Gems of Chinese Literature/Su Tung-P‘o-The Baseless Tower

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The Arbour to Joyful Rain
Gems of Chinese Literature (1922)
translated by Herbert Allen Giles
The Baseless Tower by Su Tung-P‘o
The Tower of Contentment
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SU TUNG-P‘O.

a.d. 1036-1101

[An almost universal genius, like Ou-yang Hsiu, this writer is even a greater favourite with the Chinese literary public. Under his hands, the language of which China is so proud may be said to have reached perfection of finish, of art concealed. In subtlety of reasoning, in the lucid expression of abstractions, such as in English too often elude the faculty of the tongue, Su Tung-P‘o is an unrivalled master. On behalf of his honoured manes I desire to note my protest against the words of Mr. Baber, recently spoken at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and stating that “the Chinese language is incompetent to express the subtleties of theological reasoning, just as it is inadequate to represent the nomenclature of European science.” I am not aware that the nomenclature of European science can be adequately represented even in the English language; at any rate, there can be no comparison between the expression of terms and of ideas, and I take it the doctrine of the Trinity itself is not more difficult of comprehension than the theory of “self abstraction beyond the limits of an external world,” so closely reasoned out by Chuang Tzŭ. If Mr. Baber merely means that the gentlemen entrusted with the task have proved themselves so far quite incompetent to express in Chinese the subtleties of theological reasoning, then I am with him to the death.

There is one more point in regard to which I should be glad to cleanse the stuffed bosoms of some from a certain perilous stuff―the belief that Chinese sentences are frequently open to two and even more interpretations. No theory could well be more mischievous than this. It tends to make a student readily satisfied with anything he can get out of an obscure paragraph rather than push on laboriously through the dark passages of thought until the real sense begins to glimmer ahead, and finally to shine brightly upon him. I wish to place it on record, as my opinion, after the arduous task of translation now lying completed before me, that the written language of China is hardly more ambiguous than English; and that an ordinary Chinese sentence, written without malice aforethought, can have but one meaning, though it may often appear at the first blush to have several. There are exceptions, of course; but the rule remains unchanged. I have frequently been trapped myself, and may be again; trapped into satisfaction with a given rendering which I subsequently discovered to be wrong, and which I could then feel to be grammatically wrong though I had previously accepted it as right. The fault in such cases, I venture to suggest, should be sought for outside the text. (I leave this to stand as it stood in 1884, merely suggesting that it is the extreme difficulty of the book-language which is mistaken for ambiguity.)

To revert to the subject of this note, Su Tung-P‘o shared the fate of most Chinese statesmen of the T'ang and Sung dynasties. He was banished to a distant post. In 1235 he was honoured with a niche in the Confucian temple, but his tablet was removed in 1845. After six hundred years he might well have been left there in peace.]

Su Tung-P‘o1524135Gems of Chinese Literature — The Baseless Tower1922Herbert Allen Giles
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He who lives near hills, in his uprising and in his down-sitting, in his eating and in his drinking, should be in daily communion with the hills.

Of all ranges none is so lofty as Chung-nan. Of all towns situated near hills, none is so close to them as Fu-fêng. Hence it would follow that mountain-peaks were included in the surrounding scenery. Nevertheless, from the Governor's residence there was not a hill to be seen. Although this entailed no consequences either of evil or of good, still it was not in accordance with the eternal fitness of things. And so the Baseless Tower was built.

Before the erection of this Tower, the Governor would frequently stroll about, staff in hand, at the foot of the hills, whence he every now and again caught glimpses of their outlines through the dense groves of trees, much as one sees the top-knots of people who are passing on the other side of a wall. The result was that he ordered workmen to dig a square pond in front of his house, and with the clay taken therefrom to build a tower somewhat higher than the eaves. When this was done, those who mounted to the top lost all sense of the tower’s elevation, while the surrounding hills seemed to have started up into view. The Governor therefore named it the Baseless Tower; and bade me commit its record to writing.

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To this I replied, “The sequence of fulness and decay lies beyond the limits of our ken. Years ago, when this site was exposed to the hoar-frost and dew of heaven, the home of the adder and of the fox, who could then have forecast the Tower of to-day? And when, obedient to the eternal law, it shall once again by lapse of time become a wilderness and a desert as before,―this is what no man can declare.”

“Where now,” said I to the Governor, as we mounted the Tower together and gazed over the landscape around us, “where now are the palaces of old, beautiful, spacious buildings, a hundred times more solid than this? They are gone; and not a broken tile, not a crumbling wall remains, to mark the spot. They have passed into the growing grain, into the thorny brake. They have melted into the loamy glebe. Shall not then this Tower in like manner pass away? And if towers cannot last for ever, how much less shall we rely for immortality upon the ever fickle breath of praise? Alas for those who trust by these means to live in the record of their age! For whether the record of their age will endure or perish depends upon something beyond the preservation and decay of towers.”[1]

I then retired and committed the above to writing.

  1. ↑ A sneer at the Governor for trying to commemorate his prosperous term of office by the erection of a perishable tower.
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