This is the second half of my discussion of Wang Wei’s Wheel Rim River Cycle, a set of 20 poems idealizing his newly bought estate in the country near the capital Ch’ang-An on the location of modern Xi’An (formerly Hsi An, formerly, obviously, Ch’ang-An). Since this website has shut me out several times, resulting in many hours of work gone down the drain, I decided to print the Chinese characters in the modern way from left to right. Sentence this like something get you then but left to right from them read can you.

Classical music, Sigiswald Kuijken once said, is one of the top achievements in the history of mankind, equal to the Homeric epics, Athenian theater, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance panting, Shakespeare and the Russian novel (those are my specific examples, but I’m sure his wouldn’t be too different). I agree, and it is an ominous sign for today’s western culture that so few people seem to be aware of that. Chinese landscape painting and *Tang poetry belong on that choice list as well. The spacial depth of the Chinese 山水 Shan-Shui, ‘mountains and rivers’ landscape style is stunning for a style that’s not based on the technique of perspective, developed in the European Renaissance. The mystery of these images is unmatched. Likewise, the imagery of the poetry is condensed and captivating. Many Chinese words have multiple grammatical possibilities, like a particular Hungarian word that according to Finnish linguist Sakk Laamahängen (PhD) appears in colloquial as noun, adjective, adverb, interjection, conjunction, preposition and other grammatical functions, while it however has yet to be listed in a dictionary.

The first line of the famous poem 鹿柴, Deer Camp, the fifth of Wang’s collection, may suffice:

The first thing that grabs our attention is how much is missing from this story. Why did Cain and Abel suddenly decide to sacrifice to the LORD? God didn’t tell them they should do that. I don’t buy Sarna’s explanation that sacrificing “is an inner need”, except as an inner need to influence the cosmos to our own purposes: magic. Sacrifice comes from the time gods were thought to be blind natural forces. What’s innate is perhaps an idea that if I give something of my earnings to the cosmos, the cosmos will be favorably disposed towards me. Of course there is also the idea that ending the life of an animal requires some form of compensation. But I don’t buy that the need to give something to God is innate, or children would want to do that all the time. The next questions however are more problematic. Where is the land Nod? Where did Cain find a wife? Exactly whom was Cain so afraid of being murdered by? Mom? Dad? One or two unmentioned sisters? No one else was around! We cannot avoid the conclusion that the story originally described an event of a later age, in a populated world, and it got inserted for some purpose, probably to show our nature by presenting “the first murder”. Perhaps the story was akin to Romulus’ murder of Remus at Rome’s beginnings: an archetypal pointer at sin lurking at the center of each young republic, like our own, with Hamilton and Burr.