Three Essays on the Monk Yunjian · I
By Xue Guoan · Translated by William Xu
The qin monk Shi Kongchen, compiler of the Kumuchan Qinpu (The Withered-Wood Chan Qin Handbook), took the name Yunjian, "Among the Clouds." The world has often miswritten it as Yunxian, "Idle Clouds." I have written twice before to set this right.
Look at the prefaces to the Kumuchan Qinpu. Five of them, by Hong Jun, Qian Yingpu, Zhu Minwen, Zhuchan and Dehui, together with Kongchen's own preface, call him "the Venerable Yunjian," "Yunjian the Enlightened," "the Monk Yunjian," "Yunjian the Man of the Way." In every case the character jian is written 閒. Only the prefaces by Ma Qingrong and Xu Xi write it 間.
A word for English readers: three Chinese characters are at stake here. 間 (jian) means "between, among." 閒 is its older, formal form, a moon (月) seen through a gate (門), a gap in the door. Because a gap in time is a moment of leisure, 閒 also came to be read xian and used for 閑, "idle, at leisure."
So 閒 and 間 are the same character in two forms, one formal and one simplified by common use, while 閑 is a different word. 閒 can stand for 閑, "idle," but 間 never can. Kongchen's name means being between, where things meet, not being idle. How can we be sure? The formal 閒 can be written in the common form 間, but 閑 can never be borrowed as 間. When Ma and Xu wrote 間, it can only have been the common form of 閒, never a stand-in for 閑. Of this we can be certain.
Modern records confirm it. In 1911 the monk Dapeng wrote a poem titled On Rising from Illness, for the Venerable Yunjian, and the title writes 間. Twenty years after Kongchen's death, Li Genyuan visited Tiger Hill in Suzhou, saw his stupa, and recorded it in his Record of Visiting Antiquities in the Western Hills of Wu. The inscription reads "Stupa of the Venerable Old Monk Chen of Yunjian," again with 間. And when Jiang Yinqiu mourned Qigu, abbot of Yuantong Temple in Suzhou, he wrote that Qigu's qin came down from the Kumuchan tradition, and his funeral couplet reads "In the qin he learned from Yunjian; in painting he followed Miaocan", again with 間. All these sources agree with one another, and not one of them writes 閑.
So the name is certainly Yunjian, not Yunxian. Because the characters look alike, people wrote it wrong, and the mistake repeated long enough came to pass for truth. Let later readers not be misled.
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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