Elder Confucians - holylandvietnamstudies.com

SPRING SCROLLS – Section 1

4035 Views Prof. Assoc. HUNG NGUYEN MANH

HUNG NGUYEN MANH ¹

Elder Confucian on Lunar New Year Festival

We are watching an elder Confucian kneeling on the ground to write a pair of Tết scrolls. In front of him is a peasant, perhaps his client, standing next to another man, a passer-by who’s pausing to take a look at the scroll.

This picture reminds us of similar scenes about half a century ago. Annually, at the beginning of the twelfth month, elder Confucians dressed in traditional black robes with turban and a pair of eye-glasses were often seen in humble huts at rural Tet markets, writing scrolls for shoppers.

He often posted a board with two big Chinese characters “Spring Scrolls” at the hut’s door. His working instruments only comprised a tray, some brushes, a bowl of Chinese ink, and a pile of red or orange paper. Calligraphic inscriptions had been already made on the scrolls. Shoppers just called at the shops to have a look at the scrolls and choose those which they thought suited to their worship altars, the location of the worshipping places and objects, their ancestors or the lares. The elder Confucians did not waste any moment thinking, but just took a brush and dipped it into the ink and then wrote the inscriptions in Chinese characters and charged about two hào (Vietnamese currency unit) for each pair of scrolls.

If the scrolls were to be posted at the gate, the inscriptions could be read as follows:

“Miles of cosy air are about to merge into spring.

The most beautiful scene is the first month of the year.”

If the scrolls were to be hung at the veranda, the inscriptions would be:

“Salangane heralds good news at the gate.

Golden oriole welcomes spring’s arrival everywhere.”

Or another pair of scrolls would read:

“In front of the yard: Bamboo heralds the word of peace.

At both sides of the gate: Apricot conveys the flower of prosperity.”

If the scrolls were intended to post at two pillars of the house, the elder Confucian would write such popular inscriptions as follows:

“Heaven is added with years and months, and men with longevity.

Spring is prevailing over sky and earth, and happiness over home.”

Or:

“New Year comes with hundreds of happiness.

Spring days see thousands of good lucks”

If the scrolls were to be hung on both sides of the ancestral altar, they often praised the great services and virtues of the ancestors, the results of which were beneficial to the descendants:

“High Mountain remains incomparable with the gracious act of giving birth.

Open sea is far behind the generous care in rearing.”

Or:

“For hundreds of years, pious and grateful children will keep existing.

Generation after generation, legacy of ancestral services will remain unchanged.”

Or:

“Thanks to ancestral services and virtue: Thousands of years will be prosperous.

Out of descendants’ gentleness and piety: Generations of men will be happy.”

Let’s read a paragraph written by a French for the weekly Indochina in 1942 ²

“…Poor Confucians rented some 10 days prior to the Tet a street pavement or an open ground in front of a house or a street corner… They wrote in golden or silvery ink Chinese characters on red paper scrolls to earn a small sum of money. If there had been a funeral in the out-going year, the bereaved families would ask for yellow or green scrolls. This mythical impact had stimulated the people to spend a certain sum of money on the purchase of scrolls to decorate their houses’ gates, pillars and floor… or on the walls. Although Confucianism was no more, Confucians were still seen in worn-out cotton jackets, trembling with cold while sitting on a small piece of rush mat to write these last chinese characters…”.

Red Scrolls – An Eastern Literary Genre

“Fatty meat, pickled scallions, red scrolls,.

Tết pole, a string of firecrackers, green cakes”

Besides arranging and decorating his house, buying offerings for his altar, even a very poor man cannot forget to go to the market or out to the street so as to procure a scroll with big letters, a few scrolls with printed letters, handwritten or engraved on bamboo like mentioned above.

There are people who buy red paper and ask the village teachers to write on. Others manage to ask scholars to write on red paper or silk – this being rather difficult for the scholars are not so well stocked with words to give away to anybody. Many unrefined rich men who can afford lavishly ornamented parallel scrolls cannot get any letter from them. Even if they manage to get these letters, these are trivial literature (bagasse literature).

Where to paste red scrolls? On the wall, on both sides of the altar, on the gate or on the house columns as seen in the figure (Fig.1). “Flowers turn to the sun following spring”. Red scrolls are pasted not only in the above – mentioned places but also on pigsties, buffalo pens. Henri Oger relates that they appear also on water basins (Fig.2).

Spring scrolls - holylandvietnamstudies.com — Fig.1: Spring scrolls

In the South, three red scrolls are pasted in the house and the fourth in the kitchen. Tens of others are reserved for fruit-trees in the orchard. Even ox carts, buffalo carts are adorned, not to say of the well and the pigsty. In particular, water melons on the altar are also decorated, but the letters on red paper like these sometimes do not represent authentic parallel couplets.

Spring scroll on water basin - holylandvietnamstudies.com — Fig.2: Spring scroll on water basin

Not only the rich but also the poor enjoy red scrolls. And what about the pagoda? It is even more ornamented. In the picture, a pagoda door is left ajar to let us see one side of a parallel couplet (Fig.1).

