Views of a Chinese Graveyard

In the hilly region towards the centre of the Prince of Wales Island – or Pe Nang as it is called – is the old town of Bilak Pulau. Stranded there an entire afternoon awaiting return buses to George Town the present author wandered into the surrounding jungle and about three miles out of town encountered an old traditional Chinese cemetery. The photographs on this page are views of the cemetery, the graves and the funerary art from that site, along with a few rudimentary notes on the symbolism of Chinese graves. 

The Chinese constitute an ethnic majority in modern Pe Nang – the only area of the Malay peninsula or the Malacca Straits where they do so – and have been an established community for many centuries. Although there are a few graves from recent times, this cemetery is from an older era and is the burial place of many of the progenitors and ancestors of the illustrious Chinese clans who still populate the island. These were Chinese – mainly from southern China – who ventured to the Straits in search of fortune, or at least a better life. 

Although remote and buried in forest, the cemetery is still tended. In the photos shown on this page readers will notice the profusion of slips of paper strewn all about; this is from a recent festival in which graves are decorated with messages to the dead, as in this instance:

The remarkable thing about traditional Chinese graves is their shape. In contrast to the boxed rectilinear graves of Europeans, they are almost always semi-circular in shape, or what is often described as 'horseshoe' shaped, or else the shape of the Greek letter omega. The deceased is buried with the head at the top of this curved shape and so the "head stone" is actually where the feet are. Burial is usually quite shallow - compared to the mandatory six feet of the european grave - and so a tumulus or mound is usually shaped over the area inside the omega/horseshoe. The grave therefore is elevated above ground level.

There is much discussion about the significance and meaning of the curved burial plot, although very little of it is informative or sensible. As with nearly all things Chinese, readers will find an abundance of reports stating that the shape is regarded as "lucky" and is designed to bring "good luck" to the deceased in the afterlife. This tells us nothing. 

More useful are accounts that tell us that the shape is developed from the theories and practices of feng sui - Chinese geomancy - where it is considered beneficial for the dead to be buried in a valley or a concave formation of hills; where this is lacking then the grave itself is mounded up and shaped accordingly. This is evident in the graveyard depicted here. It is, as it happens, on a western-facing hillside that conforms in part to the feng sui requirements, and clearly individual graves have been shaped into small hills to accentuate the natural lay of the earth in an appropriate way. 

Other accounts of the omega/horseshoe grave remark upon the fact that sometimes the tumulus is decorated like a tortoise shell, and so the entire construction seems to allude to the shape of a tortoise. Why? Because, we are again told, "tortoises are good luck." Certainly, but why? The key idea is that the tortoise shell is cosmological. This is a very common symbolism found throughout Chinese cosmology (and the Chinese tradition is strongly cosmological.) The symbolism concerns an over-arching shell such as the sky is supposed to be in traditional cosmological understandings. The grave then becomes a microcosm of the world. There is, however, also the fact that tortoises, according to legend, are supposed to seek out a suitable (re: "lucky") place to die. By making the grave tortoise-like it becomes - by extension - a good place for the dead to be buried. It is, in any case, all about a suitable location. For the traditional Chinese the location of the grave is paramount. 

What most accounts of Chinese burial practices neglect to mention, though, is that - very obviously - the shape of the traditional grave is uterine. The earth is a womb. The grave is the uterus. The dead await rebirth (either by resurrection or in the Pureland - Chinese accounts of the afterlife are diverse.) The shapes and curves of the Chinese grave are, in any case, distinctly feminine. This is the deepest, most primordial and most important symbolism. Compared to the utilitarian Western burial box (coffin) the Chinese grave is distinctly anatomical and the curved shapes emphasise the idea of the earth as womb, the living earth, which is the key underlying metaphor of geomancy. Chinese burial practices are above all geomantic. This fact is on display everywhere in a traditional Chinese cemetery. We will hopefully have occasion to explore this further at a later date. 

Note the semi-circular "forecourt" in front of the grave marker and the lines of salt that families draw at various points around grounds along with offerings to the dead. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

On Octagons

As reported in a previous post – here – the moment one ventures from the Indian world into the Chinese world one is confronted by a wash of the lucky colour red. Red, or more correctly vermillion, or cinnabar, is the colour of the Chinese and Chinese-influenced traditions. It is very conspicuous. It is everywhere. And along with it, also conspicuous, is the profusion of eight-sided figures, octagons, within the Sino-Asiatic order. They are nowhere to be seen in Hindoo temples, nor in Boodhist temples even though Boodhism features an eightfold path – this takes the form of the eight-spoked Dharma Wheel in typical Boodhist iconography. The octagon, however – the eight-sided plain figure with or without an eight-pointed star – is conspicuously Chinese. 

