Kalidasa vs Chairman Xi

The difference between Chinese and Indian literary culture is that, though both burgeoned as but Yogavasishta virtual realities or 'Millet dreams',  the former's Taipingjing has always been concrete and political whereas the latter's Ram Rajya was the locus classicus of delusive Maya or random metempsychosis.  

Yet both, in their more typical expressions, share a quality of harmonious resonance or 'dhvani' or 'Xing', by reason of unrelenting egotistic tedium though, elsewhere, univocity obtains in quite different realms. For India this is nothing less than 'sushupti'- cosmic awareness as so deeply bored as to be dreamless sleep-  whereas, for the Chinese, thanks to cheap paper from the Second Century onward, literature itself is a music of such affectless torpor as might play a pre-eminent role in enlightening and uniting the Han people. 

Why stop there? Ji Zha heard the strings and knew the winds of all countries. Thus a revolutionary, like Mao- commodious incarnation of both Yellow Turban Zhang & cunning's incarnadine Cao Cao- wrote in the Classical style to but show why and to what end Po Ya broke his lute strings. 

Thus Mao's impact on China is equal to that of the first Emperor who burned  books, buried scholars, and built a wall to such good effect that all we have today are books and walls and entombed scholarship.

My own, socioproctological, view of Chinese history stresses the role of Lu Zhi (died 192 AD) a tall man with a sonorous voice who fathered a son on a comely female ghost. I think my poem on this is now 40 years old. It is horrible to think of my posterity as hungry ghosts wandering the by but bot visited posts of my dreary blog. Perhaps they too will father sons on apparitions more insubstantial yet and they will participate in their own proletarian revolution. My point is that any literature can become Sinitic if a mandarin class gains power thereby. 

Interestingly, Chairman Xi appears to have been influenced by Wang Kuo Wei- a Manchu loyalist with a three stage, sturm und drang, Romantic theory of paideia- and thus, from the Indian perspective, he must loathe 'revolutions in ink' of the Tagore/Liang Qichao type, in which bloodless abstraction divorces 'national literature' from any particular nationalist trajectory. From the point of view of 'imagined communities' held together by Scription's Capitalist exploitation of what is merely Oral, it is better, like Lord Rama, in the Uttara kanda, to drown in an actual river- not one of ink or blood. At any rate, like Qu Yuan, that is the path Wang Kuo Wei took. Who knows what 'Ram Rajya' would actually look like? Tagore objected to how it was envisioned by the Mahatma. His reason is easily understandable. If the Brits left, his people would be chased out of East Bengal where his family had large estates. Beyond that we can say nothing. Gandhi may have had a vision. The Taleban may have a vision. Pol Pot may have had a vision. But no literature encompasses them or provides a fitness landscape upon which they might compete and evolve.

It is easy to say that Chairman Xi's 'Peach Blossom' Utopia would be an Empire of Tedium. But that is the whole point of that Taoist tale!

What I'm trying to say is that no Indian could find any 'literary culture' of a politically univocal type in the writing of any sub-continental politician- including Maulana Azad. I know some have tried. But they have failed. This was as true in the age of the Maurya as it is in that of Modi. Religion, not Literary Culture ('adab') qualifies Nationality. Otherwise Tibet would have acceded to India before China could get its mitts on it and while Whitey still had a say in the matter.

Why did Chinese literary culture tend to unite the Chinese and create a 'Han' identity which does not correspond to genetic or linguistic 'facts on the ground'? The answer is obvious. They had a centralized Empire with a Mandarin Class. India had lots of little Kingdoms tenuously connected to a notional Emperor. Peripatetic monks and migratory lineages of Priests united the country on the basis of a synthetic philology and a syncretic soteriology. Indian 'Yoga' required the seeking of the like-minded across all borders. Chinese 'Tao' was totalizing but individualistic. Identity was not dissolved; it persisted beyond duality. 

 Thus Chinese 'mousike' is a lonely Symposium- drinking wine alone and no longer caring one has no friends- but, as with Juan Chi, the underlying 'Pure Conversation', or Quingtan, suggests that all relationships- marital or otherwise- contribute to 'spontaneous order' which is fugitive and first order melodic but second or third order harmonic in a manner destructive of Mind.

