Below, you will find an excerpt from Lu Chi’s “Wen Fu – The Art of Writing.”

Our decision to annotate this particular section of text is twofold: firstly, as interpreters of the text, it spoke to us on a personal level; secondly, we also felt that meditation can be used as an important key or tool to help a poet avoid falling into writer’s block and unlock a writer’s inspiration to get him/her into a zone of creativity as Lu Chi discusses throughout his text.

The annotations can be found by clicking the numbered tabs along the right edge of the screen.

 

2. Meditation Before Writing

In the beginning,
All external vision and sound are suspended,
Perpetual thought itself gropes in time and space;

Then, the spirit at full gallop reaches the eight limits of the cosmos, and the mind, self-buoyant, will ever soar to new insurmountable heights.

When the search succeeds, feeling, at first but a glimmer, will gradually gather into full luminosity, when all objects thus lit up glow as if each the other’s light reflects.

Drip-drops are distilled afresh from a sea of words since time out of mind, as quintessence that savors of all the aroma of the Six Arts.

Now one feels blithe as a swimmer calmly borne by celestial waters, and then, as a diver into a secret world, lost in subterranean currents.

Arduously sought expressions, hitherto evasive, hidden, will be like stray fishes out of the ocean bottom to emerge on the angler’s hook;

And quick-winged metaphors like birds are brought down from the curl-clouds by the fowler’s bow.

Thus the poet will have mustered what for a hundred generations awaited his brush, creating music that has waited unheard for a thousand ages.

Let the full-blown garden flowers of the ancients in their own morning glory stand; to breathe life into late blossoms that have yet to bud will be his sole endeavor.

Eternity he sees in a twinkling,
And the whole world he views in one glance.