Reclaiming the humor in a poem by Xue Neng

薛能

聖燈 or 佛燈

莽莽空中稍稍燈
坐看迷濁變清澄
須知火盡煙無益
一夜欄邊說向僧

Buddha Oil Lamp

Xue Neng (Tang)

Vast vast void, a fitful lantern,
Gaze enchanted, muddy mist morphs pellucid.
Flame burns out, smoke cut loose from its source,
All night by railing, chatting with a monk.

(Translated by Dongbo.)

The Holy Lamp

Xue Neng (d. 880)

Centered in the emptiness, dense, vast, boundless:
the lamp, bit by bit fading out.
[I] sit in meditation, watching, waiting for defilements and delusions to change into the pure, the quick, the clear.
[Time passes.]
You must face the fact when the fire is extinguished, the smoke will not help.
Sidled to the railing, and one whole night [I] make explanations, directed to the monk.

(Translated by Jon Babcock.)

To get this, I didn’t skip the 須知 xūzhī beginning L3, “You must acknowledge/recognize that…” Also in L3, I used the alternate 益 yì, ‘benefit’, instead of the hard-to-construe 盆 pén, ‘basin, bowl’. The two characters are graphically similar and in certain calligraphic styles, on certain woodblocks, could easily be misconstrued for one another. The edition of the Complete Tang Poems ( 全唐詩 Quán Táng Shī) from Taiwan on my shelf uses 益 yì. (It also gives the title as 聖燈 Shèng Dēng, ‘Holy Lamp’ instead of 佛燈 Fó Dēng ‘Buddha Lamp’ although that is neither here nor there.)

I was fond of translator Dongbo’s “…muddy mist morphs pellucid”, but to underline the humor, I had to clearly state the big Buddhist things that the protagonist of the poem was attempting, the transformation of ignorance into wisdom and of the impure defiled world (or self) into the Pure Land (or Buddha). For the same reason, I don’t throw out L2.1, 坐 zuò ‘sit’ which means 坐禪 zuòchán ‘meditating’ as well as just sitting. And I didn’t discriminate against L4. 6, 向 xiàng, ‘toward’, ‘in the direction of’ nor underestimate the import of L4.5, 說 shuō, ‘formal speech’, ‘explanation’, ‘theory’ etc., and the verbal incantations of these, ‘speak’, ‘explain’ and ‘theorize’.

I think the joke is as follows: He has great hopes, a layman sitting in the temple, facing the teeming, boundless Void of Buddhadharma, but the lamp is gradually going out, a diminishing flame slowly crawling up to the very tip of the wick, like the tip of the head of grain at the end of the stalk, the primary meaning of L1.5&6 稍 shāo. He prefers to represent it as quite the same as the gradual damping out of the flame of his own worldly passions.

He shoulders on, sitting, meditating, watching, waiting for the promised transmutation of confusion and impurity into wisdom and purity. Finally, the lamp burns out.

Hmm. Legs and back are killing him. Well, once you see the moon, what use is the finger that pointed to it, right? Once you have extinguished desires, what good is the method that got you there, right? It’s stupid, just sitting here in the darkness. So he sidles up to the railing alongside the monk’s quarters and bothers him with theories of the great Dao throughout one whole long night. (Instead of using his precious time at the temple to meditate or even get a good night’s sleep, he wastes it disturbing a monk, thereby doing double damage.)