A Wish for All Creatures
The name says everything, if you know how to read it.
Pu’an — the two characters that give this guqin piece its name — carry a meaning of boundless compassion: universal peace, extended to every living thing. Not just to people, not just to the worthy or the powerful, but to all creatures without exception. Even the ant beneath your foot. Even the moth drawn to the flame.
This is the spirit of the Buddhist master Pu’an, whose name the piece bears: a vision of love so wide it leaves nothing out. And it is this spirit — not mystery, not spectacle — that Master Mei Riqiang carried in his hands when he played.
Two Pieces, One Name
The confusion begins with history. In the Ming dynasty text Sanjiao Tongsheng — “The Three Teachings Speak as One” — a composer named Zhang Dexin wrote a piece also called Pu’an Zhou, complete with full liturgical text for recitation. But that piece and the guqin composition known today as Pu’an Zhou are entirely different works that happen to share a name. Same title, different music, different world.
The guqin version that Mei Riqiang played belongs to a separate lineage entirely. Shi Hong first encountered it through the Meian Qin Pu — the guqin score compiled by the Meian school — where it appears under a related title, Shitan Zhang, with a preface that reads:
“This piece and Pu’an Zhou share the same origin but differ in name. It depicts the sound of monks chanting sutras and performing prostrations, their footsteps circling the ritual space. Bells and drums sound together, all instruments join in, repetitions are many, the whole piece is lively and festive — a style unto itself.”
Lively. Festive. Full of human warmth. This is a piece about community, about the collective act of devotion — many voices, many footsteps, many hands joined in a shared wish for peace.
The Master’s Demonstration
Mei Riqiang did not explain Pu’an Zhou with music theory. He acted it out.
He described the atmosphere of a Buddhist ceremony in vivid, almost theatrical detail — the warmth, the movement, the layered sounds of communal ritual. Then, to illustrate the monks at their chanting, he lowered his eyelids halfway, began murmuring under his breath, and crossed his hands to form a series of mudras — the sacred hand gestures of Buddhist practice — shifting from one configuration to the next with practiced ease.
It was, Shi Hong recalls, quite beautiful to watch.
The point was clear: in Mei’s understanding, Pu’an Zhou was a portrait of devotion in action — music as a vessel for collective compassion, rendered with the same loving attention to detail that a painter brings to a scene of everyday life. The piece was alive with human presence: the shuffle of feet, the rhythm of breath, the hands moving through ancient gestures in a candlelit hall.
A Ghost Story, and What It Really Means
Master Mei once told Shi Hong a story about his teacher Xia Yifeng. On a New Year’s Eve, Xia was alone in his study playing Pu’an Zhou. Midway through the piece, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around. No one was there. Convinced that the piece had attracted unseen presences, Xia Yifeng never played it again.
One can smile at the story — or take it seriously. But perhaps what it really tells us is something about the power of sincere intention. A prayer offered with full concentration, repeated with devotion, reaching outward toward all living things — such a thing does not stay contained within four walls. It moves. It travels. It touches what we cannot see.
In that sense, Xia Yifeng was not wrong to be moved.
Two Rules, One Lost Detail
Mei Riqiang learned Pu’an Zhou first from Wang Jianhou, and later received additional guidance from the guqin master Zhao Yunqing. His version was close to the Beijing Qin Society score, with minor variations.
Of everything Mei taught about the piece, two points stayed with Shi Hong most clearly. The first: Pu’an uses no vibrato. No yin, no nao — none of the finger oscillations that give most guqin music its characteristic warmth and expressiveness. The piece moves forward with a kind of bare, unadorned directness — like a chant that needs no decoration, because the intention itself is enough.
The second point concerned the harmonics at the very end of the piece. Mei explained that this final passage encoded an eight-character mantra — a sacred phrase hidden within the music, sounding its blessing as the last notes faded.
Shi Hong, to his lasting regret, did not write it down. He remembers only the general sense: something like “Pu’an arrives here — all prohibitions lifted.” Peace extended everywhere. Nothing excluded.
“I did not pay enough attention to such details at the time,” he writes. “Now that the master is gone, there is no one left to ask.”
Next: One melody, three stories — how a single guqin piece came to carry the names of a musician, a poet, and a princess.
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