The author of these pages is currently resident in the old city of George Town on the Prince of Wales Island, the only city in Malaysia that boasts a Chinese majority. A feature of the old city is the beautiful temples and clan houses, some of them very extensive and sumptuous, some very old. They are among the best Taoist and Confucian temples outside of China proper. Chinese from both Formosa and the mainland travel to George Town to visit them. It is a major temple city and a major centre of traditional Chinese religion.

An immediately obvious feature of such temples, and the attending buildings, and the Chinese domestic terrace houses too, is the proliferation of octagonal forms – tile designs, floor patterns, sacred insignia, altar iconography, and so on. The Chinese “lucky colour” is vermillion. The “lucky number”, as the Chinese will tell you, is eight. Sets of eight, preferably arranged in octagonal forms, are considered auspicious. It is by far the most common geometrical motif in traditional Chinese decoration.

Below are a few examples of octagonal forms to be seen around George Town. Some of the roads feature large octagonal designs and octagonal tile designs are everywhere to be seen. The geometrical tiles themselves were originally imported from Sheffield by the British, but the Chinese were so taken by them – such is their love of the octagonal pattern - that they adopted them as a standard feature of their homes, temples and pathways. The present author has noted the tile patterns of George Town - one of the most striking and beautiful features of the old city - in a previous post here.

 

Octagons feature as a design on several streets in George Town old city. 

Design on the wall of the Chinese clan association building in George Town

Octagonal tile patterns found throughout George Town

What, though, is the significance of the octagon, both in principle and specifically to the Chinese? It is, of course, not exclusive to the Chinese tradition; it does feature in the symbolism of other traditional orders as well, but nowhere so extensively. In the occidental order we find it the symbolic form of baptism. Several famous baptistries, such as that in Florence, are octagonal, and – a residual continuation of the same symbolism - baptistimal fonts in Catholic and some Anglican and Lutheran churches. Amongst Christians, though, it is a form more typical of the Eastern churches where it occurs naturally with a sacred architecture featuring a dome atop of rectilinear understorey. 

This is the form appropriated from the Byzantine Christians by the Mahometans when they built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem – perhaps the most impressive octagonal building in the world. It was possibly from this inspiration that Emperor Frederick – who had seen the Dome of the Rock during the Crusades - built his mysterious octagonal folly, the Castel de Monte, in southern Italy. All the same, these architectural examples are exceptions. The octagon is not as conspicuous as a symbol in the occidental world as it is in the orient. It occurs naturally in Mahometan geometrical patterns, but there it is not imbued with the same symbolic value – marked as “auspiciousness” – that we find among the Chinese. 

The Castel del Monte

Basically, the symbolism of the octagon is this: it is an intermediate form between the circle (of heaven) and the square (of earth). Its primary meaning therefore is: regeneration. It signals: the square that returns to the circle. That is, it consists of two superimposed squares which are in the process of returning into a circular form. Thus the association with baptism: the rite of regeneration. In the Chinese (which is to say Taoist) context, though – and this is quite apart from its correspondences with the eight trigrams of the I Ching and other symbolic parallels such as the eight directions – the signification of regeneration is overtly alchemical. 

As with the colour red, the meaning behind the “luck” the Chinese associate with the symbol is to be understood via the strongly alchemical nature of the Chinese order. Alchemy concerns exactly this: regeneration. The regeneration of matter into spirit (if we are to describe it dualistically). The regeneration of base metals into gold. In the octagon, the square (matter, earth) is regenerating into the circle (spirit, heaven). It is for this reason that it finds such a prominent place in the Chinese tradition – it is the pre-eminent (stable) expression of the doctrine of alchemical regeneration, which is the core theme of Chinese spirituality. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

In Defence of the Colour Blue

The internet is a sad, lonely world where people will grasp at any novelty to stir them from digital ennui. Recently – or actually it has been over the last several years – a story has kept resurfacing in various internet journals, blogs, social media outlets and “memes” (whatever a “meme” might be) that is supposed to tantalize readers and viewers with the improbable assertion that the colour blue is a modern invention. It is a novelty story in the “stranger-than-fiction” category designed to brighten the dull days of the world-weary. 

