The Venerable Daxiu, photographed in Suzhou after the Double Ninth Festival of 1931 and given to his friends as a keepsake. It appeared in the Jinyu Qin Journal (1937). Image courtesy of Shiqin Zhai, the qin studio of Xue Guoan.
By Xue Guoan · Translated by William Xu
This year marks the 155th anniversary of the birth of the Venerable Daxiu (1870–1932). The Qingu Guqin Library is reported to be re-editing his collected writings for a new edition. I offer this older essay to fellow lovers of the qin.
A cushion to sit on, a qin across my knees;
I play until the sound is gone, and the sound remains.
Who today still understands the ancient tunes?
Better to fall silent than listen to the busy zither.
Ten thousand things return to one, and the one has no end;
only the qin can play the Pu'an chant.
Listen quietly: the heart's own incense rises,
no need to burn sandalwood in the censer.
— Daxiu, "Words on the Qin"
A Monk Who Walked Sixteen Provinces
Daxiu (1870–1932), one of the famous monks of the late Qing and early Republic, came from Renshou County in Sichuan. His family name was Yan and his dharma name was Yanzhang. He belonged to the same generation of the Linji school of Chan as the great master Xuyun.
He was gifted as a boy and first studied the Confucian classics. At thirteen he entered the Qingxuan Taoist temple on Mount Emei. At seventeen he turned to Buddhism and took his vows at Baoguang Monastery in Xindu, near Chengdu. Seven years later he left Sichuan and, under the name Daxiu, "Great Rest," began a life of wandering: "Roaming lakes and seas, singing freely; my tracks so hard to fix, the cranes must come to find me." According to Daxiu, the Monk from Shu by Zhu Jiayu and Ge Chunnan of Suzhou, from 1893 to early 1909, some sixteen years, he travelled through sixteen provinces.
After forty he settled among the hills and waters of Suzhou and Hangzhou. He lived in turn at Shengshui Temple on Yunju Hill in Hangzhou, Tianzhong Temple on Mount Tianzhen in Fuyang, the Zhaodan Terrace on Solitary Hill by West Lake, Longchi Hermitage and Hanshan Temple in Suzhou, and Baoshan Temple on Xishan Island in Lake Tai. He oversaw the rebuilding of several famous temples and befriended many men of letters. "Having walked the Five Sacred Peaks, I walk no more; between Wu and Yue I pass my springs and autumns." His last home was Wuyin Hermitage at the foot of Mount Tianma, west of Tianping Hill in Suzhou. There he built his own tomb, and there he died, seated in meditation and reciting the Buddha's name, on December 8, 1932. He was sixty-three and had been a monk for forty-six years.
Poet, Calligrapher, Painter, and Qin Player
Daxiu excelled at poetry, calligraphy and painting. He also played the qin, and he was skilled at carving inkstones and making instruments. He traded poems with eminent figures such as Li Genyuan and Zhou Mengpo, and could compose on the spot. His calligraphy was compared to the great monk-artists of the past: his cursive script had the force of Li Yong, his running script the method of Wang Xizhi, his regular script the grace of Zhao Mengfu. His paintings were once prized by gentry and temples across Suzhou, Shanghai and Hangzhou, and people were proud to hang them on their walls. He was best known for his Hundred Strange Rocks, a series of 103 paintings in which rocks grow "stranger with every stroke," taking "a hundred thousand shapes in a moment": now like a withered tree stripped of its branches, now like a crouching tiger, now as still as an old monk in meditation, now as delicate as a beauty standing alone. Li Genyuan, Zhang Yilin, Jin Songcen, Wu Hufan, Zhou Mengpo, Pang Laichen and Li Xibai all wrote inscriptions for it.
Was He Really a Zhe School Master?
Many years later, hardly anyone speaks of Daxiu's poems, calligraphy or paintings. When he is mentioned at all, it is for the qin, because the modern qin players Xu Yuanbai, his brother Xu Wenjing, and Wang Jianhou all studied with him. So whenever the Xu brothers or Wang Jianhou come up, Daxiu is named in passing. But only in passing. His own playing and his life in the qin have hardly been looked at.
