Dragon-Carving for Writers
Literature, pattern and what we can learn from an obscure medieval Chinese writing manual
On Bell Mountain with Liu Xie
It is still early in the morning, but Purple Mountain on the outskirts of Nanjing is already busy with visitors. Troops of schoolchildren are heading up the hill to pay homage at the Mausoleum of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen. They laugh and joke as they climb. Families on day-trips take photographs with their mobile phones. Women by the side of the path sell peeled cucumbers and crowns of plastic flowers. And tour parties head towards the World Heritage site tomb of Emperor Hongwu, founder of the Ming dynasty. But I am not here to pay homage to Dr. Sun, nor to see the impressive Ming architecture. Instead, I have come to search out a more obscure figure.
His name is Liu Xie, and he lived between the fifth and sixth centuries in the period of Chinese history known as the Six Dynasties. Liu was a writer, a literary critic, a philosopher, a scholar and — at the very end of his life — a Buddhist monk. Today he is most famous for being the author of a book with the enigmatic title, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, or Wenxin diaolong.
