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In ancient China, the study of names and principles infiltrated all philosophy. Naming is the fulcrum, the point of departure, the focal point and result of all theoretical debate.
In Maqiao, female u
*House of Immortals (and Lazybones)
: In Maqiao Upper Bow there was a stretch of cobbled road, along both sides of which stood a few cottages. The buildings on one side of the road were fronted by a perfectly ordinary wall of wooden planks, leaning this way arid that. They were, however, still crowned by a high, square terrace built out of bricks. Once you looked carefully, you realized that these platforms were trading counters from many years before, that these old houses retained the faint appearance of storefronts. Such trading counters represented the fossils of commerce. The A
Another mysterious relic from the past was a big iron pot, now full of holes, long cracks, and splits; abandoned in the woods behind the state granary and minded by no one, the bottom of the pot had filled with rotten leaves and rainwater. The pot amazed people by its size, which was big enough to steam two baskets of rice, and the spoon used to stir it would have had to be at least as big as a rake. Nobody could say to whom this pot had belonged in the past, why they'd needed such a big pot, why the pot's owner had subsequently discarded it. If this pot had been used to cook food for regular hired labor, its owner must have been a great village landlord. If this pot had been used to cook food for ordinary soldiers, then its owner must have been a general of no little standing. These conjectures were enough to unsettle me.
Of the prosperity that the A
I went to the House of Immortals once: dispatched by a cadre with orders to paint quotations by Chairman Mao everywhere in red and yellow paint, I couldn't leave out this corner of the village. When I went, I knew that all the other Daoist Immortals in the House of Immortals had either passed away or departed, leaving only one Ma Ming. He wasn't at home, and having received no response after coughing several times at the gate, I had no choice but to advance timidly up a few dilapidated stone steps into this dust-smothered darkness, into a state of hopeless and overpowering fear and trepidation. Fortunately, after proceeding sideways into the right wing of the house, I found a few tiles were missing from a corner of the house and a shaft of light had sneaked in, finally helping me out of the desperate obscurity. Only slowly did I begin to make out an expanse of brick wall, for some unknown reason bulging outwards, shaped like a Buddha's belly. The wooden plank wall was riddled with woodworm, and everywhere I went there were grass rushes and the crunching sound of broken tile residue. Next to the wall was a large coffin, also covered with rushes and a piece of torn polyethylene. I spotted the owner's bed, a piece of worn matting in amongst a grass nest in one corner. On top there was a mound of wadding as black as ashes-probably the end that kept his feet warm, bound tightly together with a length of grass rope, demonstrating the owner's ingenuity in keeping out the cold. To the side of the grass nest were two old batteries, a wine bottle, and a few multicolored paper cigarette packets- these must have been the few trophies in the House of Immortals seized from the world outside its door.
My nostrils encountered an aggressively pungent stench which, if I leaned a little over to one side, disappeared. If I leaned back, there it was again. I couldn't help but feel that the bad smell here was not caused by a gas, but was a formless solid, built up over a long period of time, already coagulated into a concrete form, a heavy mass. The owner of the house would surely have had to watch where he stepped to avoid stirring up such a deeply accumulated stench.
I also took care to avoid this solidified stench, and found a place where my nose could be more at ease to paint a board of quotations. They went like this: "When busy, eat dry food, when leisured eat liquid, at normal times eat half dry, half liquid." I hoped it would have some illuminative value for the owner of the house.
I heard someone behind me exclaim with a sigh: "When time is confused, it must be a time of confusion."
As I hadn't heard footsteps approach, I didn't know when he'd appeared. He was so thin his temples were deeply sunken, and he was wearing a cotton hat and unlined cotton jacket unusually early in the day. As he upbraided me with a slight smile, his hands in his sleeves, it occurred to me this must be the owner of the house. The brim of his hat was just like that of other men round here, always worn twisted at a great angle.