), 47, cited in Yutaka Ito, “Words Quite Fail,” 199.
44. See Gompers, “Imperialism—Its Dangers and Wrongs.” There were, however, many public figures like Andrew Carnegie, a classical isolationist fearing “European entanglement” who also opposed annexation for fear of race-mixing. Figures like David Starr Jordan, the founder of Stanford University, led the anti-miscegenation group, while the Anti-Imperialist League argued that an annexation would contradict the very republican and democratic foundations of the American system of government. Those arguing for annexation, like Kansas senator W. A. Peffer, argued along straightforward white supremacist lines for Anglo-Saxon world domination.
45. Fenollosa, “Coming Fusion,” 155.
46. Ibid. What sets Fenollosa’s apart from the positions of others, mentioned earlier, is his inversion of racial degeneracy theory, which took all forms of racial and cultural mixing as inherently “degenerative.” Arthur Joseph de Gobineau, an early French race theorist, published his “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races” in 1854, in which he used anthropology, linguistics, and history to formulate a biologically determined theory of race that gave no opportunity for upward mobility, but saw all mixing as degenerative. Gobineau insisted that those races which remained superior were those that kept their racial purity intact—and that mixing would lead to “racial suicide” (Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races). Francis Galton, in a chapter from his book Hereditary Genius entitled “The Comparative Worth of Different Races,” uses a grading scale to classify races by their “intelligence.” Galton’s genetic concepts of racial superiority became very popular in United States (and Europe). So, while as far back as 1691 some states had already banned all forms of interracial marriage, anti-“miscegenation” laws (itself a neologism of the mid- to late-nineteenth century meant to denote the negative, “degenerative” nature of race-mixing) gained a new pseudo-scientific legitimacy in the years of Fenollosa’s writing. In his “Notes for a History of the Influence of China upon the Western World,” Fenollosa explicitly compares Europeans’ biased attitudes about Asia to Americans’ racial attitudes: “Unfortunately, even today, we Westerners, for the most part, came to Asia, not to discover and welcome identities, but to impose our differences; and between the foreign residents of China and Japan and the natives there is almost as much of a caste feeling, as in our Southern states between the whites and the blacks. It is no mere missionary bias that leads us to undervalue their cultures, it is a solid jealousy of race and social prejudice” (199). So while Fenollosa fails to abandon the language of Social Darwinism, he does seek to use it against the Eurocentric grain of his period.
47. See Miller, Benevolent Assimilation.
48. See Nishida, “The Problem of Japanese Culture,” 859; and Nishida, “Towards a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of Pre-Established Harmony as Guide.” See also Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in which the author discusses the works cited here. Finally, for a thorough discussion of Japanese Buddhism and imperialism/militarism in the mid-twentieth century, see Victoria, Zen at War; and Victoria, Zen War Stories.
49. See Pruning the Bodhi Tree.
50. While Kipling described the annexation of the Philippines as the “white man’s burden,” Fenollosa’s own imperialism would be more accurately articulated through his “New Buddhist” orientation: a “bodhisattva burden” if you will.
51. The manuscript note is also described in Fenollosa, Murakata, Houghton Library, The Ernest Fenollosa Papers, 3:48.
52. “My position in America; a manifest of mission,” manuscript note dated 1 May 1891, p. 1, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am. 1759.2 (60), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. It is likely that Fenollosa is referring here to William James, Principles of Psychology (1890), since he uses terminology derived from James’s discussion of music, which no doubt condition his views on the role of overtones in the production of harmony. See Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded,” 182–83n53, for a lengthy excerpt that compellingly links James’s and Fenollosa’s thinking on this point.
56. Fenollosa, “My position in America; a manifest of mission,” manuscript note dated 1 May 1891, p. 1, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am. 1759.2 (60), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
57. Tendai Buddhism is a major Sino-Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism, named after Mount Tiantai in southeastern China, where its first monastery was established.
58. 中道實相 The reality of the “mean” is neither 有 substance (or existent), nor 空 void (or nonexistent), but a reality that is neither, which is to say, it is a “mean” between the two extremes of materialism and nihilism. This “mean” is found in a third principle between the two, suggesting a space beyond the categories of existence 有 and nothingness 無. This “mean” is 圓道—the perfect way (of the three principles of Tiantai) (see Soothill and Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, 398). For more on Tiantai, see Swanson, Foundations of T’ien-T’ai Philosophy.
59. The dialectical method argues that historical process, or the progress of the “spirit’s” movement toward self-consciousness and freedom, manifests as a dialectic tension, as a result of mankind’s limitations at each phase of history. This area of Hegel’s thought has been often reduced (and grossly oversimplified) to a dialectical relationship of the categories of “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis.” An idea contains a form of incompleteness that gives rise to the antithesis, a conflicting idea, and a third point of view, a synthesis, arises from this conflict. This synthesis overcomes the conflict by reconciling the truths contained in the thesis and antithesis at a higher level, but the synthesis, which is a new thesis, generates a new antithesis, and the process continues until truth is arrived at—which Inoue claims to have found in the Tendai “middle path.”
60. Inoue, Bukkyo katsuron: Joron, 398. Inoue’s revelation that Buddhism’s “Middle Way” is superior to Western religion and philosophy took place in 1885, the same year that he graduated from Tokyo University, and the same year that Fenollosa took Buddhist ordination. The fact that Fenollosa, who was nicknamed daijin sensei (teacher of great men), took his ordination in this year would have lent great support to Inoue’s thesis that all Western philosophers would logically convert to Buddhism once they were properly introduced to Japanese Mahayana. On the other hand, Inoue’s claim that Tendai doctrines were superior to all Western religion and philosophy would have also have bequeathed Fenollosa a unique status among both his Asian and Western peers.
61. “Remarks on Japanese Art in General,” p. 8, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS Am 1759.2 (84), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
62. Chisolm, Ernest Fenollosa, 131.
63. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, 145.
64. For more about Rhys Davis, the Pali Text Society, and colonialism, see Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism.
65. For a discussion on how both the Buddhist and Christian delegates to the exhibition deployed Social Darwinism, see Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West, 2, 16, 20–21, 47, 61, 80.
66. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, 29.
67. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound [1918, 1936], 46.
68. Ibid. Fenollosa makes a similar point in an earlier draft of the CWC: “For in nature, in a plant, for instance, all things are done at once, the flow of sap, the assimilation of nutriment, the bursting of leaves, the hardening of fiber and the coloring of petals, the storing of the seed essences, do not wait for our slow analyses, as separate groupings in successive time, but go on together, and what is more mutually affect one another. The abstraction of logic from the simultaneity and entanglement of forces, namely, all that which constitutes life; and so give us dead abstractions” (“Synopsis of Lectures on Chinese and Japanese Poetry,” see Critical Edition, 110).
69. For an excellent discussion of pratītya-samutpāda (Pali: praticca-samutpada), see Garfield, Empty Words. For a discussion of “Indra’s net” and the Avatāmsaka/Huayan/Kegon (“Flower Garland”) school/sutra, see The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra.
70. Fenollosa, ““Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature,” 156.
71. Whalen Lai makes this point in “Ch’an Metaphors.”
72. This metaphor can be found in the Platform Sutra (see Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch), and Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra, among many other places. The Critical Buddhism movement in Japan during the late 1980s cited this metaphor as a prime example of “non-Buddhist” monism common to most contemporary Japanese Buddhism (see Noriaki, “Critical Philosophy versus Topical Philosophy”).
73. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound [1918, 1936], 46.
74. Ibid., 50. Following this line, it is difficult to believe that Fenollosa was philosophically invested in the idea of characters as pictures of things. Furthermore, he routinely criticizes the West for its valuation of photographic realism in art, since such work falsely purports to show the “whole truth” (see Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art; and additional quotes in “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound [1918, 1936], 45–46).
75. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound [1918, 1936], 50.
76. Ibid., 52.
77. Ibid., 51.
78. OED online database.
79. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica” (see Critical Edition, 56).
80. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I, Vol. 1,” 27–29. The earlier drafts of the CWC often contain analogous passages to those found in the version edited and published by Pound. In this case, Fenollosa’s earlier draft retained the clearest articulation of his argument (see “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. I,” Ezra Pound Papers, box 99, folder 4218, Beinecke Library, Yale University); Fenollosa also discusses this point in even more detail in a lecture entitled “Analysis and Synthesis,” where he states: “Our very language becomes analytic, and we think that we get accuracy as each word comes to express the smallest shred of thought…. But in this way we do not really exhaust all the relations of things to one another, we merely ignore some of them. Things are not related to one another merely in series, or classified and enumerated groups. Several things, thoughts, or feelings may be so related as mutually to modify one another; and this modification sometimes is of such a nature that a new whole or entity is produced out of the parts which have become transfigured by their new relation” (see “Lecture on Analysis and Synthesis,” p. 2, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Papers, bMS AM 1759.2 [50], Houghton Library, Harvard University).
