MISTY RAIN

Indistinct Shadows of the True Man With No Title

This is the first installment of MISTY RAIN, a book that is largely just a concept and not yet a reality. The journey should be of some interest, at least for me. You are welcome to come along.

THE MASKS WE WEAR

Mount Lu’s misty rain and the tides in Zhejiang,

Before getting there, my countless regrets wouldn’t relent.

I went, I came back, it was nothing special,

Mount Lu’s misty rain and the tides in Zhejiang.

The Chinese of old were apt to change their names on a whim. Circumstance or location usually provided the motive. Most Chan monks took the name of the mountain on which they settled. Su Tong Po (1037 - 1101), who wrote Misty Rain On Mt Lu, was known as Su Shi to family and friends. This 11th century Chinese poet was a man of many talents which included calligraphy, gastronomy, pharmacology, and political rabble rousing. An important figure in the government of the Song dynasty, he was outspoken about the social ills of his day, and suffered banishment for his pains. His many written works utilized both prose and poetry, often combined, which he fashioned into erudite commentary on social ills,  authoritative pieces on his travels throughout China, and a knowledgeable monograph on the early days of the iron industry in Asia. His name lives on today for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that a popular dish found in Hangzhou cuisine is called Dongpo pork.

Of Su Tung Po’s 2700 poems, many consider Pu Suan Tzu to be his most evocative:

A fragment moon hangs from the bare tung tree

The water clock runs out, all is still

Who sees the dim figure come and go alone

Misty, indistinct, the shadow of a lone wild goose?

Startled, she gets up, looks back

With longing no one sees

And will not settle on any of the cold branches

Along the chill and lonely beach

Misty, indistinct, the shadow of a lone wild goose … There we are. All of us. Shadows. Alone and indistinct. Leave it to a poet to capture the human condition in a few lines of verse.

This essay and those that follow may run for 50,000 words; this is obviously an literary exercise in hubris. Using both fact and fiction, the essays will tell of my journey to China, my visits with my old friends here and there, and on any conclusions that I may draw. I have never been to China. My old friends have been dead for 1500 years. I do not speak, read, or write Chinese.

No matter. I go to seek the True Man with no title.

Like I said, hubris. And presumption.

The first necessity is to clear some of the underbrush. A path will emerge:

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence, coupled with the greatest possible freedom of self-determination. 

So wrote C.G. Jung (1875-1961) in THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY, 1932. Through his work and research, Jung developed the field of psychodynamics and helped to reshape the direction of social history.

Carl Gustave, one might say, was not quite on the mark.

‘Persona,’ taken directly from the Latin persona meaning ‘person,’ is a term that Jung used in 1917 to designate the ‘outward or social personality.’ American poet Ezra Pound, it seems, got there first in using the term to denote a ‘literary character representing the voice of the author.’ A persona is the mask we don to face the varied circumstances of our daily life. We are not the same person sitting in a church pew reciting hymns as we are when out with the boys crushing beer cans on our foreheads. Most humans are incapable of being who they are for the simple reason that they have no idea who they are.

Hence, personas. We are who we pretend to be.

Once upon a time a millennium or so ago, Chan master Lin Chi was expounding in the Dharma Hall on his metaphoric True Man with no title. A monk, quite confused, went up to him later and asked, What is this fellow, this true man of no title? Lin Chi grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and yelled, Speak! Speak! The monk, dumbfounded, could not manage a peep. Lin Chi let him go and said, What worthless stuff is this true man of no title.

That is all well and good; a parable perhaps. But just what (who?) is one to make of this fellow, this true man? Drop your mask, Cup Cake, and have a good look in the mirror. There, before you, if you will but see, is the true man (or woman, as the case may be) naked and exposed, warts and all.

And what of Jung and his persona that is ‘...the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being, and the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence, coupled with the greatest possible freedom of self-determination’? How does this lofty personage square with the true man of no title? And if free will is an illusion, what then? Self-determination, in Jungian terms, goes out the window.

Through the tumult of words thrust upon us by family, by education, by church and state, by Jung, by golly, reality becomes abstraction; and so we are tricked into the belief that our minds are inside our heads telling us who we are and what we should be doing. We become trapped in contradiction creating one artificial persona after another in a vain attempt to find ourselves. But the reality of who we are is forgotten: misty, indistinct, nought but shadow.

Here then is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game. The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents [as Jung would have it-gvs], but they are not to know that they are just playing as if. It is explicit in the rules that the individual is self-determining, but implicit that he is only so by virtue of the rules.

Alan Watts

(from Games Zen Masters Play, 1976. p9)

Many are convinced that they are individuals who are the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence, and who possess the greatest possible freedom of self-determination. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Many wallow in ignorance. Some few seek alternatives. 

My trip to China? If alternatives there be, who better to consult than the true men or women themselves. And if true men exist, what better place to seek them out than the mountain retreats of ancient Zhōngguó (中國).

Wanderings of a lifetime – what do they resemble?

A winging swan that touches down on snow-soaked mud.

In the mud by chance he leaves the print of his webs,

but the swan flies away, who knows to east or west?

NOTES:

Misty Rain on Mt Lu. Translation: Steve Lipscombe, https://stevelipscom.be/

Pu Suan Tzu. Translation from: allpoetry.com/Pu-suan-tzu

Wanderings (title: Remebrance): Translation by Burton Watson, SELECTED POEMS OF SU TONG-PO. Copper Canyon Press, 1965