The story, which takes several forms, appeared yet again in a recent edition of ‘Business Insider’ – exactly the sort of content you would expect to find in ‘Business Insider’! - under the heading NO ONE COULD SEE THE COLOUR BLUE UNTIL MODERN TIMES. It was thereafter reposted by well-meaning but bored individuals who were taken in by the headline, and thus it began yet another round of self-perpetuating appearances on the world wide web as it slowly but surely insinuated itself into the daily conversation of the digital class and twitterati. It soon became an item of received wisdom. People who should know better started coming up to you saying “Did you know that no one could see the colour blue until modern times?” 

In the ‘Business Insider’ article we are told:

Ancient languages didn't have a word for blue - not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there's evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

This, really, is the crux of the whole matter. It is a linguistic argument. Someone has claimed that words for blue are missing in old languages and since there was no word for it then people in olden times must not have been able to see the colour at all – as unlikely as that might be. No other evidence for this proposal is on offer, except for some extremely dubious experiments with an obscure Namibian tribe who, apparently, have trouble distinguishing between blue and green. This leads to the logical leap that asserts that the colour blue is a modern invention, a recent social construction (you know, like gender.) As the ‘Business Insider’ puts it:

Before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they didn't know they were seeing it.

And they ask:

If you see something yet can't see it, does it exist?

We arrive at the real point of the story: the tiresome trope that knowledge is socially constructed. We have the physical receptors to see the colour blue, sure enough, and we can safely assume that ancient people did too, but if there is no corresponding construct of knowledge (which is purely subjective and has no necessary correlation to objective facts) then it may as well have not existed at all. We make reality. Reality is a social construct, a gentleman’s agreement, and nothing more.

A story as absurd as this should give us reason to pause. The moment one encounters a headline such as NO ONE COULD SEE THE COLOUR BLUE UNTIL MODERN TIMES one should immediately suspect that it is a piece of post-modern relativist twaddle, and, indeed, so it turns out to be. It is a good example of how post-modern intellectualism operates. Typically, you take some flimsy linguistic evidence and add to it some half-baked anthropological study of a colour-retarded tribe no one has ever heard of - the exception that disproves the rule - and use it to demolish one of the most obvious standards of common sense. It is disconcerting and it is intended to be. If even the colours we see are invented, if they are just social constructs, then every thing we ever held to be normal or true about ourselves and our world is open to question since it is probably equally false as well.

As it happens, though, this particular exercise in post-modern absurdity is easy to refute. It is extraordinary that we should hesitate to think otherwise. Is it true that ancient languages had no word for the colour blue? Of course not. It is demonstrable nonsense. Could pre-modern people see the colour blue. Of course they could. 

The roots of this nonsense lie in the late XIXth century. The entire idea is a ludicrous falsity first proposed by the British Prime Minister Gladstone. It has since been taken up, extended, amplified and digitalized into an internet phenomenon. 

Gladstone, readers should be aware, is the most odious Prime Minister in British history prior to Tony Blair. This is the man who turned British foreign policy against the Ottomans and embraced the family of Ibn Saud. This is the man who, as Prime Minister, would often take to the back streets of London and lecture prostitutes on Christian morality. In his student days, it seems, he once sat down and trawled through the epic poems of Homer noting references to various colours. An unimaginative simpleton, he was perturbed by the famous Homeric description of the “wine-dark sea”. Why “wine-dark”? Did Homer not know that the sea is blue? Never mind the tradition that Homer was, in fact, blind. It was Mr Gladstone – a counter of instances - who first determined that Homer lacked a word for blue. What about the Greek word “cyan” one wonders? Gladstone overlooked that. He hit upon the theory that the Greeks could not see the colour blue. (Apparently, by the same reasoning, they didn't defacte either, since Homer makes no mention of toilets. The old 'argument from silence' fallacy.) Gladstone was not only politically loathsome, he was dim as well. 

Getting more to the point, what, let us ask, about the very many instances of surviving works of Greek art - not to mention Minoan and Egyptian and others - that feature blue enamel or traces thereof? These alone demolish the entire case. Mr Gladstone - not an artistic sort of soul - overlooked that too. Is there no evidence of early people using the colour blue in art work? Of course there is! An abundance of it! 