81. This point will be taken up in greater detail in a moment.
82. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” (see Critical Edition, 56).
83. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 49.
84. Pound, ABC of Reading, 19–23.
85. “In the spring or early summer of 1912, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Richard Aldington, and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three following principles:
1. Direct Treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome. (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 3)
86. The original Alalects 13.3 reads: 子路曰：”卫君待子而为政，子将奚先？”子曰：”必也正名乎！”子路曰：”有是哉，子之迂也！奚其正？”子曰：”野哉, 由也！君子于其所不知，盖阙如也。名不正，则言不顺；言不顺，则事不成；事不成，则礼乐不兴；礼乐不兴，则刑罚不中；刑罚不中，则民无所措手足。故君子名之必可言也，言 之必可行也。君子于其言，无所苟而已矣。Chinese text cited from http://zhongwen.com/lunyu.htm. Pound’s translation is from Confucius, 29–31. Here Pound’s other important Confucian term, sincerity, is linked into his linguistic project. Pound’s translation of cheng yi, usually translated as “making one’s thoughts sincere,” becomes “sought precise verbal definition of their inarticulate thoughts,” which reveals the mimetic theory of language that formed the basis of his translative practices.
87. Pound, Confucius, 249. See also Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism. Lan locates Fenollosa as a principal catalyst in Pound’s positivism, citing (like a broken record) that Fenollosa sought “language derived mostly from the use of concrete images.” And, therefore, “by equating the natural law with the visual in language, the true with the concreteness of images, Pound assigned to poetry the task of bringing words closer to things” (63). Lan’s reading of Fenollosa mirrors Pound’s in the ABC of Reading, which places a special emphasis on concrete images as precise things, which supposedly, for Fenollosa, provides a solution to the abstractions of Logic.
88. Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism, 46–47.
89. Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations, 65.
90. In his study, Lan points out that Western literary criticism casts Pound’s Confucianism into an unfavorable light. He cites critics like Alicia Ostriker, who attributes Pound’s turn from the Goddess-worshiping Greeks to the Patriarchy of Confucianism. For James Wilhelm, Confucianism was a turn away from religious tolerance, and for Leon Surrete, Pound’s turn from Plato’s republic to Confucian totalitarianism planted the seeds of Fascism. Yet Lan justly points out that Western literary critics have not engaged Confucian source materials, and therefore cannot help operating from a simplistic understanding of Confucianism, which should cast doubt upon their speculations. Lan, on the other hand, explores how Pound’s interpretation of Confucianism differs significantly from the Confucianism discourses under discussion in “Confucian Studies” present and past. Yet Lan also criticizes Confucian scholars’ reluctance to engage Pound for fear of his controversial (a euphemism) political and racial ideas and his infamy as an amateur sinologist (a distain only rivaled by that for Fenollosa) (see Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism, 7–8). See also Ostriker, “The Poet as Heroine,” 35; Wilhelm, Ezra Pound, 24–27; and Surette, Pound in Purgatory, 74.
91. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound (see Critical Edition, 45).
92. See Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 143. The earliest printing of “In a Station of the Metro” is in the April 1913 issue of Poetry.
93. Ibid., 152.
94. Ibid. (Huang’s emphasis).
1. While I found this lecture during the summer of 2004, I had not transcribed more than a few pages until the summer of 2005, when I was able to return to Yale thanks to the generous support of Haun Saussy, who found funding for my project and also helped support the long hours of transcribing that followed, including helping me get past many of the most inscrutable words in the text.
2. Most of these texts have been transcribed, annotated, and published in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition.
3. Page marked “Fenol” in Pound’s hand. Ezra Pound Archive, box 99, folder 4423, Yale University Libraries, Beinecke Library.
4. See The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition.
5. See also William James’s notions of “overtones” and “unity,” in his Principles of Psychology.
6. Joseph Needham used this term to describe Chinese cosmological thought (see Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, 277, 280–89).
7. The practice of translating Buddhist terms into existing Chinese term/concepts, geyi 格義, was used in the early transmission of Buddhist texts into China, but was later abandoned for the practice of transliteration.
8. The Huayan school chose the Avatamsaka Sutra (Ch: Huayan jing) for its foundation, which immediately located this school in distinct epistemological position vis-à-vis all previous schools, for the Avatamsaka describes the historical Buddhist moment of awakening itself, which means an epistemology based upon this sutra begins from a nirvanic, rather than samsaric perspective (which most traditional Buddhist schools emphasized in one form or another).
9. Lai, “Chinese Buddhist Causation Theories,” 243. In addition to the influence of Chinese cosmogony, Lai argues that this movement toward harmonious becoming and spontaneous oneness can be traced back to a particular Chinese version of the Prajnaparamita Sutra translated by the great Kumarajiva. According to Lai, Kumarajiva’s choice of the word 即是 (jishi) is the copula in “rūpam śūnyam eva” (form [is] empty only). Lai writes: “The Chinese word for is ‘is’—namely, chi-shi [jishi]—is not required in Sanskrit in this instance. Apparently, the Buddhist usages such as samsāra is nirvāna or form is emptiness introduced a strength or magnitude of meaning (signifying symmetrical identity), perhaps not available in earlier usage of the Chinese chi [ji]A=B. “ Lai continues by discussing Nāgārjuna’s strong efforts to negate and not to affirm: “That is, things neither come nor go, are neither the same nor different” (ibid., 253–54).
10. In Pound’s edited version, this line reads: “Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony” (see Pound’s appendix to Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica” [with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound, 1918, 1936], 60).
11. Clearly, we can see an echo of Keats’s negative capability, but Fenollosa’s explanation takes on explicit classical Chinese shadings.
12. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 160.
13. This idea also parallels other Western interpretations of “Daoist” emptying. For example, Michael Saso’s description of “kenotic emptying of mind, heart, and emotions for the encounter with the Dao” looks nearly the same as Fenollosa’s description (see Saso Blue Dragon, White Tiger, 225–33). Saso traces his notion of kenotic practices to the Zhuangzi Neipian.
14. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Traits.”
15. This idea is central to the poetics of emptiness developed by Wai-lim Yip discussed in Chapter 4.
16. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 160–61.
17. Ibid., 161.
18. Ibid. I am reminded here of Denise Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form,” from The Poet in the World, 7–13, in which Levertov speaks of the poet in similar terms, as a medium seeking out natural affinities and forms in nature.
19. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 161.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 160.
22. Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, 19–20.
23. Ibid., 20.
24. Fan, Wenxin diaolong zhu文心雕龍注 [Commentaries on Wenxin diaolong], 1.
25. Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 160.
26. See Liu Xie, Book of Literary Design, trans. Siu-kit Wong, Allan Chung-hang Lo, and Kwong-tai Lam.
27. Fan, Wenxin diaolong zhu文心雕龍注 [Commentaries on Wenxin diaolong], 1–21.
28. Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 51.
29. Liu Xie, Book of Literary Design, trans. Siu-kit Wong, Allan Chung-hang Lo, and Kwong-tai Lam, 1. I have cited these translations, not for their fidelity to the original (for they are not), but for the closeness of their contemporary translation to Fenollosa’s ideas at the turn of the century.
30. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, 16.
31. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 145.
32. Ibid. It is unclear what the internal quote marks indicate here.
33. Ibid., 144.
34. Ibid. While we only find the term wen/bun used untranslated as harmony/synthesis in Fenollosa’s lecture/essay “A Theory of Literature,” one can find a discussion of wen and the origin of writing in notes taken during his studies with Professor Mori. Fenollosa writes, “Soketsu’s (the language’s founder) [Ch: Fu Xi or Bao Shi] skill in finding the true chord of nature was such that the heavens poured down grain, and the demons of night whine at it. The legend is as old as the characters, and scholars take it that the characters have a very deep essence in them, reaching to the essence of the universe and able to bring prosperity, or adversely, misfortune” Quoted by Huang, Transpacific Displacement, p. 38. A similar, albeit less dramatically presented account of writing’s origin can be found in Xu Shen’s postface to the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, where he writes that Fu Xi, “looking up, contemplated the images (xiang) in the sky, and looking down, the markings (fa) on the earth. He observed the patterns (wen) on birds and animals and their adaptations to the earth. From nearby, he took hints from his own body, and elsewhere from other things. Then he began to make the ‘eight trigrams’ of the Book of Changes, to pass on the model symbols (xianxiang) to later times” (this translation of Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 is from Gu, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing, 85).
35. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 144.
36. While it is easy to see why Fenollosa would be drawn to the binary opposition of wen and luan, I find it interesting that he fixates upon another binary opposition, between wen and li. After all, in his masterwork Epoch’s of Chinese & Japanese Art, Fenollosa describes Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian “synthesis” of the three teachings “the greatest intellectual feat accomplished by Chinese thought during the five millennia of its existence” (Vol. 2, 35).