The usual account goes like this: Daxiu was a brilliant player and a famous master of the Zhe (Zhejiang) school. The Xu brothers and Wang Jianhou became his students at Tianping Hill in Suzhou and at the Zhaodan Terrace in Hangzhou, and received the full Zhe school tradition from him. Xu Yuanbai passed it on to his wife Huang Xuehui, his son Xu Kuanghua, and to Yao Bingyan, Ye Mingpei, Xu Xiaoying, Zheng Yunfei and others. Wang Jianhou passed it on to Yao Bingyan, Mei Yueqiang and others. And so Daxiu is still honored as a founding master by Zhe school players today.
In fact, this account is open to question. To begin with, it is not clear that Daxiu belonged to the Zhe school at all. Daxiu, the Monk from Shu records that he "never forgot anything he read, and learned every art without a teacher," and that he "taught himself the qin and grasped the secrets of the Shu (Sichuan) school." The authors do not explain how he taught himself as a young man. But in writing the book, and in searching for and restoring his tomb and tracking down his writings, they "buried themselves in paper and sifted through it all," and drew on the memories of people who had known him: his old friend Chen Yuyuan; his godson and student Wu Zhaoqi, who was twelve when Daxiu died; and his second-generation student Huang Qizhi, who was eleven at the time and waited on him with his father. I believe the claim was not invented.
Zhou Qingyun, known as Zhou Mengpo, wrote in the memorial inscription for Daxiu's stupa:
I knew Daxiu for more than twenty years… At seventeen he went to Baoguang Monastery in Xindu to take his vows, and studied every essential text of the scriptures. Beyond the sutras, he visited teachers in monasteries great and small, and he would hold his qin and sing at length. Did he wish to turn the mountains and rivers, the earth, the trees and stones, all into the sound of the qin? At twenty-three, in 1893, he left Sichuan to wander, his qin always with him…
So before twenty-three Daxiu was still in Sichuan, and already "holding his qin and singing." For the next sixteen years of wandering, his qin went with him. Only after forty did he live mostly between Suzhou and Hangzhou. To call him a Zhe school master seems forced.
Second, the Xu brothers studied with him in 1912 at Tianping Hill in Suzhou, when Xu Yuanbai was twenty and Xu Wenjing seventeen. At that time Daxiu was still abbot of Shengshui Temple in Hangzhou, a post he held from 1909 to 1915; Tianping Hill was only a temporary stay. The following year the brothers went south to join the revolution. Altogether their study lasted a year at most. To say they "received the full Zhe school tradition" is probably an exaggeration. In the survey of qin players in the Jinyu Qin Journal, Xu Yuanbai himself wrote under "school": "None."
The most balanced description, I think, is the one in Selected Writings of Zha Fuxi: Xu Yuanbai "said his qin was a family tradition, and he also sought correction from the monk Daxiu… His style belongs to the Wu-Yue tradition: round fingering, tight rhythm."
Still, no one disputes that the Xu brothers and Wang Jianhou, above all Xu Yuanbai, are the masters of what we now call the modern Zhe school. And all their lives they treated Daxiu as their teacher, with respect and affection.
"Daxiu Does Not Rest"
In the 1950s, in Hong Kong, Xu Wenjing oversaw the making of twelve qin and gave each a name and an inscription, known as the Twelve Qin Inscriptions of the Jing Studio. One of them is named Daxiu, in memory of his teacher. Its inscription reads:
He rests on the summit, and the crane listens to the spring.
He rests by the lake, and the mountain is not alone.
He rests in the Way, and the peaks grow small.
He rests in wandering, and his house is a boat.
He rests in the qin, and his mind is empty.
So I listen to his sound.
I studied the qin with the Venerable Daxiu fifty years ago. I name this qin after him and carve this inscription. Daxiu does not rest.
The Xu brothers studied with Daxiu only briefly. Fang Zhenhua, Wang Jianhou and Wu Qibi probably studied with him longer. In early 1915 Daxiu left Yunju and went to live in seclusion at Tianzhong Temple in Fuyang. After less than two years, around the end of 1916 or the start of 1917, he returned to Hangzhou and settled at the Zhaodan Terrace on Solitary Hill, where he stayed about six years, until he moved to Suzhou at the lunar new year of 1923.