It is true that the earliest cave art tends to lack the colour blue, but that is purely because permanent blue dyes are relatively rare in nature, difficult to procure, difficult to make and quick to fade. All the same, one can find plenty of blue in ancient art. Is it really necessary to show examples of it in order to expose Mr Gladstone’s theory as the nonsense it is? See the pictures on this page. Mr Gladstone was a vicious political revisionist, a toady, a self-righteous moral puritan and a literal-minded philistine who could see no better purpose for the texts of Homer than to count instances of adjectives – and that, badly. That is where this whole story comes from. The idea that the Greeks - and by extension other noble people of ancient times - could not see the colour blue should be known as Gladstone's folly. 

Regrettably, we still live with the disastrous realignments of British foreign policy first made by Mr Gladstone, and now it seems we must endure his ridiculous undergraduate theory about colours as well. After all, let us recall that, as well as knowledge, stupidity is also socially constructed. The story that no one could see the colour blue before the modern era is itself a social construction and reveals much about the forlorn age in which we live. That anyone – anyone! – could even countenance such a headline is testament to just how eager we are today for some new stimulation, some novelty to shake us from our jaded seen-it-all-already post-modern lethargy.  We are now so prepared to dismiss common sense, so prepared to throw away every eternal verity, so ready to believe that the entire testimony of the human race heretofore is bunk, that we will entertain even the most ridiculous of propositions. Is it true that ancient people could not see the colour blue? The correct answer to such a question is: Don't be stupid. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Taoist Portal Deities

The old city area of George Town, and other older areas of Pe Nang, boast some of the most beautiful and illustrious Chinese Taoist temples outside of China proper. The Chinese settled Prince of Wales Island and the straits of Malacca at an early period for purposes of trade. At first they established temples to gods sacred to seafarers, but over time they also established clan temples devoted to ancestral worship. It is now the clan temples that are most prominent. They house the gods of the various clans, memorials to ancestors, as well as acting as social organisations and meeting halls for clan members. In the XIXth century there was often fierce or even violent competition between rival clans, sometimes leading to outbreaks of killing and riots. The sagacious British rulers of the isle had to sort it out. Today, the rivalry between clans can be seen in the efforts each has made to render their respective temples bigger and better and more beautiful than others. This has made these temples especially splendid, and in recent times there has been an effort to restore them to their original state. 

Some of the Chinese temples in George Town have Boodhist features, and some - including the central Temple of the Goddess of Mercy in Pitt Street - include Hindoo deities, but most are Toaist and house Taoist gods. One of the keys to understanding Chinese religiosity is that its dominant theme is the continuity of life and death. This often leads it to be characterised as "ancestor worship". Very often, illustrious and important ancestors become worshipped as gods. This is a Taoist extension of the institution of the boddhisatva in Mahayana Boodhism. A famous physician, for example, will be said to forgo eternal felicity (nirvana) after he dies in order to continue to assist the ailing among the living, and in this way he becomes a god of healing. His image is set up in temples and prayers are made to him for intercession. Famous ancestors of particular clans are elevated to the status of deity after the same manner. Prayers concern the prosperity of the clan, wealth, good fortune and social advancement. The dead do not move on. They continue to look over and assist the living. This is one of the main themes that the Chinese take from Mahayana Boodhism. It goes neatly with their "ancestor worship". 

One of the most outstanding features of the George Town clan temples are the portal doors. In many temples these large, heavy wooden doors are painted with images of protective deities who prevent evil spirits from entering the temples. The protective deities are two generals who lived in the Tang Dynasty. They once stood as guards for the emperor. Now, in the afterlife, they have sworn to continue in this role and so they are worshipped as guardian deities; their images adorn portals and doorways and other places where it is necessary to prevent the entry of malevolent influences. 

The photographs on this present page show examples of the protective portal guardians from several George Town clan temples, as well as some images of the interior spaces of the temples themselves. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Nuptial Number Revisited

The so-called 'Nuptial Number' is by far Plato's most intractable mathematical problem. It is so dense and so obscure that many commentators, both ancient and modern, have decided that it has no rational solution but is instead an item of satire, not to be taken seriously. Others - including the present author (an admitted obscurantist) - see it as one of the great keys of the Platonic canon, if only it is understood correctly. Like the impossibly obscure formulae of the alchemists, it is the key to the Mysteries. 

It is not the purpose of this post to offer any sort of detailed solution to the 'problem' posed by this most difficult of passages from Plato's Republic; rather its limited purpose is simply to present the passage in question in a clear, accurate translation usefully divided into its component parts. The Greek text is impossibly convoluted and many of the words used are both rare and esoteric. No translation can save the passage from what seems to be deliberate obfuscation on the part of the author. But much of it can be disentangled and made clearer by some explanatory additions and a careful break down of its parts. 