37. Fenollosa always capitalizes “Ri.”
38. Fenollosa, “Preliminary Lectures on The Theory of Literature: A Theory of Literature,” 145.
39. Ibid., (Fenollosa’s emphasis).
40. Yet Fenollosa’s heterorcultural poetics does not stop at the limits of lexicographical expansion: he does not simply want to add wen to an abstract list of literary terms; he follows Liu Xie in arguing that the Yijing can be used to help perceive and manifest wen in one’s daily life. For a further discussion of the transformations of the guo, see ibid., 147–49.
41. Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound (see Critical Edition, 54).
42. “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry” (see Critical Edition, 95).
43. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. ii” (see Critical Edition, 139).
44. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, Vol. 2, 5.
45. For Fenollosa this parallel between man and nature was wholly embodied by Chinese poetic form as extremely structured forms of parallelism, which I will return to in a moment (see Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II” [1903], Critical Edition, 138).
46. One of the most interesting things about Fenollosa’s enthusiasm for correlative cosmology lies in how rarely this view has been shared by Western scholars in the twentieth century. While Joseph Needham, a Western scholar, finds value in the system(s) of “Chinese sciences,” far more have viewed it with ambivalence, suspicion, or even distain: Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss argue it is a “primitive classification scheme,” and Lévy Bruhl argues it is an example of “arrested development,” “prelogical thinking,” and “balderdash.” While Fenollosa’s attempt to integrate correlative cosmology with his Tendai/Kegon epistemology reveals a rushed conflation on his part, the poetics he creates from this admixture is richly textured and totally unique (see J. J. Clarke, The Tao and the West, 68, 221; Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, 73–74; and Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 284–87).
47. For more on Yip’s concept of “epistemological elaborations,” see Chapter 4.
48. See Legge, The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 16, 424.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 16:425.
51. Ibid.
52. This section of Fenollosa’s translation notes is reproduced in Kodama, American Poetry and Japanese Culture, 66.
53. For more about this term see Bodman’s dissertation, Poetics and Prosody in Early Mediaeval China, 262.
54. Ibid., 162.
55. Fenollosa describes the four tones as follows: “The open or even tone, which holds its sound on a musical level. The rising tone, which sounds something like a [sic] interrogative inflection; the falling tone, which is something like our inflection of pleading or negative assumption, and the closed tone, when the vowel sound was finally shut off by a consonant ending.” It is important to note that the fourth of these tonal categories, “entering tones,” are no longer present in modern Mandarin pronunciation (a point I will return to in a moment, as Fenollosa takes this absence very seriously) (“Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture i. Vol ii” [see Critical Edition, 137]).
56. Ibid.
57. I have a Chinese essay on my style of translating (through mimicry) classical Chinese poetic form, entitled 夺胎换骨：译诗存音, or “Evolving from Embryo and Changing the Bones: Translating the Sonorous,” which is forthcoming in “外国文学研究” (Foreign Literature Studies). My first publication of this style of translation can be found in Stalling, “Five Variations of a Poem by Li Yu.” Finally, this work will appear in my forthcoming book entitled Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (under consideration).
58. A facsimile of this page of the manuscript is reproduced in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, p. 114, in the section of that work concerning Fenollosa’s 1903 essay, “Synopsis of Lectures on Chinese and Japanese Poetry.”
59. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 104.
60. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II,” 132–33.
61. The usefulness of Chinese poetry appeared very differently to Ezra Pound, since he saw in it primarily a powerful alternative to formal Victorian verse forms. Pound is, therefore, correct when he reads the CWC as “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics,” but he and Fenollosa differ considerably in their understanding of these fundamentals. The glue that has held Fenollosa and Pound together for nearly a century may reside in the simple fact that one of them edited and controlled the texts of the other. Fenollosa was, after 1908, dead, in the conventional sense as well as in the sense of Roland Barthes’s “death of the author.”
62. Taking his cue from Confucius’s example of musical harmonies, the second half of the CWC discusses poetry in terms of a poetic synthesis that may have fueled Pound’s formulation of the trinity: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. Fenollosa writes: “Looked at aesthetically, our own poetry can be thought of as made up of two planes or dimensions,—the elements of beauty that spring from the words regarded as thought, and the elements of beauty that spring from the words regarded as sound. Now the Chinese has both of these; but in it, the first is bound up with still another formal element, namely, the elements of beauty that spring from the words regarded as visible. Thus, Chinese poetry can be regarded as having three dimensions; like painting, with its line, its dark and light, and its color” (see Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II” [1903], 133).
63. Ibid., 131.
64. “Marpessa” first appeared in the Poems (1897) of Stephen Phillips (1868–1915). Fenollosa quotes two lines from Idas’s address to Marpessa:
Not for this only do I love thee, but
Because Infinity upon thee broods;
And thou art full of whispers and of shadows.
Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say
So long, and yearnéd up the cliffs to tell;
Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,
What the still night suggesteth to the heart. (Stephen Phillips, Marpessa, 25)
65. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II” [1903], 130.
66. Ibid., 134.
68. I have altered the scansion only slightly to make the meter more clearly readable.
69. We will look at an example of the Chinese-inspired rhyme scheme later in the chapter.
70. “Quatrain” in Persian.
71. By “conceptual,” I want to point to the “so-called conceptual poetry” of Kenny Goldsmith, for example, who in his book Day rewrites every word of a single edition of the New York Times as a book. The words, numbers, fonts, etc., may all be the same as the original, but his act of republishing them opens new ways of reading them. In this sense, Fenollosa wants to open new ways of reading texts that are “ready-made” insofar as their traditional English meters are already made, but philosophically banal (see Goldsmith, Day).
72. “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II,” 134.
73. Fenollosa stood outside this current, but the phonology of earlier phases of the Chinese language had been the object of intense research in the Chinese scholarly tradition (the eighteenth-century lexicographer Duan Yucai made essential contributions), but it was in the 1920s that an alphabetically-based phonetic system for ancient Chinese was elaborated by Bernhard Karlgren, using a variety of contemporary dialects, traditional rhyming dictionaries, and poetic texts themselves as evidence. Karlgren presented his results in his Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. On Karlgren’s studies in the light of later work, see Behr, “Odds on the Odes—How Old Chinese Became an (Almost) Natural Language in 1992.” For an example of phonological recovery of Tang poetic art, see Stimson, “The Sound of a Tarng Poem.”
74. See Karlgren, Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese, 1923.
75. “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II,” 134. There is a certain tension between Fenollosa’s argument that Sino-Japanese has preserved the fifth-century and later eighth- and ninth-century Chinese pronunciations, and his well-known (and erroneous) belief that Chinese is a largely non-phonetic language. If characters pointed to “relations among things themselves,” rather than words, the Japanese (and Korean and Vietnamese, for that matter) would have used native words to pronounce all the characters, rather than attempting to preserve the Chinese sounds. The difference asserted between things and words is, of course, too simple to account for the history of linguistic contacts.
76. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, Vol. I, 41. In the posthumous publication of Fenollosa’s book, Professor Petrucci notes that “ ‘Go’ signifies in Japanese ‘Southern.’”
77. The word person 人, pronounced as nin, would come from this first wave of sound readings, from the Buddhist term for person, ningen 人間
78. Fenollosa writes: “Again in the 8th and 9th Century, the sounds of Northern China were introduced in a 2nd wave of culture. Fortunately both of these systems of sound have been preserved by the syllabary, for the former has persisted in Buddhist speech, the later as the official. We have then a key to measure the change of Chinese sounds, from the 5th C to the 9th—or at least from the South to the North” (Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II” [1903], 134–35).
79. Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II” [1903], 137.
80. Ibid., 135.
81. Fenollosa discusses Kukai’s creation of the kana syllabary in Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, vol. 1, 146.
82. Siddham survives in East Asia where Tantric Buddhism persists—in places where, for example, Korean Buddhists still write seed syllables in a modified form of Siddham.
83. This is unclear because modern scholarship throws doubt upon Kûkai’s influence over the creation of kana; the fact that Siddham remained in use in Tantric ritual in Japan indicates to me that Shingon would not need kana to do this as well.
84. Further evidence for the belief in the inherent power of esoteric sound can be found in Fenollosa’s Epochs, in which he describes an esoteric practice using the “in” language and focus upon vocable mantric sounds (vol. 1, 156). Fenollosa also describes his own branch of Tendai at Miidera as being in the same vein as Kukai (vol. 1, 147).
85. “Landscape Painting and Poetry,” Ezra Pound Papers, box 101, folder 4250, Beinecke Library, Yale University. As to the actual Romanized version of the kana, Fenollosa seems to have settled on one of the first systems to be developed, called the Hepburn system, which might well have come to Fenollosa’s attention through his friend, student, and collaborator Okakura, who along with his brother Yoshisaburo (who served as Lafcadio Hearn’s translator) learned English at their local Christian mission school, operated by Dr. James Hepburn who popularized this system of Romanization (see Okakura, The Book of Tea, 67).
