The idea of the sage may be known from this, that he simply endeavored to eliminate multitudinous characters. Later literary men, on the other hand, desire to increase their number.
This is from Wang Yangming (1472-1529), whose lettrist career managed to start a mid-sized character breeding operation of his own. This kind of word-farming was called "commentary" in China, and I'll never figure out how they managed to fit it all on the DVD.
I suppose by the Ming Dynasty the scholars had no hope for sagely writing. The wise man of the day just couldn't afford to be the vague, fortune-cookie hucking Santa Clause of yesteryear. The Taoists and the Buddhists spoiled the whole thing with their extended and oh so diverting "explanations" of concepts and ideas.
(And if you think "concepts and ideas" is a redundant phrase, let me just remind the more ignorant of you that one can get two characters for the price of one in Chinese. It's the only language where "one" can get "two" without a math tutor. In Sanskrit, "one" never really added up but I hear "zero" is doing quite well)
Good Confucian fellows like Zhu Xi couldn't just stand idly by murmuring "rhubarb" and blowing raspberries; they had tried that move in the earlier Tang Dynasty, when Taoist magic tricks had reached the court and Zennist mental acrobatics were infamously out selling Cirque-du-Soleil a millenium before it existed. In response, Confucians tried the conservative and sober minded "Old Text" tactic. It was as exciting as it sounds. If you can imagine the collective and bearded literati of an entire Empire simultaneously shouting "bah humbug!" you might have an idea of its philosophical significance. This bread-and-water-and-then-more-water tactic not only gutted Confucian learning of its entertaining new age Yin-Yang aspects, but stole Confucius himself from the Olympic heights of divinity (to which he had been recently, and rather unceremoniously, flung) and left him disorientedly grovelling in his hovel back where he started.
"It's bound to work," they said, " the people love an underdog!". After running him through a gruelling training montage, with song and lyrics by Jackie Chan, Confucius became everything Rocky V wanted to be.
That is to say, he flopped. But that tune changed with the Song Dynasty. A pair of pedantic siblings appeared called the Brothers Cheng. In this picture they will be portrayed as Siamese cats who finish each other's sentences. Well, to keep a long Cheng short, these two started the tactic of stealing Buddhist and Taoist "concepts and ideas" (easy now), and stripping them of sexy terms like "emptiness" (which is called wu in Chinese because the people love an empty park, but mu in Japanese because it's considered polite to empty your cow on a Buddhist). They gave them instead a nice and orderly "well hold on now" Confucian gloss. Fully formed, as it were, from their furry heads came Zhu Xi, who took their ideas as it were to the principle's office, which were called li in China. And of course this took a lot of diatribing.
So we come to Wang Yangming's complaint. Is there anything in it? Well, yes, in fact, lots of writing is in it. He's hearkening back to the days when poets didn't have names, books didn't have non-mythical authors, and to be a philosopher one merely needed to sit up straighter than the next guy at court and then set up shop in a grass hut. Wang makes a point; we live in age when the characters are multiplying faster than we can even count them. I wonder if writing can ever return to a state of non-writing, where books like Homer and the Shi Ching can just sort of appear from the people. We all know that these books (henceforth to be referred to as "classics") are just as good, if not better, than the books we ourselves make and stamp and send to Singapore to be pirated.
As the great and loveable curmudgeon Master Kung said,
Even I reach back to a time when historians left blanks (for what they didn't know), and when a man would lend a horse for another to ride...
Sounds good to me. The only problem is that once you've started to write it just keeps going. But I will look out for an off-ramp if it ever shows up. Writing in order to shut the hell up!
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