“The mode is old but the pillar is new”

Red scrolls are written in Chinese and also in Nôm (or demotic script). They reveal the house owner’s thoughts about life, spring, sometimes referring to the constant mutation of nature, sometimes connoting a philosophic meaning like a motto.

Some people say that parallel scrolls is an Eastern literary genre, a polished, condense and sometimes very meaningful artistic work’. Red scrolls bespeak a special flavour of Vietnam’s Tết festivals. They have become a custom of the Vietnamese.

Upon talking of Vũ Đình Liên, people recall the poem “The Confucian Scholar”.

Many years later, the very theme of this poem has inspired painter Bùi Xuân Phái to create his famous coloured collage representing Vũ Đình Liên’s Confucian Scholar. In 1974, while admiring the said collage Vũ Đình Liên was, in his turn, inspired by it to author the following reminiscent poem:

“ The more one admires the painting, the more one’s heart is animated with poetical inspiration.

The whole soul of the past deplores the “Confucian Scholar”.

Three verses have conjured up the source of remembrance.

A few bits of paper still lend wings to dreams.

The tone and colour of old tears still remain unfaded.

The images cause the old love to grow increasing.

O! pen and ink Confucian Scholars of thousands of years in the past.

Has your resentment already turned slighter now”.

The above-mentioned famous poem was written when the poet was only 23 years old and it was intended to record the last image of a Confucian scholar (the poet’s father). Vũ Đình Liên the poet author was born on November 12, 1913, at Châu Khê Village, Bình Giang District, Hải Dương province. Later on, he followed his family to settle in Hanoi and lived at The Hàng Bạc (silver street). Vũ Đình Liên graduated as Bachelor of Laws and took part in the revolutionary movement in the first days of the war of resistance against the French, and was an activist in the literature and Arts Association of the Third Interzone. The work entitled “Vietnamese Poets” has the following remark on that everlasting poem: “For someone adopting the literary vocation, his aim is reached when authoring such an imperishable poem.

We mean such an immortal poem is enough to make its author remembered by posterity.”

In 1953 poet Vũ Đình Liên returned to Haø Noäi and worked for the Textbook Developing Board at the Ministry of Education and was a member of the Lê Quý Đôn Cultural Group that compiled the “Brief History of Vietnamese Literature”. He had at the same time contributed to the translation of the “Hoàng Việt anthology” and was the chief author of the “Anthology of Vietnamese Prose and Poems” vol.4. He had also taught at the University of Pedagogy and was the head of the French language Department.

Judging of his dignity and work, Hoài Thanh, Hoài Chân since sixty years ago had written: “Ever since the new poems movement came into life, we had seen the presence of Vũ Đình Liên’s poems published scatteringly on various reviews. He also sang the praise of love just like all the poets at that time. But his main inspiration involved his altruism and his love of things past. He took pity of downfallen people, he remembered the old scenes and friends”.

His worriment about his own self since he was 3 years old and lived with his blind father and a poor mother, who had to feed her husband and child as well as the sickness caused by the world events and people’s common behaviour, had always occupied our poet’s mind.

People relate that one day in 1973, while returning from Sơn Tây to Hà Nội, the poet had stopped at The Trò bridge to inquire about the history of that bridge. Moved by the short life of the poor songtress who died on that bridge (she caught a cold while returning late in the night), the poet had written the following poem and left it at the small pagoda that village’s people have built to worship the dead songstress’ sacred soul:

“On his way back to Hanoi, one has to cross the Trò bridge.

One’s heart turns sorrowful when listening to the old story of the poor dead songstress.

Who got drunk in that night ‘s feast and caused the castanets to drop.

The frost and rain had befallen the poor songstress.

Her thin raiment couldn’t stop coldness.

And a life of ups and downs had come to an end like a fallen flower.

Suppose that Nguyễn Du still has histearful pen.

Some additional heartbroken poems can still be written”

The poet’s close friends describe the following image of himself which appeared each year at the transitional hour on New Year eve, when Vũ Đình Liên went out, with a small bag containing his ration for Tết already divided into small portions, to visit the wharves, the bus stations looking for old men or little errant boys who would need some food to greet the springtime.

Poet Vũ Đình Liên passed away on January 18,1996 and did not have the chance of seeing the work “The Poems of Vũ Đình Liên” that shall be published by the Văn Hoá (Culture) Publishing House³.

… continued in section 2…

NOTE:
¹Associate Professor HUNG NGUYEN MANH, Doctor of Phylosophy in History.
² G. PISIER – L’esprit des Annamites et le Tết (The Soul of the Annamese and Tết holidays) illustrated weekly Indochina, February, 12, 1942, p.15.
³ According to TRẦN VĂN MỸ article: “ VŨ ĐÌNH LIÊN – a gifted poet, a great personality” Hà Nội Today Review, supplement No.26 – June 1996 – pp 53~55.

BAN TU THU
01 /2020

NOTE:
◊ Source: Vietnamese Lunar New Year – Major Festival – Asso. Prof. HUNG NGUYEN MANH, Doctor of Phylosophy in History.
◊ Bold text and sepia images has been set by Ban Tu Thu – thanhdiavietnamhoc.com