86. Fenollosa describes this “kei” as “words of accent, at point of striking lute.” “Landscape Painting and Poetry,” Ezra Pound Papers, box 101, folder 4250, Beinecke Library, Yale University, p. 4.
87. Ibid.
88. Pound, “A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste,” 200–201.
89. “A Few Don’ts” originally appeared in Poetry in 1913 and then again in a collection of Pound’s essays on poetry entitled “A Retrospect” in Pavannes and Divagations, 1918.
90. Mair and Mei, “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody,” 394.
91. Shen Yue, Songshu, in Bodman, Poetics and Prosody in Early Mediaeval China, 134. The bracketed comments are Bodman’s.
92. Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 54.
93. Ibid., 28.
94. Fang, Preface to The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, x–xi.
95. Ibid., xi.
96. Ibid., xii. The transliteration reads:
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Charles Olson (The Distances[New York: Grove Press, 1960], 61–62) is cited in Sarra, “Whistling in the Bughouse,” 11.
100. For further discussion of this point, see Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 38–40.
101. Ibid., 45–47.
102. Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, 29.
103. Ibid.
104. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art, vol. 1, 145.
105. Ibid., vol. 2, 3.
106. Ibid., vol. 1, 15.
107. Ibid., vol. 1, 19.
108. Owen, “Omen of the World,” 83.
1. Snyder, Mountains and Rivers without End, 158.
2. Snyder, The Real Work, 21.
3. Snyder, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems, 67.
4. See Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights, 211. See also Norton, “The Importance of Nothing.” Norton also focuses on the way disjunction works soteriologically in Snyder’s work, but I am more interested in exploring how this aspect of Snyder’s work borrows from Zennist readings of classical Chinese poetry, not classical Chinese poetry as Norton, Snyder, and others have. The difference is, I believe, important to a critical reading of the heterocultural formation of “emptiness” more generally in Snyder’s poetry and poetics.
5. Scalapino, Introduction to Overtime, by Philip Whalen, xviii. We can think of this as “wrecking” the dualistically organized mind.
6. Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights, 211. In a note Faure writes, “According to Wang Shizhen, this passage is based on an aphorism of the Chan master Dongshan Liangjie (807–869): “A word that contains speech is a dead word; a word that no longer contains speech is a live word.”.
7. Snyder, Foreword to A Zen Forrest, Sayings of the Masters, comp. and trans. Soiku Shieematsu, viii.
8. Ibid., ix.
9. Also called the “turning point,” quan yu (turning language), or bu er zhiyan (non-dual words).
10. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 103.
11. Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics, 285.
12. Snyder, A Place in Space, 5.
13. I want to emphasize, however, that this inversion is not simply reducible to a Romantic Western imposition on or an “external” homogenization of an exotic poetry and poetics, since this inversion has already taken place in traditional Zennist hermeneutic practices.
14. See Gu, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing, 4–5.
15. “The Taste,” in Left out in the Rain, 163.
16. Davie, Poet as Sculptor, 45.
17. Snyder, “We Wash Our Bowls in This Water,” in Mountains and Rivers without End, 137–38.
18. Snyder, Earth House Hold, 129.
19. D. T. Suzuki usefully traces the Laṅkā to a book, found in the Dunhuang caves, called the “Record of Master and Disciple in [the Transmission of] the Laṅkā” (楞伽師資記), which identifies it with Guṇabhadra, the translator of the Sung, or four-volume, Laṅkā, and not with Bodhidharma, as is generally done by Zen historians. But there is another text found at Dunhuang, called “Record of the Succession of the Dharma-treasure” (歷代法寶記), which traces the Laṅkā back to Bodhidharma and not Guṇabhadra (see Suzuki, The Lankavatara Sutra, available online at http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm).
20. To simplify matters, I will use only the term tathāgatagarbha, rather than always using it along with the largely analogous term Buddha-dhātu. Furthermore, due to the rather esoteric notion of “gharba” as “womb-matrix,” I will use the term “Buddha Nature,” as it coincides with Snyder’s poetics more seamlessly, and is not misleading when one considers the nearly apposite meanings of Buddha-dhātu and tathāgatagarbha.
21. Pruning the Bodhi Tree, 242.
22. I discuss this so-called “positive emptiness” on pages 13–17 of the introduction.
23. See Jason Lagapa’s helpful essay, “Something from Nothing: The Disontological Poetics of Leslie Scalapino.”
24. This is because this poem is thought to be his “enlightenment verse,” a genre of writing said to be written at the moment of a poet’s or teacher’s awakening.
25. Dogen’s essay is in Dogen, Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵).
26. While I cannot be certain, this teaching appears to be one of several sutras classed as tathāgatagarbha in nature.
27. Snyder, Mountains and Rivers without End, 137–38.
28. For definitions, see Soothill and Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. Also, there is an interesting dialogue in the journal Connotations that engages the issue of non-duality and water in Snyder’s poem “The Canyon Wren” (see Chung, “Allusions in Gary Snyder’s ‘The Canyon Wren’”), but this essay should be read in the context of all of the articles about this issue that have been published in Connotations (see Whalen-Bridge, “Gary Snyder, Dôgen, and ‘The Canyon Wren’”; Patke, Response to “Gary Snyder, Dôgen, and ‘The Canyon Wren’”; and Whalen-Bridge, “My Poet Is Better than Your Poet: A Response to Rajeev Patke.” The disagreement appears to be in the difficult nature non-duality takes in the poem and Whalen-Bridges’s attempt to provoke non-dual mind forms by breaking down the subject/object, nature/man binaries through a discussion of non-human language reception.
29. Snyder, Earth House Hold, 57.
30. Many of Snyder’s poems end with this retroactive unifying grammar: the poem “Wave” ends in the positive emptiness “of my mind”; the poem “Song of the Slip” ends in the expression “make home in the whole”; in “Kai, Today” Snyder ends with the single word “sea,” and so on.
31. See Parkinson, “The Poetry of Gary Snyder,” 616–32; the work is also cited in Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 166.
32. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 136–37.
33. While Altieri is right to point out this difference, I find it odd that he implicitly endorses Snyder’s unity over modernist tension as if the lack of tension necessarily leads to an ego-less work.
34. Ibid., 137.
35. About a year after composing this section, I found a poem/koan similar to the one Ben-Ami Scharfstein describes briefly in his introduction to The Sound of the One Hand (see Scharfstein, “Zen: The Tactics of Emptiness,” 26).
36. And while usually one only talks about doing away with “distinctions,” “discriminations,” and “dualities,” I think that one should feel at liberty to use the term “difference” here, in light of the fact that the “monistic” ontology that undergirds this view of emptiness delegitimizes the ontological status of anything separate or different from itself. We are led to believe that such distinctions are caused by mind, and thus are not uncaused, not separate from the monism that gives rise to them.
37. Interestingly, in the next chapter we explore a poetics of emptiness that attempts to challenge dualism by running in the opposite direction (by privileging the autonomous otherness of differentia). And yet both of these strategies present theories of language wholly discordant with contemporary literary criticism, which complicates their critical reception today.
38. “Practitioners of Reality,” a symposium with Norman Fischer, Michael Mc-Clure, and Leslie Scalapino, held at Stanford University, March 2003.
39. This argument is often very heated, with both sides polemically attacking the other as being either non-Buddhist (Hindu) or nihilistic, depending on what definition of emptiness one ascribes to.
40. While now quite old, one of the best essays tying Snyder’s poetry to Romanticism is “Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet,” by Charles Altieri.
41. Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 46.
42. Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, 526.
43. Ibid., 524.
44. Snyder, The Real Work, 178.
45. For an in-depth analysis of ocular rhetoric in Zen and other Mahayana schools, see McMahan, Empty Vision.
46. Snyder, “Reflections on My Translations of the T’ang Poet Han Shan,” 233.
47. Ibid.
48. Snyder, The Real Work, 39.
49. Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, 94.
50. Perelman, “Poetry in Theory.” Perelman critiques Snyder’s poetics as being “anti-theoretical” and “a-historical,” citing Snyder’s poem “What You Should Know to Be a Poet,” as a prime example:
all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
and the moon
your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;
dreams. (Ibid., 163)
“The poem,” Perelman continues, “is crisply efficient in laying out the elements and ethics of the counterculture of the sixties. The book the poet needs to study is the natural world, enlarged by shamanism to include the supernatural” (163). Perelman then goes on to argue that “[while] the stoicism of the Zen stance can be valuable; nevertheless I find this poem, as a social representative of poetry, quite a problem. Perhaps some of my difficulties stem from the title. Would this be easier to take if it were called ‘WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW’? For a poem that wants to impart knowledge about the world as a whole, there are two main blank spots, both of them theoretical. ‘To be a poet’ you apparently don’t need to know anything about poems or poetics, and you don’t need to know anything about theory…. This poem seems constituted by an a-historical, antitheoretical stance: the know-nothing armchair bureaucrat, dilettante, intellectual, the theorist who has never bucked hay is the target of the poem’s lecture” (163). Perelman is right, insofar as Snyder’s poetics is ahistorical and the theorist is the target of Snyder’s lecture—and Dale Wright’s definition of “American Romantic Zen” as an “openness to cultural and historical ideas quite other than their own” is clearly applicable here, but I am not sure we can call Snyder’s work “anti-theoretical,” since this would imply that theory lies wholly within the domain of Perelman’s (or our) own critical orientation. The list of “natural” phenomena and “elegant mind” speaks to/through particular cultural idioms informed by specific philosophical discourses, which must be explored if we are to offer a heterocultural reading of Snyder’s transpacific elements.
