Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “Almost a thousand years passed, the colophon written by Huizong goes on, and in mid-August of the year 1128, deep into a stormy night racked with thunderclaps and squalls of hail and torrential rain, the superior at the Temple of the Gates of the Law had the extraordinary sensation of the sky being torn in two by lightning and a hallucinatory vision of the stupa floating several feet above the ground, defying the laws of gravity and eventually vanishing in a puff of smoke. He woke the two hundred monks in the temple, announced his vision to them and asked them to pray with him all night for the stupa to be removed to the eternal peace of Parinirvana. As dawn broke the rain slackened, the dark mists stopped swirling and there was a huge thunderclap, creating so much electric discharge that the sky seemed to explode and the ground to disintegrate. The framework of the temple cracked and shuddered; then, in a fraction of a second, the left side of the stupa, which had been struck by lightning, collapsed. The right side remained standing in the rain, its damaged silhouette—bearing the clear tear line, which ran from the highest point right down to the ground—outlined against the sky like a fragment ripped from an architectural drawing. The following morning, in among the lightning-blackened bricks and planks at the foot of the building, soaking wet pages of the Avatamsaka Sutra were found lying in concentric circles on the ground. This was Buddha’s ‘Flower Garland’ Sutra, which the monks were not surprised to see here, as, for many centuries, faithful wealthy donors had had the right to lay down offerings (rolls of silk or sheets of paper on which scribes had been paid to copy out sacred texts) inside the thick walls of the temple. But when the superior of the monastery climbed to the top of the broken stupa to take down a pitifully damaged bronze statue of Buddha, a manuscript rolled on valuable shafts made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory fell from the belly of the statue. Unsettled by the unfamiliar language on the roll as much as by the circumstances in which it was found, he presented himself to Emperor Huizong in person to offer him the manuscript, convinced that it bore a message concerning a higher authority. What came next proves that deciphering this text would have tremendous repercussions on the country’s fate as much as on that of the emperor himself.

  “Huizong, a weakened sovereign, an artist shipwrecked on a throne, ended his colophon in a hand that admittedly proved he still had a dazzling mastery of the skill but increasingly lacked discipline: ‘My imperial person, in his concern to decipher the manuscript, devoted all his erudition and hours of research, reading and reflection to every last sign. In vain.’ As this item seemed to date back to the period of An Shih-Kao, the emperor asked the then king of Parthia, where this genius originated, to send him a delegation of intellectuals and experts, but they too were unable to identify the language. They pointed out that, according to the annals of history, An Shih-Kao was familiar with some twenty languages, most of them dead. The mystery remains impenetrable but the emperor is convinced that, despite its brevity, the text is a sutra, since it was positioned at the very top of the reliquary, inside the most sacred statue. This hypothesis is joined by another, from Su Shi, the emperor’s favoured poet with very pronounced inclinations towards Buddhism: remembering that An Shih-Kao was assassinated, Su wondered whether there was any secret link between this crime and the roll of silk in which An Shih-Kao might reveal something about the authenticity of the relics.’

  “As for Puyi,” the professor went on, after gazing for a while at the silent streets flitting by through the tram window, “his fascination with the manuscript took an unexpected turn. Towards the end of the 1920s, before the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, Puyi, who was then twenty-five, was confronted with the dilemma of behaving patriotically at the risk of never regaining his throne or collaborating with the Japanese who might one day restore him to his imperial role, albeit at the expense of his honour. It was at this point, as if trying to find a message to resolve his dilemma, that he threw himself into deciphering the unknown language, firstly on a whim but later with a nervous intensity that gradually consumed him. Books translated by An Shih-Kao began to overrun his study, dining room, bedroom, bed and soon his whole existence. For the most part these works, devoted to various techniques of dhyana meditation or to numerical categories, made him feel faint and dizzy, bringing on migraines that clouded his little round eyes and made imaginary motes of dust dance across his field of vision, but he forced himself to apply a system conceived by one of his former tutors with the aim, after considerable circumnavigations, of identifying one word or phrase that might have sprung from the great translator’s hand in an unguarded moment, betraying the secret to the labyrinthine construction of this unknown language. One day, when he was reading the nineteenth volume of one of the seven versions (the number of pages and contents of each version vary and even contradict each other depending on when they were written, constituting several areas of controversy) of the Buddhanusmri Tisamadhi-Sutra (a meditative sutra that evokes different manifestations of Buddha), he had a sudden conviction that all An Shih-Kao’s translations belonged to the classic tradition of Hinayana, a school of thought known for its strict discipline and which had fallen out of usage long since in China but was, and still is to this day, very widespread in Burma, Sikkim, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. Convinced he was on the right track, Puyi then noted these countries down in red ink and sent their heads of state or their British guardians official letters essentially asking for their help in deciphering the signs. At first these letters went unanswered without upsetting Puyi at all, because he had now turned his research to another field of investigation: the origins of Chinese writing. His aim was to find the oldest glyptic signs which might have a link to those in the manuscript and that a linguistic genius like An Shih-Kao would have been able to write. Puyi would certainly never have thrown himself into such an enterprise had he had any idea of the complexity this work entailed or the erudition it required. To some historians, this long march towards the origins of the Chinese language represents a final flurry of patriotism from the last emperor, but they also hold that he ended up losing himself along the way, which, in my humble opinion, is by no means a certainty, because a man in a state of mental torture is sometimes better equipped to approach the truth than scholars. Puyi had three thousand chests of national treasures and he started by asking to see a collection of small, thin-walled bronze alcohol flasks made during the Zhou era (late eleventh century-256 B.C.). Using a magnifying glass, he studied their minute inscriptions, where he found no trace of the unknown language, but—examining the signs that soothsayers had had carved onto these small yet solemn and imposing receptacles—he felt for the first time that they constituted a separate ritual language with little connection to Chinese writing. This idea was reinforced when he scrutinised another, still older glyptic language used by soothsayers about two thousand years before our era. He found it in his collection of rare antiquities that had never belonged to previous emperors, but had been given to him by a private collector at the beginning of the twentieth century: inscriptions on sections of tortoise-shell, which had been used for divination by reading the patterns of cracks on them, kinds of diagrams that soothsayers created by burning the shells; the interpretation (in some cases propitious, in others not) of these diagrams, the date, name of the interested party and reason for the sacrifice were later engraved on the shells, themselves so thin and fragile that most would barely want to touch them with their fingertips for fear they would crumble to dust. During this period Puyi’s doctors, concerned to see him laugh a great deal of the time for no apparent reason, worried about his mental health. I myself am convinced he was at last savouring a brief moment of happiness when he could forget the outside world, his political dilemma, his impotence, etc., as he laid out those tortoiseshells and wandered along pathways through an ornamental garden of signs as far removed from Chinese writing as the unfamiliar language on the manuscript. To Puyi those signs did not belong to a language at all, but to a system of purely graphic symbols with no grammatical rules or synta
ctical relationships. It was the language he had always been looking for, one he had found only in dreams or as a child, a language without verbs, just nouns, nouns and nouns—a language, I like to think, with which he could have written his own motto, painted in large characters on the walls of his residence: No verbs, therefore no concerns.

  “After the inscriptions on tortoiseshell, Puyi was inspired by patterns suggesting a primitive sort of writing, painted or engraved on two ceramic articles in his possession: a pot with openwork sides to display its contents and ajar with a narrow neck. He then widened his field of research, obtaining photographs and copies of prehistoric engravings found deep inside legendary caves in far-flung provinces. In 1980 a distant cousin of his published a two-volume work entitled Glyphs and Rock Carvings Acquired by Puyi.

  Little by little, [the cousin states in his preface,] as he copied and recopied them, Puyi managed to hear a dialogue between these patterns, the suns, human bones, birds, frogs, fish, plants and insects, not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs. As several weeks could pass without his speaking to anyone but his Japanese sumo, this verbless exchange thrumming round inside his head constituted his only conversations. In a wine-coloured leather diary for 1930 (probably a gift from his English tutor and now conserved at the Museum of Contemporary History), there are some brief notes sufficiently explicit to demonstrate that, in his mind, these glyphs and rock carvings were associated with images of paradise, which ended up haunting his dreams. On the page for the 8th of November, for example, he writes: “dreamed of Banpo, a giraffe” … Banpo was known from pictograms dating back to the second half of the second millennium before our era.

