Partially adapted from an article by Ke Hang, originally published by Guqin Workshop (钧天坊), July 10, 2017.
When Rushan was a small boy in South Korea, he asked his father what lay beyond the sea.
His father said: more sea.
And beyond that?
His father understood then what his son was really asking. "That is China," he said. "A country far larger than ours. It gave us the Three Character Classic, the Thousand Character Text, Confucius, Laozi. Everything you study in the village school came from there."
From that moment, China became the horizon the boy could not stop looking toward.
He was called Cheolin then — born in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, the son of farmers. At eleven, his parents scraped together the fees for a private classical school, where he studied Chinese characters alongside Korean. The ancient texts settled into him quietly, the way things do when you are young and don't yet know you are being shaped.
At fourteen, a distant relative — a Buddhist monk — came to visit. He saw something in the boy and invited him to come study at the temple. Cheolin said goodbye to his parents and followed the old monk to Munsu Temple. He was given the dharma name Donseong, and a different kind of education began.
Ten years passed. Donseong became a respected young monk, leading a congregation of over two hundred at Beopryeon Temple in Seoul. But the more he taught, the more clearly he felt the edges of what he knew. A larger ambition had been forming for years, quiet and persistent: to go to China.
There was only one problem. South Korea and China had no formal diplomatic relations. There was no direct path.
So Donseong did what pilgrims have always done when the straight road is closed — he took the long way around. He sat the entrance examinations for Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei, passed, and in the first spring of the 1990s, crossed the sea.
Taiwan gave him more than a degree. It gave him calligraphy, ink painting, and one evening that would change everything.
His painting teacher, Chen Zhuoyuan, invited him to a New Year's concert. Donseong almost declined — a paper was due, the temple had obligations. But Chen insisted: "This one is different. It's a guqin recital. You will want to be there."
The small theater was dim. The stage held a row of elderly men, masters brought from the mainland — among them, Mei Yueqiang.
Donseong sat in the second row. He could see their hands clearly. He could hear every note of the silk strings, ancient and unhurried. Something in the sound reached past his training, past his learning, into somewhere older.
He decided, before the concert ended, that he would learn this instrument.
Years later, now bearing the name Rushan — "still as a mountain, true as a mountain" — he arrived in Beijing to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at Peking University. He had not forgotten the guqin.
Through friends at the university's guqin society, he was introduced to Wu Zhao, president of the China Guqin Research Association and one of the instrument's foremost historians. Rushan asked to become his student. Wu Zhao agreed.
One afternoon, they were working through Plum Blossom Melody. Wu Zhao demonstrated the passage twice. Rushan's hands hovered over the strings, lost. The old master fell silent for a long moment.
"Is something wrong?" Rushan asked quietly.
Wu Zhao sighed and shook his head. "What a pair of clumsy hands."
Those hands had split firewood in mountain monasteries, held calligraphy brushes, carried sutras across three countries. But here, on seven silk strings, they were useless.
After another silence, Wu Zhao spoke again: "Never mind. Clumsy has its own flavor."
Rushan went home and began to practice with something close to obsession. He would sit down after morning tea and look up to find the sun already setting.
In the winter of 2001, Wu Zhao brought Rushan to a guqin gathering in Yangzhou.
There, for the first time, Rushan heard Mei Yueqiang play.
The Guangling school's sound was everything he had been searching for — unhurried, undecorated, carrying the weight of something very old. The pieces Ping Sha Luo Yan, Qiao Ge, Long Xiang Cao — he had known their names for years. Now he heard what they actually were.
He asked his teacher to introduce him. Wu Zhao brought him forward.
Mei Yueqiang listened to the Korean monk play. He was pleased. From that day, Rushan became his student.
For the next year, Rushan spent every holiday on the train to Yangzhou — to Jiandao Lane, Number 29, where Mei Yueqiang taught and where students came from across the country to eat, sleep, and practice under the same roof. Rushan saved his living expenses for tuition and the journey. When Mei Yueqiang temporarily relocated to Beijing, the distance disappeared, and so did any remaining excuse not to practice.
In less than two years, Rushan had learned more than twenty Guangling pieces. Nearly the entire repertoire.
Mei Yueqiang's home at Jiandao Lane 29 in Yangzhou has since been designated a cultural heritage site by the city government — the Mei Yueqiang Former Residence. The small rooms where masters and students once slept side by side, where guqin music filled the air from morning until late at night, now stand as a monument to what was passed on there.
What was passed on was not just technique. It was a way of listening. A way of being still.
Years later, William came across a recording on YouTube — Master Rushan playing Plum Blossom Melody.
Every phrase, every ornament, every breath between the notes.
It was identical to the way William plays it.
That is what transmission means in the guqin tradition. Not approximation. Exactness. And it does not stop.
This article draws on content originally published by Guqin Workshop (钧天坊), July 10, 2017, written by Ke Hang. Used with attribution.
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