51. See Kitarō, “The Problem of Japanese Culture,” 859; and Nishida, “Towards a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of Pre-Established Harmony as Guide.” See also Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” who cites these works in his discussion. The question, however, is how one comes to define this direct apprehension.
52. Eshleman, “Imagination’s Body and Comradely Display,” 233.
53. Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, 544.
54. See Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. For more general discussion of Zen sutras, and the Platform Sutra in particular, see the more recent text by Dale Wright, The Zen Canon, at pp. 70, 89, and 150.
55. This connection between sound and enlightenment recalls a number of sutras and Chinese poems, including poems by both Su Shi and Han Shan that I will discuss later when we explore the soteriological dimensions of aurality in Zen poetics.
56. Yet the hagiographical approach to Snyder’s work has been increasingly challenged by far more critical voices, like that of Timothy Gray in his groundbreaking work, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter-Cultural Community. While this work is not particularly interested in reading Snyder’s work through a critical Buddhist framework, it does situate him in a richly (and “thickly”) textured historical context informed by the transpacific critical orientation of Rob Wilson and others.
57. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, xviii.
58. See Michael Castro’s important study, Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth Century Poets and the Native American. Castro devotes a chapter to a study of Snyder’s Native American appropriations and interests and revisits the historical period that saw a reaction against ethnopoetics and Snyder’s work Turtle Island. While Jerome Rothenberg left his Native American translations and anthologies behind to explore his Jewish “roots,” Snyder concentrated more than ever on the transpacific dimension of his poetics.
1. The original publication date of Zhongguo shi xue was 1992; an expanded edition was published by Renmin Wenxue Chubanse in 2006.
2. Yip’s English work began with his landmark retranslation of the poems collected in Ezra Pound’s canonical Cathay, and grew to include an important anthology of classical Chinese poetic forms, entitled Chinese Poetry, and numerous critical essays published between the late 1960s and the late 1990s. Celebrated as one of the Ten Major Modern Chinese Poets by the Taiwan Ministry of Education, he was recently honored at the 7th Triennial Congress of the Chinese Literature Association, in conjunction with the publication of The Complete Works of Wai-lim Yip by Anhui Educational Press.
3. Yip, “Aesthetic Consciousness of Landscape in Chinese and Anglo-American Poetry,” 101.
4. The term ziran appears in the Daodejing, verse 25: “Dao follows the law of ziran.” And the term wuwei appears in chapter 63 of the Daodejing, in the phrase weiwuwei 為無為. The actual term “wuwei” shows up only three times in the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi, but becomes a term of major philosophical and aesthetic import in and after Neo-Daoism.
5. Yip, “Aesthetic Consciousness of Landscape in Chinese and Anglo-American Poetry,” 102. Regardless of the Daoist precedents for Yip’s interpretation of this koan, situated in his American context, his formulation strikes a decidedly Romantic tone. The invocation of childlike innocence and immediacy to nature, followed by the obfuscation of the adult mind, followed in turn by the possibility for a return to a pure seeing, could have (and indeed has) been written about Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode.” For an affirmation of the Romantic vision of the ode, see the classic new critical essay by Cleanth Brooks, “Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination,” chapter 7 in Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn; and for an interpretation of the ode as a poetics of loss, see Jerome McGann’s “Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romantic Poems,” chapter 8 of his The Romantic Ideology.
6. We could also read this koan through the notion of interdiffusion, like (Kegon) Huayan Buddhism’s “Indra’s net,” which sees all phenomena as single jewels in an infinite net where each jewel reflects every other. In this case, the first stage is in error, for overemphasizing the identities of single jewels (mountains or tea bowls), just as the second places too much emphasis on the “wholeness” of the interdependent net itself (at the expense of each jewel’s intrinsic uniqueness), while the third recognizes that the mountains are both the net and the jewels, so they can keep their “conventional designations” without losing sight of their interdiffusion (Ch: shishi wuai, JA: jijimuge).
7. Lin, “Yip Wai-lim: A Poet of Exile,” 112.
8. Yip captures his sense of exile by alluding to Cai Yan’s “18 Beats on a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” a poem Maxine Hong Kingston chose, a decade later, for the ending of her work, The Woman Warrior.
9. Yip and Pound, Ezra Pound’s Cathay, 7.
10. For a list of all the steps, see ibid., 7–8.
11. Recall that in Chapter 3, Snyder saw soteriological potential in the couplet’s abrupt shift in focus from the social, human world to the “other time” of the “grass growing wild,” through “turning language” that shakes the reader’s mind from its normative patterns, allowing a more direct experience of the transience of human affairs than what might be available through discursive language. Yip also values the abrupt “turning” of the lines, but, as we will see in a moment, he locates a very different governing set of philosophical values behind it.
12. Yip and Pound, Ezra Pound’s Cathay, 18.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 19.
16. In the ninth “Osiris” article of 1912, Pound describes words as electrified cones charged with the power of tradition (see Kenner, The Pound Era, 238).
17. Chang, Creativity and Taoism.
18. Yip does not reference Chang’s work, but given the fact that Chang is articulating a view of Chinese poetry available in the Chinese tradition, Yip simply bypasses him and references a similar variety of source texts from Chinese philosophy, poetics, and poetry. The dates of publication are also important to keep in mind. While Chang Chung-yuan’s Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry was first published by Julian Press in 1963, due to its popularity it was reissued by Harper Torchbooks in 1970, which would have been during the time of Yip’s shift toward an explicit Daoist poetics. The point I would like to make is not one of originality, and certainly not plagiarism, but that an important precedent in the “Daoist” transpacific imaginary reveals itself more fully in Yip’s work.
19. Chang, Creativity and Taoism, 175.
20. Ibid., 176, 178.
21. See Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility; Niranjana, Siting Translation.
22. Yip, Prologue to Diffusion of Distances, 1.
23. See the journal Alcheringa, which was published from 1970 to 1980 and originally edited by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg (Rothenberg left in 1976 to found the New Wilderness Letter). Archival issues of the journal can be found at http://www.durationpress.com/archives/ethnopoetics/alcheringa/alcheringa.pdf.
24. Yip, Prologue to Diffusion of Distances, 2.
25. This autobiography was solicited by Pennywhistle Press for a new publication of Yip’s selected English poetry, but has still not been published. The quote here is used with the permission of the author.
26. Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 25.
27. Said, Orientalism, 3.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. See Whorf, Language, Reality, Thought.
30. Count Kuki Shûzô (九鬼周造) was a student of Heidegger, a friend of Sartre, and was in part raised by Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉覚三) (see Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics). Kuki also wrote the first book-length study of Heidegger, Kuki Shūzō (九鬼周造). “Haideggā no tetsugaku (the Philosophy of Heidegger).”
31. The term “Iki” is an allusion to Kuki Shūzō’s work Iki no kôzô (The structure of Iki), an inquiry into traditional Japanese aesthetics he wrote in the 1930s. It has been translated by John Clark as Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki, and by Hiroshi Nara in his book The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō. The Japanese aesthetic term iki いき is often represented as 粋.
32. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 4–5, quoted in Yip, “The Use of ‘Models’ in East–West Comparative Literature,” 15. Lidia Liu quotes a different section of this text and, like Yip, appears to share much of Heidegger’s skepticism toward cross-cultural communication (see Liu, Translingual Practice, 4–6). See also Nishida, “The Problem of Japanese Culture,” 859; and Nishida, “Towards a Philosophy of Religion.”
33. Yip, “Taoist Aesthetic,” 18.
34. Yip quotes a series of Chinese literary figures to support his ideas throughout his work. These include Lu Ji 陸機 (b. 261–d. 303): “The mind is cleared to crystallize contemplation” 罄澄心以凝思; Su Kungtu: “Live plainly: wait in silence / It is here the Scheme is seen” 素處以默/妙機其微; Yan Yu: “The last attainment of poetry is entering into shen (spirit)” 詩之極致有一 曰入神; and Su Shi: “In the state of emptiness, one takes in all the aspects” 空故納萬境. All of these passages are cited in Yip, “Language and the Real-Life World,” 75–76; and Yip, “Taoist Aesthetic.”
35. Yip, “Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry,” 50.
36. Yip, “Language and the Real Life World,” 65.
37. Yip, “Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry,” 40.
38. Ibid. (Yip’s emphasis).
39. Ibid.
40. Yip does praise English for its narrative strengths, but this strength is not coupled to an ontological strength, like his arguments of “wuyan” are.