  “One day,” the professor went on, “he received a letter from Borneo, an Indonesian island whose Dutch governor had had copies made of the alphabets of several languages once used by native peoples. Among them was one letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which attracted Puyi’s attention because it resembled a sign on the manuscript. Peculiarly, instead of leaping for joy, he simply glanced at a map of the world, placed his finger on this land lost in the middle of an ocean which—in An Shih-Kao’s day—had not yet been crossed and cried: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, no!’ With which he removed his finger and had the letter filed in archives still known as the Court Archives, the better to forget it.

  “Another letter, a surprisingly thick one, its envelope smothered in strange stamps and postmarks, arrived in Puyi’s residence in Tianjin in mid-August 1931. The place was shrouded in gloomy silence, this was a month before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The sumo came into his room and put the letter on the emperor’s bedside table while he lay huddled in his freezing bed, tortured by worry and migraines, haunted by the thought of becoming a puppet for the Japanese who would name him emperor of Manchuria, casting infamy over the entire Chinese people. That same day the only Chinese scholar familiar with Sanskrit, the sacred language of India, was summoned before Puyi to read the letter. All that emerged from this consultation was that the author of the letter was a ruler from a region which once belonged to ancient India but was now part of Nepal, and its Kapilavastu district had been Buddha’s birthplace two thousand five hundred years earlier. On orders from his superior, a British governor who had fought the Boxers in Peking in his youth, he was sending Puyi a copy of The Hitopadeśa, a collection of fables written in a local language called Newari, a combination of Sanskrit and a north Himalayan dialect used by nomads. This letter fostered an infatuation with Sanskrit in Puyi, who was quite won over by its grammar, as it was explained to him by the scholar, or rather by one essential grammatical point, the only one that held his attention: in this very rich, very precise language, verbs existed only in the passive form. You could never say, for example: ‘The cook is preparing rice,’ but rather: ‘Rice is being prepared by the cook.’ Tormented by a feeling of failure and the thought that he would soon leave his residence and be no more than a puppet emperor in captivity, Puyi felt every sentence pronounced by the scholar resonating in his ears like some gentle incantatory formula, his every word opening a new doorway through which he alone could reach the skies with his magician by his side. In the space of an afternoon an idyllic world was born in his mind, a world where verbs—actions—were reduced to their passive form, thus making every kind of threat disappear. No gesture or movement had any meaning now other than submitting, like a virgin sheet of paper that accepts having print over its entire surface, sometimes even being deeply dented in the process.

  “That evening the Sanskrit scholar, exhausted by his new pupil’s ardour, took his leave immediately after dinner to sleep in one of the many empty bedrooms. Puyi, on the other hand, as he later recounted, spent a sleepless night learning the alphabet and a dozen or so Sanskrit words by heart, floundering in the contrast between long and short vowels, their solemn weight, the way they alternated, and in the framework of consonants, the voiced and unvoiced, the aspirates and the unvoiced aspirates. He even tried to compose a sentence—his first in Sanskrit—to taste the pleasures of passive experience and passive desire; he succeeded and it was beautiful. Then he discovered, and this too was beautiful, how to decline the concept of despair in the passive form and, better still, in passive past participles. Oh, the power of passivity!

  “He did not close his eyes until daybreak, sinking into a half sleep, and, in a fleeting fraction of a second, he saw two strangers leaning over him, one tall in a monk’s habit with a beard that completely covered his cheeks, the other small and slight, still young but with a greying goatee on the tip of his pointed chin. They disappeared just as they had appeared, before a single word had been exchanged. Only afterwards did Puyi recognise them as An Shih-Kao and Huizong, even though the latter had not been wearing an imperial headdress. He had two votive altars erected to them in a large hall in recognition of his gratitude for this first visit, which he saw as a very good omen, a mute baptism of the sacred language.