Fang Zhenhua learned not only the qin from him but also the art of carving inkstones. Jin Songcen, the great classical scholar and Daxiu's close friend, recorded this scene in his Biography of the Monk Daxiu:
While he was abbot of the Zhaodan Terrace, on the full-moon night of the twelfth month, with the bright moon high in the sky, he and his qin student Fang Zhenhua carried their qin and wine to Solitary Hill. The winter plum was in blossom. They sat facing each other in the Crane-Releasing Pavilion and played "Three Variations on Plum Blossoms," drinking three cups for each playing, drinking and playing by turns. The fish of the lake rose to listen, the kingfishers gathered, and they did not notice the bitter frost, or the dawn rising in the east.
The Qin He Gave Away
Wang Jianhou received from Daxiu both his playing and his instrument-making, and also two qin as gifts: the Tang dynasty Feiquan ("Flying Spring") by the Lei family, and the Ming dynasty Zhonghe made for the Prince of Lu. The Feiquan eventually belonged to Tang Jianyuan in Hong Kong, but it was later stolen and its whereabouts are still unknown. (It is not the late-Tang qin of the same name in the Palace Museum, Beijing.) The Zhonghe passed from Wang Jianhou's family to Mei Yueqiang after Wang's death, and is now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum. Wu Qibi studied qin and painting with Daxiu at the Zhaodan Terrace and received a qin called Heaven's Wind and Ocean Water, now in the Fuzhou Museum.
Neither Daxiu nor Wang Jianhou nor his other students left any recordings, so we cannot know how they sounded. But we can hear something of Daxiu's legacy in a few pieces by Xu Yuanbai and Mei Yueqiang, such as The Fisherman and the Woodcutter and Pu'an Chant. Mei Yueqiang's first teacher was Wang Jianhou, and in these pieces his phrasing, rhythm and style are clearly close to those of Xu Yuanbai, his "teacher's elder brother" in the lineage. From this we may imagine how Wang Jianhou, and perhaps Daxiu himself, played them.
There is another curious detail. Xu Yuanbai and Wang Jianhou, both Daxiu's students, gave their studios almost the same name. The Jinyu Qin Journal lists Xu Yuanbai's studio as the Hut Where the Qin Hides and the Painting Retires, and Wang Jianhou's studio was the Tower Where the Qin Hides and the Gourd Retires. The third volume of his mimeographed Guide to Qin Studies contains a catalogue of the instruments kept in that tower. The two names must be connected to their being students of the same teacher.
A Life Always Accompanied by the Qin
To say that Daxiu taught himself and grasped the secrets of the Shu school is not to say that he was a Shu school player. Whether he was studying the Tao or the dharma in Sichuan, wandering the rivers and lakes, or lingering among the hills of Wu and Yue, the qin was always his companion.
When he first took charge of Shengshui Temple, he was so busy rebuilding the temple and working the fields that he set the qin aside for a while: "A bowl on my shoulder, I climbed Yunju; I put down my jade qin and took up the hoe." As soon as the temple was finished, he wrote a couplet for its gate:
Choose a great scenic site to build a place of practice, do some honest work: hoe the rain, plough the clouds, plant flowers, grow bamboo.
Take a little rest and follow the world as it goes; ask me my business in leisure: sing to the wind, play with the moon, read paintings, play the qin.
After the Republic was founded in 1912 he wrote a poem called "Delight in the Way":
Delighting in the Way all year, my joys are many;
by the small window, alone with my shadow, I chant.
No bell or chime in the temple, my mind is always still;
facing the clouds and hills, my spirit is at peace.
Waking from dreams, I watch the crane dance by the plum;
half-drunk beneath the pines, I play "The Woodcutter's Song."
Someone comes to tell me the old heaven has fallen;
the idle quarrels beyond my gate are none of my concern.