41. Yip’s bifurcation of language into these two types is itself present within the classical Chinese definition of particles as “empty words” (zhuzi), and the simple fact that they are used sparingly in classical poetry does seem to validate Yip’s own devaluation, again revealing Yip’s fidelity to his reading of the Chinese poetic tradition itself. François Cheng would disagree with this devaluation of empty words, however, citing that their very emptiness gave them a metaphysical/cosmological function within the poems in which they are used (see Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing).
42. Yip, “Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry,” 50.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Fredman, “Neo-Paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity,” 202.
46. Yip, “Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry,” 48.
47. Yip, “Language and the Real-Life World,” 65. The bulk of Yip’s criticism gestated in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, and his own poetic production can be included in the “tradition” of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, which set itself against the then still entrenched New Critics and T. S. Eliot. In this context, Yip tends to privilege what Lazlo Géfin calls the “ideogrammic stream” (imagist-objectivist-Black Mountain) as a break from so-called “traditional” Western poetics. I am using the term “traditional” since Yip himself does in pointing to the work of the “New Critics,” which focused on earlier forms of scansion and thematic analysis, as opposed to the poetry and criticism gathered together under the heading of “New American Poetry.” Therefore, we might extend the similarities between New American Poetry and Daoist poetics beyond their metaphysical claims, to the fact of their mutual “otherness” to what Yip considers “traditional Western poetics” (for a general discussion of this lineage of American poetry see Gefin, Ideogram).
48. Yip, Chinese Poetry, 231.
49. Yip, “Syntax and Horizon of Representation in Classical Chinese and Modern American Poetry,” 62.
50. Ibid.
51. Ethnopoetics is less a school than a general term referring to the anthologizing work of Rothenberg, which focused on oral literatures like Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972), but which is most associated with the magazine Alcheringa, coedited with Dennis Ted-lock from 1970 to 1976. Tedlock’s many volumes of translations that attend to the aural (performative) condition of oral literature are central works in this movement.
52. The term “New American Poetry” is derived from Donald Allen’s prophetic anthology New American Poetry: 1945–60 (1960), which brought together poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, the Beats, and the New York school as a challenge to the mainstream verse culture at the time anthologized in the New Poets of England and America (1962), edited by Donald Hall and Robert Pack. This broad challenge to the reign of New Criticism is, in the broad sense in which I am using it, “New American Poetry.”
53. Yip, Modern Chinese Poetry, 77.
54. Ibid., xv.
55. Ibid., xvii.
56. See Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism.
57. Yip, Modern Chinese Poetry, xix.
58. See Marjorie Perloff’s The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage for a discussion of the point.
59. For a good discussion of these differences, see Graham, Poems of the Late T’ang, 13–15.
60. For scholarship that moves past the confines of Lao-Zhang thought, see the work of Seidel, Kaltenmark, Girardot, Robinet, Kohn, Strickmann, Saso, Verellen, and Bokenkamp, etc., as well as Zheng Liangshu, Ge Zhaoguang, and Zong Lonxi, etc.
62. Yip, Chinese Poetry, 130.
63. Yip chose not to render the later half of these lines as parallel, but they are in the original:
仰 聆 大 壑 瀑 …. big gully waterfall.
Yip does not hold the parallelism of the second half, but tries to make this up by placing extra emphasis on the first.
64. For Yip’s translation, see Chinese Poetry, 145. I have benefited from Kang-I Sun Chang’s analysis of the alternation between water and mountain scenery in his book Six Dynasties Poetry (see p. 53). Also, Cai Zong-qi’s edited volume How to Read Chinese Poetry is a great source for more information about this poem and its correlative cosmological formal innovations. The Chinese poem follows:
於南山往北山經湖中瞻眺
謝靈運
朝旦 發陽崖
景落息陰崖
舍舟眺迥渚
停策依茂松
側逕既﹖窈窕
環洲亦玲瓏
視喬木杪
仰聆大壑瀑
石橫水分流
林密蹊絕蹤
解作竟何感
升長皆豐容
初篁苞綠籜
新蒲含紫﹖
海鷗戲春岸
天雞弄和風
撫化心無厭
覽物眷彌重
不恨莫與同
孤遊非情歎
賞廢理誰通
(Yip, Chinese Poetry, 144–45)
65. Interestingly, in David Hinton’s recent book of translations of Xie Lingyun, he gives a wonderfully rich Daoist reading of Xie, but, like Yip, avoids mentioning anything about Xie’s parallelism and correlative innovations, choosing instead to focus on largely the same elements of emptiness as Yip does (see Hinton, The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yün).
66. Yip, “Aesthetic Consciousness of Landscape in Chinese and Anglo-American Poetry,” 130
67. For further discussion of these lines see Sun, Pearl from the Dragon’s Mouth, 45, 180.
68. “Neo-Daoism” is a term indicating the second flowering of Daoist thought by a small but influential group of thinkers, such as Guo Xiang and Wang Bi. The movement is associated with the debate activity of “pure talk” (qingtan) 清談, and is further linked to the so-called Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 章竹林七賢, often depicted in paintings about the period (see Laing, “Neo-Taoism and the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’ in Chinese Painting”). For a more comprehensive study of Neo-Daoism, see Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound.
69. Cai describes how lines 11 and 12 signal how cosmic operations (tiandao) “reified in meteorological phenomena may bring about regeneration in the sphere of terristrial process (didao)” (Cai, How to Read Chinese Poetry, 133).
70. See Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry, 65; and for further reading see Liu, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, 369.
71. Bradbury, “The American Conquest of Philosophical Taoism,” 30.
72. Ibid.
73. Yeh, “The Chinese Poem,” 251.
74. See Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. I discuss Kern’s “Saidian” framing of American Modernism in Chapter 1.
75. For a brief discussion of “the territory of the—emptied—non-self” see Cai, How to Read Chinese Poetry, 126.
76. See Yip, “Daoist Aesthetic,” 26; and Yip, “Language and the Real-Life World,” 75.
77. See Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry; and Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature.
78. Owen, Review of Chinese Poetry, by Wai-lim Yip.
79. Huntington, “Crossing Boundaries,” 215.
80. Zong-qi Cai, How to Read Chinese Poetry, 227.
81. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 44.
82. Cai, How to Read Chinese Poetry, 228.
83. This is my own translation (which does not differ significantly from many others).
84. Yip, “Language and the Real-Life World,” 71.
85. Ibid.
86. I say “endangers it” because in recent years Western literary criticism and philosophy has directly challenged truth-claims based upon vision and visual language. Michel Foucault’s work provides one of the most sustained analyses of visual knowledge claims, showing that vision has dominated such claims throughout the West’s history, and that the hegemony of vision has “real-life” implications for us all. His analysis, in The Birth of the Clinic, of the “cold medical gaze” of rationalistic science characterized by a scientist’s gaze directed toward a corpse on a table, as well as his discussion, in Discipline and Punish (195–230), of the totalitarian gaze of the “panoptican,” which represents the all-seeing gaze of social domination and control, have contributed to a general critical orientation of Western theory toward vision. This orientation can be seen in Edward Said’s Orientalism and in the work of Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other), both of whom critique ocularcentrism’s essentializing gaze that enables Orientalists and anthropologists alike to construct knowledge of the other. In her work Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray connects the West’s ocularcentrism to the power of the “male gaze” to construct and objectify gender across different power differentials. Given this general critical disposition toward vision as the basis of truth-claims, or the “real,” it is difficult to accept Yip’s heavily vision-oriented claims.
87. Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound, 66.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 68.
90. Those strange things involve the abandonment of philosophical language for the psycho-physiological register of Daoist “inner alchemy,” which describes the processes whereby adepts must manipulate various forms of energy within the body (semen and breath) up through the viscera to manifest the highest energy “shen,” which must itself be “stripped of its identity” if one is to return to the undifferentiated “Dao.” Vision, it would seem, is a useful means toward disrupting discursive thought, but the authority accorded by vision must itself be disrupted, and this further disruption has historically taken place as physical practices within the public (ritual) and private (meditation) spaces of what Schipper has dubbed “the Taoist Body.” While these practices often still employ poetic devices, they exist (often in the oral tradition) outside the confines of classical Chinese poetry and poetics as these are generally conceived.
91. Yip’s work can be found in journals associated with the meteoric rise of “guoxue” (国学, or “Nation Studies,” the study of classical Chinese thought) among the elite and growing middle class in China. Clearly, this movement is in large measure due to the fact that people are now able to study classical texts again, but it is also wrapped up in the search for a new political state ideology culled, at least in part, from classical Chinese language and culture. While Yip’s “Daoist Project” can be seen as a powerful challenge to certain aspects of Western hegemonic discourses (and were absolutely necessary in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, in its present form it is less able to offer a compelling “counter-discourse to the territorializations of power” in China itself (see 国学 at http://www.guoxue.com/magzine/zgsgyj/zgsgyj2/tiyao2.htm).
92. See Sharf, “Who’s Zen.” See also Victoria, Zen at War; and Victoria, Zen War Stories.
93. Yip, “Pound and the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang,” 25.
1. Cha describes “A BLE W AIL” as follows: “In this piece, I want to be the dream of the audience. An environment, a curtain made from cheese cloth was hung, separating the performer’s space and that of the viewer. The effect on the viewing of the performance is that of seeing through opaque-transparency. Inside the performer’s space are lighted candles also reflected by pieces of mirror placed behind them, creating an oval shape area. The performer is wearing a white robe and 20 meters of black and red cloth underneath. The movements performed are divided into spaces that contain movement and space that are still. The sound and time are also divided into sound. silence parts.” (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive #1992.4.32). In Dictée, Cha introduces the dress of Princess Pari as “a lightly woven smock which was also white [like the scarf], and the setting as ‘an opaque screen’ [where] from a distance the figure outlines the movement, its economy without extraneous motion” (167), and she later describes another setting where “through the paper screen door, dusk had entered and the shadow of small candle was flickering” (170).
2. Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 75.
3. Cha studied the Guangping Yang style of taiji under the direction of Zhang Yizhong and his senior student Fu Tung Chen in Berkeley during the mid- to late 1970s. Her teacher was the student of Kuo Lien Ying, the style’s fourth-generation lineage holder. What is particularly noteworthy about this style of taiji is its incorporation of bagua zhang (eight-trigram palm) and xingyi quan, other Chinese internal martial arts that emphasize an understanding of Daoist philosophy and cosmology.
4. Cha quotes fairly extensively from both Chang Chung-yuan and Ekbert Fas on Daoism (as well as making a few references to Buddhism) in her MFA thesis, “Paths” (May 1978, p. 3, document no. 1992.4.165, Cha Collection, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, available online at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf296n989f/.
5. For an excellent text locating Barthes’s interest in Daoism, see Barthes, The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France. See also Minh-Ha, “The Plural Void.” This latter essay, while discussing Barthes, not Cha, details elements within Barthes’s heterocultural imaginary that clearly appealed to Cha and offered a general theoretical orientation she both inhabits and exceeds by moving still further toward Daoist and shamanistic discourses in her work, a point heretofore not taken up by Cha scholars.
6. Hayot, Chinese Dreams, 170.
7. Ibid., 103–76.
8. Hayot describes Barthes’s utopian China as a “blankness” that “refuses the Western episteme,” a “blankness that does not reverse or negate, but defers” (ibid., 133). And while Hayot shows how Barthes tended to move away from his “utopian China” after returning from China along with other key figures in the Tel Quel circle, this idea of “blankness” is reconnected to China in the late 1970s through the Daoist concept of wuwei (see Barthes, The Neutral, 176–86; and Minh-Ha, “The Plural Void”).
9. It is impossible to know if Cha would have heard Barthes speak on his Daoist reading of “the Neutral,” but Barthes mentions having lectured on the subject in 1976 (see Barthes, The Neutral, 179).
10. The term “other logic” was used by figures of the Tel Quel circle like Philippe Sollers, who appears to primarily use the term to indicate the general field of discourses that center on “emptiness” (see Hayot, Chinese Dreams, 165).
11. A partial bibliography of recent Cha scholarship would include but not be limited to the following: Lowe, Immigrant Acts; Spahr, “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée”; Huang, Transpacific Imaginations; Park, “What of the Partition”; Twelbeck, “Elle venait de loin”; Shih, “Nationalism and Korean American Women’s Writing”; Guarino-Trier, “From the Multitude of Narratives … For Another Telling for Another Recitation”; Min, “Reading the Figure of Dictation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée”; Lee, “Suspicious Characters”; Frost, “In Another Tongue”; Grice, “Korean American National Identity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée”; and Bergvall, “Writing at the Crossroads of Languages.”
12. Minh-ha, “The Plural Void,” 33. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s desire to link Cha’s performance, at least implicitly, to Korean shamanism is corroborated by the number of critics who discuss, if only briefly, the inclusion in Dictée of the story of Princess Pari, the mythological founder of Korean shamanism. Yet these discussions have been limited to Cha’s feminist revision of the Princess Pali myth along the lines of Maxine-Hong Kingston’s revision of the mythic tale of Fa (Hua) Mulan. As important as it is to acknowledge the appearance of Princess Pari in the text, it is more important to interrogate the ways in which the vast network of interlocking images, language, concepts, themes, and untranslated religious documents work as a theoretical, philosophical, or even metaphysical matrix within the text. See, for example, Lee, “Princess Pari in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman”; and in a broader discussion, Lee, “Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea.” Walter K. Lew also mentions this in his Excerpts from, Diktē = Dikte (alternatively written as ΔIKTH/DIKTE for DICTEE), 14–19; and see also Shih, “Nationalism and Korean American Women’s Writing,” 157.
13. In Minh-ha’s wonderful lyric-essay “White Spring” (in which she describes A BLE W AIL), she time and again links Cha’s work to references to Zen whose moments, taken in isolation, might appear as “Zennist” rather than Daoist (and of course there is a great deal of syncretism anyhow). But I believe that a more complete meditation on these East Asian philosophical elements within her work (which includes, most notably, shamanic notes discordant with Zen but not with Daoism) would tend to favor a distinctly Daoist orientation.
14. Shamanism is not something esoteric and rare in Korea but infuses everyday life for Christians and Buddhists alike. Today there are an estimated three hundred shamanistic temples within an hour of Seoul. So it is very reasonable to assume at least a passing familiarity with this discourse, and it is easy to see why Cha would have been drawn to its unique combination of Daoism and matrilineal Korean spirituality (see Sang-hun, “Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South Korea”).
15. Kim, “Poised on the In-between,” 18.
16. Ibid., 17–18.
17. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17–18.
18. Cha, Dictée, 173.
19. Robinet, Taoism, 202.
20. Unlike Yip, whose “emptied self” is posited as a way to directly apprehend of the “life world” unmediated by what he calls “epistemological elaborations,” Cha appears to be less interested in this ontological world and more interested in voiding the “subject” in order to become neutral, totally neutral and thus free from ideological interpolation. This idea will be further explored later in the chapter.
21. Interestingly, Cha, while having derived her knowledge of Daoism from Chang’s descriptions, chooses to focus on elements in Chang’s work that he largely excludes from poetics. While Chang’s “poetics of emptiness” offers a near exact prefigu-ration of Yip’s, unlike Yip, Chang includes a chapter on neidan, in which he describes its evolution, defines the principal terms, and offers examples. Presumably, it is here that Cha becomes familiar with the tradition and its unique focus on the intersection of breath, body, and philosophical inquiry.
22. Chang, Creativity and Taoism, 166. The original diagram is discussed in Wang, “Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained (Taijitu shuo).”
23. See Robin Wang, “Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained.”
24. Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching, 42.
25. The mythical Emperor of the East, Fu Xi, who discovered the diagram on the back of a dragonlike horse, created the houtu, which is composed of fifty-five dots; symbolic unification of the yin and yang elements of the five phases: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, which is accomplished by assigning each a numerical value from 1 to 5 and combining two at a time to equal 5 in three different ways. This is called the “the unity of three 5’s” (see Saso, Blue Dragon, White Tiger, 56–57, 77).
26. From this “map,” one finds circular dots of numbers that were arranged in a three-by-three nine-grid pattern such that the sum of the numbers in each row, column, and diagonal was the same: 15.
27. Robinet, Taoism, 233–34.
28. Cha, Dictée, 175.
29. See “Étang” (1978), from the Cha Collection, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, available online at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf9k4006pf/?brand=oac4. “Étang” was originally distributed by Line, of Berkeley, California. It is also published in Lewallen, The Dream of the Audience, 76–77.
30. Cha, Dictée, 113.
31. Little, Taoism and the Arts of China, 23.
32. Cha, Dictée, 49.
33. Ibid., 96.
34. Ibid., 159. Whiteness, of course, is also a color signifying mourning and death, and is also associated with the dress of Korean shamanism—and it also suggests a heavy influence from Barthes, whose privileging of the “white,” “blank,” “void” draws upon his Daoist imaginary (a point I will return to in a moment).
35. Wang, “Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained (Taijitu shuo),” 312. See also Liu Zhongyu’s essay, available at the Taoist Culture and Information Centre website (http://eng.taoism.org.hk), which Robin Wang cites on this point.
36. Chang, Creativity and Taoism, 165.
37. Ibid., 150–51.
38. Kristofer Schipper’s describes this circular reversal, or what he terms a “counter cycle,” when “the circulation of energies (ch’i) in the organism is also reversed. The generative succession of the Five Phase—Water produces Wood which produces Fire, et cetera—is now carried out in the opposite direction. The cycle of creation moves in reverse as well” (Schipper, The Taoist Body, 156).