  “In the last fine days of autumn—which were also, although he did not know this yet, the last fine days of his apolitical life as emperor—to be sure that he could immerse himself in this language to which he was recently converted, whatever the time of day and wherever he might be (in his study, the dining room, the bathroom, the toilet, along a dark corridor, in the disused ballroom or the deserted courtyard), he gave his guest, the professor, sheets of white paper and asked him to write out the names of almost everything in Sanskrit, as in the village struck down with amnesia in One Hundred Years of Solitude. His servants copied out the labels in whitewash letters a hundred times the size on the ground, the walls, doors, windows, armchairs, beds … even the sumo, who pinned the words raja purusa, ‘the emperors servant,’ on his capacious tunic. For the first time in a long while Puyi could be heard roaring with laughter again, yes, real laughter, in his falsetto voice, granted, but glorious laughter which filled the gloomy house with joy. One morning he met his scholarly visitor in a corridor and greeted him in Sanskrit but, instead of saying ‘Good morning,’ he employed a polite formula with all its attendant protocol, meant for the emperor alone, without realising he was making a mistake. His guest bowed to thank him but, moments later, was packing his bags, and it was only when he came into Puyi’s study with his suitcase and said a simple ‘Goodbye’ in Sanskrit that light dawned in the emperor’s mind and, understanding the absurdity of his mistake, he was filled with elation and laughed till he wept. He experienced similar sensual ecstasy when his wife—a general’s daughter he had married six years earlier and to whom he vowed platonic love, although he did not truly know her sweet face or her tender body—came into his study disguised as a young Indian prince, sat on his lap, covered his face in kisses and whispered in his ear: ‘sā bhāryā yā pativratā,’ a Sanskrit sentence which he had made her learn by heart in the tomb-like chill of her bedroom, impregnated by a strong smell of opium, and which could be translated as: ‘me wife devoted to my husband.’

  “But time had run out for Puyi to use the words of this sacred language,
which he had learned so quickly and with such appetite as an effective means of defence. Events took an ironic turn when two Japanese officers, in civilian dress, came to fetch him and take him out to a car parked by the front door of his residence (for the rest of his life he would remember the squeak of that car’s brakes and the furtive sound of footsteps—or rather the absence of any sound of footsteps—made by those two ghosts). He struggled to keep his composure and, with all the dignity of a head of state, responded to the officers’ military salute by uttering, syllable by syllable, the longest Sanskrit sentence he knew by heart: Brāhmanah Kalaham asahamāno bhāryāvatsalyāt svakutumbam parityajya brāhmanyā saya desāntaram gatah (‘After his house was abandoned, unable to bear the disagreement any longer, out of love for his wife, the Brahman fled with her to a foreign country’). After such an exploit and having surprised even himself, Puyi was overcome with joy and experienced patriotic pride for the last time in his life, particularly as, although they understood absolutely nothing, the two ghosts from the land of the Rising Sun had bowed before him on three separate occasions during this interminable sentence.

  “But when it came to saying goodbye to his scholarly guest he again used an inappropriate Sanskrit formula without realising it. For reasons of intellectual integrity, his embarrassed guest reminded him that he should have used the term meaning ‘goodbye,’ and not the one for ‘hello’ in the present tense. Puyi, who had managed to keep his madness in check up until this point thanks to Sanskrit, succumbed to a violent fit of hysteria and, shaking like a leaf, called the man every abusive name he could think of so that their farewell scene descended into nightmare. An hour later, at the airfield, his anger subsided when the sumo, the only person permitted to travel with him, appeared with two padlocked, chrome-plated metal chests, which bounced glints of sunlight round the stark, tattered and uncomfortable cabin. He put them down opposite the emperor on an iron seat with cracking dark green paint. These two chests—one filled with works of art counted among the most precious treasures in China if not the world, the other quite priceless, once the property of Emperor Huizong and now Puyi—were cited as exhibits years later by an international tribunal, proving Puyi was not innocent: he had prepared his departure and had, therefore, been guilty of treason when he stepped into that Japanese aircraft. A crime that was all the more shameful for being premeditated.