溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Knowing Every Gathering Will Scatter, Why Is the Meeting So Dear?
Knowing that even a joyful gathering will scatter and we all will pass, from where comes the heart that holds this meeting and this moment dear, and would set them down in writing?
Death and life are great matters indeed — how could one not be moved to sorrow? The reason the ancients were stirred to feeling runs into one with mine.
This question split how to meet impermanence. Wang Xizhi, while honestly grieving the fleetingness of a joyful gathering, in fact dismissed as "empty fancy" the Zhuangzi-style transcendence then in vogue — the posture that holds life and death the same and sees them as one. Death and life are truly great matters, he held, and the human heart lies in feeling their weight honestly and leaving it in record. This was quite a different road from Zhuangzi and Tao Yuanming, who released death as nature's course — where they embraced impermanence through transcendence, Wang Xizhi embraced it through record and connection. In the West too the hearts of poets seeking to hold the moment stood in the same place. Is impermanence to be surpassed by detachment, or embraced through honest sorrow and record — Wang Xizhi stood most humanly on "feel it and leave it behind."
For us who easily let meetings and moments slip by as soon-to-pass, Wang Xizhi's heart — leaving it the more dearly because it will scatter — turns impermanence not into emptiness but into connection.
Gathered with friends at a pavilion on a spring day to compose poems, Wang Xizhi, in the midst of the merry scene, is suddenly overtaken by sorrow — this joyful gathering too will soon scatter, those gathered here will one day pass, and tod…
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Gathered with friends at a pavilion on a spring day to compose poems, Wang Xizhi, in the midst of the merry scene, is suddenly overtaken by sorrow — this joyful gathering too will soon scatter, those gathered here will one day pass, and today's gladness will become a trace. Yet he does not let this impermanence drift into emptiness; precisely because of it, he sets this moment down in writing. As the reason the ancients were stirred to feeling runs into one with his own today, so those who come after will read this and be of the same heart. I sense this question embraces impermanence through record and connection — because it will scatter, it is the more dear, and so he leaves it behind. I stand before this question too, retracing how dearly I treat this present meeting that will one day scatter.
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