What the infamous 'number' might be and what its significance might be is another matter, but the drift of the passage in itself  - leaving aside the formula of the number - can be straightened out into a largely lucid account. That is what is attempted below. The rendering is based upon those of Benjamin Jowett and James Adam (with copious references to the lexicon of Liddel & Scott. We begin at Republic 545D:

THE PROBLEM: WHAT CAUSES STATES TO DECLINE?

“Come, then,” I said, “and let us try to discern the way a timocracy will develop from of an aristocracy. Or is it the simple and unvarying law that in every form of government disturbance begins among the ruling class itself, when sedition arises among it, but as long as it is at one with itself, disturbance will not occur?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“How, then, Glaucon,” I said, “will disturbance arise in our ideal city, and how will our auxiliaries and rulers fall out and be at odds with one another and with themselves?

INVOCATION TO THE MUSES

Shall we invoke the Muses as Homer does in order to tell us “‘how faction first fell upon them,’” and shall we, like a tragic poet, picture the Muses speaking in an elevated style, as if they are speaking seriously when in fact they are playing with us and teasing us like one child teases another?

“How?”

“In some such fashion as follows:

THE WORDS OF THE MUSES

[Having been invoked in the Homeric manner - albeit ambiguously - the Muse now speaks, and it is through this quasi-Homeric Muse that we are given the Nuptial Number. It is an open question as to how seriously we should take this entire construction, although let us note that Plato uses this "Muse" in other contexts in other dialogues. Many of the 'Platonic myths' are introduced in this way.]

ALL THINGS PASS

It is indeed difficult for a state ideally constituted as we have described to be shaken and disturbed; but since for everything that is born there is also a time of destruction, even a constitution such as ours will not last forever, but it shall surely be dissolved eventually.

This is the manner of its dissolution:

THINGS MOVE IN CYCLES

Not only for plants that grow from the earth but also for animals that live upon it there is a cycle of fertility and barrenness of soul and body as often as the revolutions of their orbs come full circle, in short cycles for the short-lived things and long cycles for long-lived things.

BEGETTING CHILDREN OUT OF SEASON

Concerning human beings, there are also laws of fecund birth and of infertility, and there will come a time when these laws will escape the men you have bred to be the rulers of your city. For all their wisdom, and combining calculation with observation, they will beget children out of season.

A PERIOD COMPREHENDED BY A NUMBER

Now for divine creatures there is a period comprehended by a number that is final and perfect, but for a mortal the number is the first in which multiplications of root by square - when they have attained three distances, with four limits, of that which makes like and unlike and waxes and wanes - have rendered all things commensurable with one another.

THE BASE PRODUCES TWO HARMONIES

The base of this, containing the ratio of four to three, yoked with five, produces two harmonies when increased three times.

1. One of them is equal an equal number of times, so many times a hundred.

2. The other is equal length one way but oblong

- one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of five diminished by one in each case, or of the irrational by two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of three.

LORD OF BETTER AND WORSE BIRTHS

The sum of these - this entire geometrical number, a number measuring the earth - is lord of better and worse births.

THE NEGLECTFUL GUARDIANS

When the guardians of your ideal state neglect this and marry brides to bridegrooms out of season children of ill-nature and ill-fortune will be born.

NEGLECT OF THE MUSES

The best of their predecessors will indeed make rulers but these offspring, being unworthy, when they have succeeded to their fathers' offices of power, will begin to neglect us muses, though they are our guardians, and will pay too little heed to music, and then to gymnastics, so that the children will deteriorate and grow up without us.

THE METALLIC RACES

And the rulers who come after them will have little of the guardian in them for testing Hesiod's races and your own - races of gold and silver and copper and iron. And iron will be mixed with silver, and copper will be mixed with gold, and this will engender unlikeness within them, and an unevenness which is disharmonious, which things always create war and enmity wherever they are found. This surely is the pedigree of sedition, wherever it arises. As Homer says, "Of this lineage, look you!" (Iliad 6:211)

CONCLUSION

[Here the Muses finish and we return to the conversation between the interlocutors of the dialogue, namely Socrates and Glaucon.]

"And quite right too," said Glaucon. "We affirm what the Muses say as correct."

"Indeed," I said, "because they are Muses."

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black