THOUGHTS

On my last morning back, I got up early and went to the campus park, the old Temple of the Earth, a beautiful place full of ancient trees, its lovely square altar still undamaged. Chinese parks are delightful in the early morning, thronged with people devoting themselves to a variety of eccentric pursuits.

In one corner, tango music was blaring out from a loudspeaker and I watched couples dipping and swooping perfectly in time. On another part, a group leader was chanting some thirty elderly people through their morning exercises. A couple of years ago, there would have been Falun Gong practitioners here too. Now its followers are in hiding or in jail.

As I left the park I paused to watch an old man writing Chinese characters on the path. He and a long-handled brush which he dipped in a bucket of water. He was writing the lines of a Tang poem in exquisite calligraphy on the hard, packed dirt path. By the time he reached the end of the poem, the first characters had dried out and disappeared. He noticed me watching and, smiling, offered me the brush. I dipped it in the bucket and wrote the first line of the poem: "The way that can be known is not the constant way." My characters looked terrible next to his, but he seemed pleased, nevertheless. He smiled and took up his brush again, bending to the pleasure of creating his transient beauty.