Poems of Mao
31. Reply to Comrade Kuo Mo-jo (November 17, 1961)
Reply to Comrade Kuo Mo-jo
[a shih in seven-word regular, Chi Lu]
[translated by Nancy Lin]
No sooner had thunderstorm struck the earth
Than Demon rose from the heap of Pale Bones.
The Monk, foolishly erring,
Might yet be reclaimed.
But that goblin, that Evil Spirit,
Was a sure calamity to man.
Then Sun the Golden Monkey
Blazed forth with his mammoth club,
He purged this precious planet,
O, myriad miles round,
Of filth and dirt!
Viperous miasma is back again today:
To Great Saint Sun, our hearty acclaim!
Notes [by Nancy Lin]
Kuo Mo-jo, the well known writer and head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, saw a dramatic presentation of the episode in Peking in October 1961 and sent Chairman Mao a poem in which the Monk was denounced as a confounder of right and wrong deserving ‘a thousand sword cuts’. Chairman Mao’s reply is meant to rectify this view, with a definite topical implication characteristic of his practice. November 17, 1961, the date of this poem, falls exactly one month after the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party under Khrushhev, and there is little doubt as to what the poet has in mind.
Thunderstorm and Demon allude presumably to the dialectic relationship of Revolution and Counter-revolution. The main contradiction and struggle as has emerged is rather one between Demon the real enemy and Monkey the hero protagonist, while the Monk represents only the unawakened masses who are deceived and can be and should be educated and won over instead of condemned and alienated. Kuo’s error is therefore no mean error of strategy for a revolutionist. The concluding line of the present poem is a clarion call to fight the forces of reaction in general and revisionism in particular.
Demon of the Pale Bones: Journey to the West, a Yuan dynasty novel, deals with the pilgrimage of Monk Tripitaka to India in quest of Buddhist sutras. With him as the chief fellow pilgrim and fighting guard was the Golden Monkey, the ‘Great Saint Sun’ that had once sought to storm the heaven. Of the numerous evil forces the Monk encountered on the way, the Demon of Pale Bones was probably the wiliest, who succeeded in hoaxing the Monk into confidence and compassion despite Monkey’s repeated warnings, but who was eventually subdued by the latter in three successive contests of magic power.
[the following is a translation of Kuo Mo-jo’s poem, found at marxists.com]
Kuo Mo-jo’s poem - On seeing ‘The Monkey Subdues The Demon’
Confounding humans and demons, right and wrong,
The monk was kind to foes and vicious to friends.
Endlessly he intoned "The Incantation of the Golden Hoop",
And thrice he let the White Bone Demon escape.
The monk deserved to be torn limb from limb;
Plucking a hair means nothing to the wonder-worker.
All praise is due to such timely teaching,
Even the Pig grew wiser than the fools.
An Additional Note: One of the most famous primate characters in world literature appears in the great Chinese classic ‘Journey to the West’. The story follows the adventures of Sun Wukong, (a.k.a. ‘Monkey’), an immortal rhesus macaque demon, who gains extraordinary power via spiritual cultivation and rebels against the primacy of heaven. Like Loki in Norse mythology and Lucifer in Judeo-Christian mythology, this trickster god falls from grace when a supreme deity, in this case the Buddha, banishes him to an earthly prison below. But unlike his western counterparts, the monkey repents, becoming a monk and agreeing to use his abilities to protect a Buddhist priest on his journey to collect sutras from India.
[from ‘The Story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King’ by Jim McClanahan)
[next - 32. The Winter Plum]