In 1927, at fifty-eight, living at Baoshan Temple on Xishan Island in Lake Tai, he still kept company with his "three friends," the qin, calligraphy and painting. In a poem sent to Zhou Mengpo he wrote: "Can I keep the hard discipline or not? I have bound myself to three friends: qin, books and paintings. Now and then I steady myself with a cup of wine. Why should one studying Buddhism not study the Great Vehicle?" Jin Songcen wrote that Daxiu's deepest mastery "lay in the qin. Of the dozens of pieces he played, he was finest at Mist and Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. He practiced it for forty years; its sound was hidden and beautiful, and it carried the listener's mind far away."
In another poem to Zhou Mengpo, he added a note beside one line: "I often lament that new music is corrupting the refined, so I have given myself wholly to the study of the qin. I have gathered a number of old scores and intend to edit them for printing, rejoicing to see ritual and music shine again, and waiting for peaceful times to come." Sadly, the scores he gathered and edited were never printed. His devotion to the qin was deep, and his labor on it was tireless.
A Mind No School Could Hold
Daxiu began with Confucian learning, passed into the Tao, and finally entered the gate of the Buddha. "Awakened to the three vehicles, untouched by a speck of dust; having walked the Five Peaks, I know the four elements are empty," he wrote in the funeral address he composed for himself. His life was a search for his own true nature, an awakening he had to prove for himself. In Direct Pointers on Practice he wrote: "Practice seeks only to see the mind clearly… I entered the Way as a child… at first I did not see my mind, and loved to explore mysteries. Then I woke again and came to the gate of the Buddha, and tried every kind of practice myself. Only after I came down from Emei and walked the Five Peaks could I let everything go at once. All dharmas are empty." After that, "I roamed freely with poems and wine, and mixed with the ordinary world." In Jin Songcen's words, he "could not be measured by the rules of the sutras." Zhao Xi called him "Hanshan come back to life," "Jigong reborn": a monk who kept a beard, acted the madman, practiced Chan without regard for the precepts, and ate meat and drank wine. How could the qin of such a man be confined to one school? Daxiu played the qin the way he practiced Chan: from the mind, and nothing else.
In fact, in the late Qing and early Republic, qin players were active across Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Sichuan and Fujian. And Daxiu, the wanderer, was an active monk-musician, especially in his last twenty years, often attending qin gatherings. It is only natural that, learning from players everywhere, he formed his own lofty, refined and balanced style, and was admired for it.
At the Great Qin Gatherings
In October 1919, Ye Ximing, with the support of the Wumen painter Gu Heyi, organized the Yiyuan Garden Qin Gathering in Suzhou, and thirty-three players from Zhejiang, Sichuan, Beijing, Shanghai, Hunan, Fujian and Jiangsu were invited. Daxiu was invited too, but he was travelling and could not come, so he sent a poem of congratulation, later included in the gathering's record:
This is not the little mountain room of Lingyin;
how could a monk sit with you all in one hall?
Go through the old qin, turn the wonderful scores;
sing high as the geese pass, under a moon like frost.
The following October, Zhou Mengpo held a three-day qin gathering at his new house, the Chenfeng Lodge, in Shanghai. Daxiu brought his qin and came, sending two poems ahead. In the preface he wrote: "Mr. Mengpo has gathered qin players from across the land for three days, grieving that refined music is dying, since it bears on the hearts of the people and the way of the world. His intention is great. This old monk has long been away from the strings, and is planning to retreat deep into the mountains; I hardly deserve to answer such a noble summons. But such a gathering is rare, and true listeners are rarer still…" One of the poems ends:
Confucian and Buddhist, traced to the source, prove one mind;
lingering in the virtue of the qin, all is quiet and deep.
Do not divide the art by place into north and south;
only the years divide the old from the new.
Music, through harmony, hopes for peaceful times;
pitch, through balance, fixes the true tone.
How lucky, this fine autumn light in the paulownia court:
the traces of this gathering will long be sought.
More than 130 people from fifteen regions attended the Chenfeng Lodge gathering, and thirty-three performed. On the first day, Daxiu played Song of the Fisherman.