39. For an example of this pairing, see Wong, Cultivating Stillness.
40. Cha, Dictée, 73.
41. Ibid., 128. For an example of the didactic rhetoric of classical Daoist guided meditation, see Kristofer Schipper’s description of “embryonic breathing” exercises, in The Taoist Body, 157.
42. While books like Chang’s may be the source for this particular kind of juxta-position, this particular combination of physiological and philosophical language is a regular part of learning qigong and taijichuan, which again Cha practiced daily during the decade that led up to this work. It would be safe to assume that the guided meditative practices that would be a part of this practice would have granted Cha access to this distinctly Daoist alchemical convergence of the graphic and discursive, the corporeal/metaphysical, that we see arising at different moments throughout Cha’s work.
43. Barthes, S/Z, 5. In the late 1970’s and 80’s, Barthes’s insistence on writerly textual production has been taken up by the poet-critics of the so-called LANGUAGE school, and Barthes’s critique of “readerly” texts can be seen, only slightly reformulated, in Charles Bernstein’s notion of “frame lock,” which he defines as “an insistence on a univocal surface, minimal shifts of mood either within paragraphs or between paragraphs, exclusion of extraneous or contradictory material, and tone restricted to the narrow affective envelope of sobriety, neutrality, objectivity authoritativeness, or deanimated abstraction” (Bernstein, “Frame Lock,” 92).
44. Cha, Preface to Apparatus, i.
45. See Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure.”
46. For Barthes, “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (Barthes, S/Z, 4).
47. Cha, “Paths,” MFA thesis, May 1978, p. 2, document no. 1992.4.165, Cha Collection, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, available online at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf296n989f/.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 1.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. Barthes, The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 176.
52. Ibid., 182.
53. Minh-Ha, “The Plural Void,” 45. In many ways, this essay on Barthes articulates the Parisian avant-garde pacific imaginary that preconditions much of Cha’s poststructuralist Daoism, even though Cha’s poetics takes it further both in terms of Daoist alchemy and in its folk-shamanic traditions.
54. Ibid.
55. Cha “Paths,” 5; Barthes, S/Z, 5.
56. Cha, “Exilée,” 141.
57. I am indebted to Lawrence Rinder’s essay “The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages” (15–16) for this point, and for locating this piece as well.
58. In Cha’s piece “Awakened in the Mist,” she works with this transformation of light into dark into light as the lights in the room of the performance come in and dissolve out as she recites “Everything is light, everything is dark … everything feels light, everything feels dark.”
59. Cha, “Exilée,” 143.
60. Rinder, “The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages,” 16.
61. Cha, Dictée, 157.
62. Ibid., 20.
63. Park “What of the Partition,” 217.
64. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 4.
65. Ibid., 10.
66. Chang, Creativity and Taoism, 166.
67. See Harvey, Six Korean Women, 238. I found this source through Lee, “Princess Pari in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman.”
68. Cha, Dictée, 17.
69. Ibid., 13.
70. Ibid., 64.
71. See Jacob, Six Thousand Years of Bread, 162.
72. See Stutley, Shamanism, An Introduction, 31. Dionysis is also a figure that interests Barthes, especially within the context of negative theology (see Barthes, The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 59).
73. Saso, Blue Dragon, White Tiger, 19. Saso, a Jesuit monk, uses Catholic theological terminology to establish a contrast between what he terms the “kataphatic (mind-heart filling) religion of the masses” and “the apophatic (emptying) spirituality of the Taoist recluse” (ibid., 21).
74. The term “kenosis” denotes the belief that the Son of God “emptied himself” of his divine powers in order to become fully human as the Jesus of Nazareth. Theologians who support this doctrine appeal to a reading of Philippians 2:5–8: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Kenotic Christology, which was originally championed in Lutheran debates of the sixteenth century, and later revived in the nineteenth century to reinterpret classical doctrines of incarnation, gave its adherents a powerful example of God’s self-sacrificing nature. It is this idea of God’s own “self-emptying” that is taken up in Eastern Orthodoxy, which locates God’s kenosis in its Christian cosmogony whereby the cosmos is manifested by way of God self-emptying. For Orthodox Catholics, Roman Catholics, and Protestants, however, “kenosis” offers a powerful ethic which requires Christians to “empty themselves” by way of sacrifice. Yet “kenosis” has also had a controversial history in Christology, because Paul’s pronouncement that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity to become “fully human” raised troubling questions regarding the nature of Jesus’s incarnation. Principal among these, controversies surround the term “tertium quid,” which refers to the belief of the followers of Apollinarism, or Apollinarianism, proposed by Apollinaris of Laodicea (ca. 310–ca. 390), who argued that Christ was neither human nor divine, but a combination of both, a third thing: Jesus’s mind was divine, while his body was thoroughly human. This notion of Jesus as a “third thing” conflicted with established views of the Holy Trinity: in the Western Church, the Holy Spirit arrives “in procession” (processio) from the Father and the Son; in the Eastern Church, the Holy Spirit arrives from the Father through the Son.
75. Nancy fully develops this idea of “the distinct” in The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–14.
76. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 1.
77. Exceptions would include vocalizations associated with Tourette’s, for instance.
78. Kristeva, Language, 8.
79. Cha, Dictée, 18.
80. However, it is interesting to think about Tourette’s syndrome, as cursing, for example, remains in almost all cases of aphasia as a subcortical activity, which suggests an origin from outside the realm of the linguistic constitution of the subject (see Schleifer, “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome”).
81. Spahr, “Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” 7.
82. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 147.
83. Roland Barthes, Alors la Chine? (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1975), 13–14, cited in Minh-Ha, “The Plural Void,” 45.
84. The term “trans(l)ative” appeared in the title of a course I took with Myung Mi Kim at SUNY Buffalo in 2003. Under Myung’s guidance, we teased out some of the possibilities of this term, paying close attention to the “transitive” nature of the “translative” process.
85. Cha, “Paths,” MFA thesis, May 1978, p. 3, document no. 1992.4.165, Cha Collection, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, available online at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf296n989f/.
86. Robinet.
87. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 119.
88. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 36.
1. From an April 2005 interview, Marden writes: “I was working with calligraphy, and looking at a lot of Chinese calligraphy. Getting poems by chance, I found the Red Pine translation at a bookstore. It has the Chinese characters and the translations in it. It was that form that I picked up on—four couplets, and five or ten characters per couplet. In the beginning I did drawings using the form that the poems take in the Chinese, then I started joining image and calligraphy, using the shape of the poem as a skeleton. I’m becoming more and more interested in the ideas of the Tao and of Zen. The Cold Mountain poems are very much about that” (see http://pquintas.typepad.com/ciprina/interviews). Also, it is interesting to note that Marden first encountered Han Shan in the 1960s through Snyder’s translations (see Richardson, Brice Marden, 51; also, Liu Chiao-Mei, “The Wall,” 212).
2. See Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism. Wright reenters Blofeld’s transpacific imaginary through a self-reflexive reading practice, in which he (1) relates a personal account of having come to his study of Buddhism through the textual bridges built by Blofeld; (2) explains how his early study of Zen Buddhism sought a transcendence of language and thought; and (3) describes his own awakening in the transcendental mode of Blofeld’s descriptions. But Wright’s decidedly post-structuralist re-reading of Blofeld’s scholarship reveals a different vision of language’s role in “enlightenment” today. Unlike Yip’s view of language as the primary obfuscator of the real, or Snyder and Blofeld’s instrumentalist view of language, Wright offers a view of language best described as “conditional.” For Wright, there is no outside of language, because language “conditions” even its own transgression (as with Snyder’s phrase “without any prism of language”). Wright’s re-reading of Blofeld is a work of significant theoretical and practical value (it stays close to the textual conditions of Blofeld’s invention of “Huang Po” and offers rich historical details to both complicate and liberate “Huang Po” from his own invention). Nevertheless, the certainty with which Wright proceeds to apply poststructuralist interpretations of Zen textual practices, determining their potential epistemological dimensions, leaves me a little uneasy. While liberating Huang Po from Blofeld’s Romantic Orientalism, he has, perhaps, too tightly contained Blofeld’s transpacific imaginary under too narrow a sign. Implicit in Western literary criticism’s deployment of deconstructive readings is a search for truth—a more correct reading. And while often such re-readings are “better,” in the sense that they are more textured, open, and capable of further meaning productions, this is not always the case. Wright’s analysis is a bit too theoretically “clean,” containing too few loose ends to be chucked back into translation’s alchemical furnace.
3. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 13.
4. Ibid., 6.
5. Wilson, Inside Out, 1.
6. King, Orientalism and Religion, 199.
7. Ibid.
8. See Annping Chin’s “The Newest Mandarins,” New York Times, December 16, 2007.
9. Hayot, 150.
10. Liu, Translingual Practice, 4. See also Borges, Twenty-four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems, 51.
11. Liu, Translingual Practice, 7–8.