This is 'Devdas' type alcoholism serving a useful purpose- e.g preventing a marriage between 'Sarvodya' and 'Socialism' such that a Samyukta Socialist Party could throw up a Raj Narain type nutcase. 

Let me now turn- as a good little 'Hindutva' gobshite who hates and ridicules every other similar low IQ cretin- to a proper socioproctological analysis of the underlying issue.

I take the following obvious borrowing by the Chinese of an Indian literary trope as canonical. 

Pao Zhuan Yin Yu

抛砖引玉

The literal translation of this Chinese idiom or ‘chengyu’ is 'to bring jade by laying bricks' 

There was a respected and highly talented poet of great fame during the Tang dynasty known as Zhao Gu. Zhao Gu's poems were so finely crafted that other well known poets of the era were avid fans of the noble laureate. During his time, there was a man named Chang Jian living in Wu. He was a good poet and fond of writing poetry though he had none of Zhao’s fame. Chang Jian was an ardent admirer of Zhao Gu's works, and for this reason his greatest desire was that of meeting Zhao face to face and having an opportunity to speak with him. At length he pondered how to get Zhao’s much coveted attention

News reached Chang Jian that Zhao Gu would arrive in his home. Chang Jian had a flash of inspiration: he knew that Zhao Gu would almost certainly take a trip to Ling Yan Temple whilst he was in the area, this was the most popular place for touring people. Chang Jian went to the temple. He knew that there was a wall in the temple on which the comments of guests were written so he found it and inscribed it with two lines of a poem.

Discovering the two lines of poetry daubed on the wall of the temple, the Laureate Zhao Gu could not resist writing a  completing couplet. As a rule ancient Chinese poems are always comprised of four lines, minimum. Thus, Chang Jian had his dream realized. He was able to create a poem in cooperation with his idol. "My poem is a brick, and Zhao Gu's poem is jade, I laid a brick, and attracted jade" were his words when he was asked to explain his actions.

Indians will immediately recognise this story as being derived from that of Kalidasa and King Bhoja.

King Bhoja Vikramaditya had just completed writing the Champu Ramayana. Wishing to have it corrected, prior to publication, by his Court poet, Kalidasa- who was hiding from his munificent patron in the boudoir of some slut- he composed the following line- 'What flower can yet flower upon a blossom fair?'- and promised half of his Kingdom to whoever could best complete the couplet.
The prostitute, in whose garret Kalidasa was evading his Royal pain-in-the-ass patron, having somehow divined the identity of the old lecher she was harbouring, wrote the couplet on her wall and the poet, thinking it her own composition, completed the verse with 'Her cauliflower ears 'neath the weeds of her hair'- except he didn't actually write that but something stupid like 'girl, the lotus of your eyes in the lotus of your face'
The ho-bag promptly dropped Kalidas down an elevator shaft and like pushed a grand piano down on him or something and, not even stopping to check he was dead, rushed off to the King to claim her half of the Kingdom.
The King asked her (I'm not making this up) if she'd personally verified the death of her patron. The slattern admitted she'd been in too much of a hurry to bother with personally staving in the poet's skull or battering out his brains.

 

The King hastened to Kalidasa's side, but it was too late, the Archpoet was on the point of death. Kalidasa tells his Royal patron that he had now realised the impermanence and vanity of human life and would like to spend his last moments in Religious meditation. The King promptly reads out his Champu Ramayana. However, since Kalidasa did not survive long enough to hear and comment on its concluding 'Yuddha' and 'Uttara Kanda' chapters, the great King tore them out of his masterwork.

 

The moral of this story is that if you find a great poet half dead down an elevator shaft, don't miss the opportunity to read out your poetry to him. His tortured screams will be 'like nectar poured into your ears'

Should literary culture serve a national aim- as Chairman Xi believes? Must the poetaster 'offer bricks to procure jade'? Or should we aim to be like Kalidasa?- cured of our cacoethes scribendi by the callousness of the cognoscenti whose Girardian mimetic drive is what erases personality from a truly National literature