"I Love This Qin"
Before the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1930, his student Zhou Guanjiu returned from abroad. Daxiu, Zhou, the seal-carver and antiquarian Chu Deyi, and the Shanghai qin player Xu Shaofeng met at the Haiyue Tower, discussing painting, chanting poems, talking Chan and playing the qin. There Daxiu painted, on the spot, Carrying the Qin Across the Plank Bridge. Chu Deyi noted that its steep cliffs and strange peaks were all Sichuan scenery, "as if reading Li Daoyuan's commentary on the Yangtze." Daxiu inscribed it himself:
Autumn woods, red trees, the weather just right. I invite two or three friends to bring wine and qin. Tomorrow is the Double Ninth: let us climb high and get drunk together. Do not fail me. I paint this in advance, as your ticket.
Who could have known that by the next Double Ninth, Daxiu would be thinking of departing this world? On that day, October 19, 1931, he first played a piece, then spoke a verse:
I love this qin;
before I go, I touch it once more.
Old Daxiu leaves for a thousand autumns;
you, qin, return to the ancient past.
When Zhou Guanjiu and his other students heard of it, they begged him again and again to stay. He calmly set the matter aside and went on as before, "playing the qin and drinking wine, writing poems and painting every day." But they could not hold him much longer.
The Tomb He Built for Himself
His death astonished everyone. According to many accounts, in the summer of 1932 he moved to Wuyin Hermitage and began building his own tomb with his own hands. He wrote the words "Daxiu is here" and "Clean ground" and had a stonemason carve them into the rock. He wrote his own funeral couplets: "My life is worth passing on: I learned all three teachings, a Confucian as a child, a Taoist as a youth, a Buddhist at the end. Let me tell my deeds myself: I walked the Five Peaks, ate when hungry, drank when thirsty, slept when tired." And: "No great, no small, no inside, no out; I rest myself, finish myself, arrange everything myself." He wrote a self-account and a funeral address to say goodbye to the world, and chose the Double Ninth as his day of return, but the niche was not finished in time. Two months later he visited Li Genyuan and asked him to write his epitaph. A few days after that he went into the city again, collected the finished inscription, then entered his tomb, sat with legs folded, recited the name of Amitabha, and passed away.
The Suzhou newspaper Daguangming Bao reported on his death over several days. One report read:
The monk Daxiu died a few days ago without illness in his living tomb. His bed was covered with the things he left behind, each listed in his own hand as a gift for a friend. All that remained were a bronze sword and an old qin, whose recipients he did not name.
This may be the riddle within the riddle of Daxiu's death, and the last qin story he left us. He had so many close friends and students. Why were the sword and the qin, alone, left without an owner?
Daxiu was gone. Three years later, on March 1, 1936, the Jinyu Qin Society was founded at the Juemeng Lodge, the home of his student Zhou Guanjiu in Suzhou. In May 1937 the society published the Jinyu Qin Journal in Shanghai. Among its portraits is "A Portrait of the Monk Daxiu," the photograph he had taken at a studio outside Suzhou's Changmen Gate after that Double Ninth of 1931, when he had decided to depart, and gave to his friends as a keepsake. The register of qin players lists: "Daxiu. Monk. Abbot of the Zhaodan Terrace, Hangzhou. Deceased." It was, I think, the society's way of honoring him.
Let me end with the epitaph Li Genyuan wrote for him in his own hand:
Stop, then, and rest, Venerable Daxiu! Earlier, when he built his living tomb at Baoshan, I wrote for him the words "Daxiu's Resting Place." Now he loves the beauty of Wuyin, and has come to live here, and has rebuilt his tomb to the right of the temple, and asked me to write again. Daxiu, of Renshou in Sichuan, took his vows at Emei. He could write poems, was good at painting, and was skilled at the qin. — Written by Li Genyuan of Tengchong.
From Xue Guoan, Leftovers from a Half-Room of Qin (Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2015).
About Xue Guoan
Xue Guoan is a Nanjing writer, historian and qin player, and a member of the Jiangsu Provincial Research Institute of Culture and History. He and William Xu studied the qin in the same lineage, under Mei Shijun, son of Mei Yueqiang, and have been close friends for many years. His qin studio is called Shiqin Zhai, the Studio of Ten Qin. His essays preserve the people, societies and small details of qin history that are easily lost. Seven String Qin is honored to translate them for English readers.
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