Long Zhong Lao Seng
龙钟老僧
“The Answer That Was Not to the Question”
His Story
Chapter 2. Jia Yucun, out of office and killing time in the country, walks to a collapsing temple with 智通寺 on the board over the gate and this couplet beside it: 身后有余忘缩手，眼前无路想回头 — with plenty left behind him he forgot to pull his hand back; with no road left in front of him he thinks of turning round. Yucun decides someone inside must have turned a somersault and come out the other side, and goes in to see. He finds one decrepit old monk boiling gruel. The monk is deaf and dim, his teeth gone and his tongue blunt, and what he answers is not what he was asked. Yucun loses patience and leaves for a wine shop, where he meets Leng Zixing and hears the whole history of the Jia clan.
In Xiang Li's Hands
A shaven-headed old man bent nearly double in a black robe over cream, a long yellow-and-black rosary swinging free of his sash, a pale wooden ladle in one lined hand. He leans down toward a vague pale mass at lower left — the gruel pot implied rather than drawn. No temple, no couplet, no Yucun. Bare paper takes the rest.
She paints him mid-stoop and mid-task, so that the deafness reads as absorption.
The Calligraphy
龙钟老僧 — a description, not a name: doddering, old, a monk, four characters upper right in a hand as stooped as the figure under it.
Connections
- Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — walks in, asks two questions, gets nothing, and walks out.
- Leng Zixing 冷子兴 — whom Yucun meets minutes later, and who supplies everything the monk would not.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses
