“A Wind-Blown Fire Needs Little Effort” originates from The Expanded Book of Wise Sayings (《增广贤文》, Zengguang Xianwen)ⁱ, but it first appeared as a Zen (禅, Chan) verse in The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (《景德传灯录》, Jingde Chuandeng Lu)ⁱⁱ. Many Zen sayings and phrases work between the surface of language and its inner transmission, arriving at a kind of paradoxical narrative intention. On the surface, they teach you how to harness elements of the natural world to achieve a desired end result. At root, however, Zen conveys a particular mode of temporal experience.  The Expanded Book of Wise Sayings takes the literary form of a simplified Confucian ethics. Within the book, “A Wind-Blown Fire Needs Little Effort” returns to a Confucian register; it expresses an art of control, of manoeuvring circumstance. The same words, situated in two different texts, point in completely divergent directions: temporal perception in one, a strategy in the other. The mode of conduct between what is spoken and what is withheld bridges Confucianism while simultaneously hollowing out its ethics. What intrigues me is how the verse transformed into a saying charged with strong connotations of ethical enlightenment, only to ultimately return to the register of a nursery rhyme—like rap delivered without thinking. It is something resembling the back-and-forth between écriture automatique and significant form in Western literatureⁱⁱⁱ.

[i] A Chinese proverbial anthology compiled during the Ming Dynasty (c. 16th century), widely used for centuries as a primer in children’s moral education. Its aphoristic style (short, rhythmic, easily memorized) gives it the quality of nursery rhyme or folk chant that He An references.

[ii] A foundational Song Dynasty text (1004 CE) documenting the lineages and teachings of Zen (Chan) Buddhist masters. It is one of the most important collections of Zen dialogues, encounter stories, and gāthā (short verse teachings).

[iii] Écriture automatique and significant form: He An draws a parallel between two Western critical concepts: the Surrealist practice of automatic writing (writing without conscious control, championed by André Breton) and Clive Bell’s theory of “significant form” (the idea that aesthetic value lies in arrangements of form rather than representational content).

“因风吹火，用力不多”来自《增广贤文》，最早是《景德传灯录》里的一句禅宗偈语。禅宗的许多话语和短句，很大部分是在语言表层传达和内在传递中取得一种悖反的叙述意向——表面看是教诲你如何运用自然界的因素达到实现最终事物的结果，其根本上是禅宗仅为描述一种关于“时间”的经验。《增广贤文》的文体是简化的儒家伦理，这句话在此又回到了儒家的范围内，这是一种驾驭术。同样的话语两种文本中所载方向截然不同，将要述说和欲言又止之间要采取的行为方式等同于跨越和链接了儒家又抽空了儒家的那些伦理。我感兴趣是它后来转换成了带有强烈伦理启蒙的语言，最终又回到一种儿歌的文体话语，像不假思索的说唱，有点类似杂糅了西方对文本的无意识形态写作和有意味形式来回穿搭的方式。