A Garden Without the East (Part 2)

Lucretius did not answer at once. He placed his palm on the bark of the old pine. For the first time in a long while, he did not observe the world, but for a moment listened…

Before we continue, I would like to explain why the title of these writings is: A Garden Without East?

In human experience, the east is not only a geographical direction. It is also a symbol of beginning, of the birth of light, of awakening, and of the first step on the path. Yet the east is never absolute. It is always determined in relation to the one who is looking. What is east for one person is west for another. What is morning in one place is already day or evening elsewhere.

The east is therefore real within the world of relationships, measurements, and human perspectives, but it has no unchanging centre. A Garden Without East means a space in which there is no longer one privileged direction, one chosen starting point, or one time that would be closer to truth than the others. This is not a garden without light. On the contrary. It is a garden in which light does not come from only one direction.

In it, thinkers whom history usually separates by centuries and civilizations can meet: Laozi and Plotinus, Zhuangzi and Bruno, Confucius and Spinoza, Lucretius, Sima Chengzhen, and others. They do not meet as predecessors and successors, nor as teachings that must oppose or confirm one another, but as companions in an imaginary space where time loses its distance.

A Garden Without East is therefore not a space where one path defeats the others. It is an imaginary space where different paths meet because none of them demands to be the centre of all the others. When a person lays down the need for their own centre, something begins to reveal itself that the Daoist tradition calls qingjing 清靜 – clarity and stillness. In this clarity, differences are not erased. Quite the opposite: only when the desire for the dominance of a single explanation becomes calm can different voices truly hear one another. A Garden Without East is therefore a space without a privileged direction, without a privileged time, and without a privileged voice. It is a space of meeting.

***

(Continuation)

Resin slowly clung to his fingers. Lucretius looked at the trace the tree had left on his palm. In Rome, he might have searched for a cause. He would have asked which substance had been secreted from the inside of the trunk, which process had created it, and how it had passed through nature to his hand. But the meeting beneath this pine directed him toward a different reflection. The question was no longer only: How does something happen? It also became: What does it mean that something is at all?

The tree did not answer. Yet the silence did not remain empty either. The garden was like a space before the first word. Neither heaven nor earth. Neither beginning nor end. It belonged to no people and no time. Here there were no Romans, Chinese, or Greeks, nor those mixed peoples of present-day Europe. There were only voices that met for a moment.

The wind moved through the crown. No branch asked which other branch was right.

Lucretius finally spoke.

“People often think about the fear of death. Yet often they fear only the image they have created of it.”

“A person is not afraid only of ceasing to be. They also fear the thought that one day they will lose everything they have called their own: their body, their name, their memories, their place among other people. So they created images of the future. Some cultures created punishments, others  rewards. Some imagined eternal judges, others eternal gardens. Yet often it was not eternity speaking, but a person’s own fear, seeking form and duration.”

For a moment he looked into the emptiness between the branches.

“The deepest slavery is not in death itself. It is in the image of death that we already carry in life.”

He opened his scroll again. His voice was not the voice of a preacher. It was the voice of a person who had long contemplated the difficult human encounter with impermanence.

He read: ”Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.” (De rerum natura, III, 830–831)

Then he translated for the others: “Death is nothing to us and does not concern us in the least, since the nature of the mind is held to be mortal.”

Confucius listened to him attentively and then said:

“Yet people grieve for those who have gone.”

Lucretius nodded.

“Because they love.”

“Then love causes attachment to what is impermanent?”

“No.”

Lucretius looked toward the pine.

“Love gives value. Fear clings to what it senses it cannot keep.”

Zhuangzi picked up a leaf that had fallen from the tree.

“When a leaf falls, does the tree grieve for its past?”

Lucretius smiled.

“No.”

“Does that mean it has no beauty?”

“No.”

“Does that mean it has no meaning?”

Lucretius looked at the leaf.

“Perhaps that is precisely why it does.”

Confucius said slowly:

“Yet a person is not only a natural phenomenon. A person lives among people.”

He placed his hand on his knee.

“If a son loses his father, if a friend loses a friend, should we say that everything is only the movement of nature?”

Lucretius did not answer at once.

This time, he was the one who listened.

Confucius said: Wei zhi sheng, yan zhi si  未知生，焉知死。(Lunyu, 11.12) “If we do not yet know life, how could we know death?”

The wind stood still again for a moment. Lucretius looked toward him.

“Perhaps we began from different sides.”

“How?”

“I wished to free the human being from the fear of death by writing the following lines: Aeternas quoniam poenas in morte timendumignoratur...(De rerum natura, I, 111–112), in the sense of:

“For people fear eternal punishments after death because they do not understand the nature of things.”

Confucius nodded.

“And I wished for the human being to live properly while here.”

No one said that one of them was right. For in the Garden, questions were not doors that would be closed by individual answers or opened by individual questions.

Laozi, who had been gazing the whole time into the emptiness between the trees, therefore quietly uttered: Chu sheng ru si. 出生入死。“Whoever comes into life enters death.” (Daode jing, 50)

Lucretius looked at him.

“That sounds different from my words.”

“Perhaps it does.”

“But it does not contradict them,” said Lucretius.

Laozi did not answer. He only looked into the Roman’s eyes and then at the water moving among the stones. This time Zhuangzi remained silent the longest. Then he said:

“Once I grieved for my wife.”

Confucius looked at him.

“And then?”

“First I grieved.”

“Then?”

“Then I looked at the beginning, at the roots.”

“The roots of what?”

“Not of her life. Of our transformation.”

And he said:

Cha qi shi er ben wu sheng 察其始而本無生。I observed her roots and saw that originally there was no arising itself. (Zhuangzi, Chapter 18)

“If there was no birth, then death cannot be said to be the end of something that was separate from the whole.”

Lucretius listened. He did not agree. He did not object. He simply listened.

Laozi, who often followed the conversation in silence, spoke: “Ren fa di, di fa tian, tian fa dao, dao fa ziran. 人法地，地法天，天法道，道法自然。“The human being follows the Earth. The Earth follows Heaven. Heaven follows the Dao. The Dao follows itself.” (Daode jing, 25)

Lucretius repeated the last word. “Ziran 無爲自然. ?”Nature that is not forced?”

Laozi merely nodded.

“Not nature as an object we observe. Nature as the precondition of the existence of manifest forms.”

Then the wind once again blew through the pine, and for a moment it seemed they had not been speaking about the same thing. Lucretius spoke of nature. Confucius of human bonds. Laozi of the flow of the Dao. Zhuangzi of transformation. Yet the pine stood among them. This pine chose no path. It rejected no word. It simply grew. Even if it had not.

The Garden did not demand an answer. It did not expect different thoughts to merge into one single thought. In it there was enough space for each thought to remain faithful to itself and yet not be separated from the others. This space belonged to no time and no people. It had no gates through which only the chosen could enter, nor walls that would separate anyone. In it there was no east that wished to mark  space-time. Beneath the old pine could sit those who brought scrolls and those who brought nothing. Those who spoke and those who knew how to be silent. Those who sought answers or questions, and those who simply merged with the Dao.

The Garden did not ask from which time a person came, in which language they thought, or what name their wisdom bore. Words came like wind among the branches and departed like leaves returning to the earth. None was higher simply because it was older, and none was worth less because it was new.

Here there were only paths of mysterious encounters with clarity and stillness. The Pine that stood among them did not choose, did not confirm, and did not reject. It simply grew. And perhaps that is precisely why anyone who ever came to this place could find shade beneath its branches.

Rector of SDT; Yuan Weiqi