Mr. Gu was nearly a decade older than Shi-Rong. It was hard to be sure of his original height, since he was almost bent double now. His little face was wizened, but his eyes remained very bright, and he still kept up a busy correspondence with scholars all over the kingdom.
He lived in a modest farmhouse with a small garden, where he liked to tend the plants. Sometimes Shi-Rong worried because the house was in disrepair, and he’d offered to build a new house for the old scholar on his own property. “I shouldn’t bother you with visits,” he assured him. “At least, no more than I do now.”
But Mr. Gu shook his head. “These are the lands that the Zhou kings gave to my family,” he reminded Shi-Rong. “That was over two thousand years ago. Where else should I live?” His bright eyes twinkled with amusement.
“Tell me if you change your mind,” Shi-Rong replied. But it was obvious his friend had no intention of moving.
Shi-Rong would go over to Mr. Gu’s house about twice a month, and they would discuss all manner of things. The old scholar would lend him books, and they would read together. It was like becoming a student again, Shi-Rong used to think—only without the exams.
These visits were never complete without their taking a walk to the river. It was over a mile down a long, steep path, but the old man was remarkably spry. “I can go up the hill easily by myself,” he’d explain, “as long as I have a good stick to lean on. But getting down is harder. I need your arm for that.” Shi-Rong was happy to oblige, though he’d warned Mr. Gu that he might not be able to manage this himself for much longer.
But the thing he loved best of all in these visits was when they practiced calligraphy.
Shi-Rong had always been rather proud of his writing. As a mandarin, he had been known for his elegant letters and memorials. Shi-Rong’s brushstrokes were always well balanced, firm, and flowing. So the first time that the older man had suggested they might each take the same poem and write it out, he’d gladly complied. It was an ancient poem about a scholar in the mountains, and Shi-Rong’s version expertly reproduced the style of calligraphy from the period when the poem had been written. When he handed it, not without some pride, to the scholar, Mr. Gu nodded thoughtfully.
“This would impress the national examiners very much,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“One can see at once that you are a bureaucrat.”
“Ah.” Shi-Rong frowned. Was that a compliment?
Without a word the older man passed across his own copy. It was not just different. It came from another world. Each character had a mysterious life of its own—merging with, commenting upon, sometimes opposing the next—until the last but one, which, having a long tail, seemed almost to dissolve into the mountain mist until the final character acted as a kind of seal to hold the whole together.
“In calligraphy and painting, which are almost the same thing, both the yin and the yang must be present,” said Mr. Gu. “You know this. But you do not practice it. You think too much. You impose. This is the yang. You must let go, not try to form your thought. Forget yourself. Allow the negative, the yin, to enter. Contemplate in silence and then, with much practice, without your seeking any form at all, your hand will unconsciously become the thought.”
As the old man said, Shi-Rong knew all this in theory; but he was surprised, after so many years as an administrator, to find how hard it was to do it in practice.
Almost every day after that, he would spend an hour or two working on his calligraphy. Sometimes he would write only a single character and ponder its meaning. Quite often, he would copy a poem. Occasionally he would compose a short poem of his own and then try to write it, perhaps many times, closing his eyes as he wrote the characters so that he would not correct them at all. And sometimes, when he did this, the results had a beauty quite beyond what he would have thought of himself. And when he shared these efforts with the older man, Mr. Gu would say: “Better. You have far to go, but you are on the path.”
One winter afternoon, after he’d been applying himself in this way for some three years, Shi-Rong made a confession to his mentor. “I have noticed something recently. But I am not sure what it means.”
“Tell me.”
“I hardly know how to describe it,” said Shi-Rong. “A feeling of separation. Things that were always important to me—my rank, my family honor, even my ancestors—no longer seem to be so. It is a terrible thing, surely, not to care about one’s ancestors.”
“As we grow older, we become more aware of the larger flow of life,” said Mr. Gu. “This is part of what the Taoists practice. Our individual lives become less large in our minds.”
“Even the rules of Confucius, by which I have tried to live, no longer seem so important.”
“In my opinion,” said Mr. Gu, “Confucius is important for the young. He gives them moral rules by which to live, without which society falls apart. Young people need to believe. If they don’t believe in Confucius, they’ll only believe in something worse.”
“You don’t think the young should seek enlightenment?”
“A little, but not too much,” the scholar replied cheerfully. “If they become too enlightened, they won’t do any work.” He smiled. “Enlightenment is for old men like us.”
In the months that followed, as Shi-Rong’s calligraphy continued to improve, his sense of detachment also seemed to grow, and generally this was accompanied by a sense of peace. But he still
