White Lotus

Here is Professor Xu's verson of the Tang poem White lotus by Lu Guimeng:

White Lotus Blooms are often outweighed by red flowers
They'd rather be transplanted by lunar bowers.
Heartless they seem, but they have deep grief no one knows.
See them fall in moonlight when morning wind blows.


Here is the version Steve Watkins and I worked out:

The white lotus is often abused
By flowers of more seductive hues.
Rightous and cool, by Yao Pool*
Should be the home the lotus knows.
Heartless and cruel it may seem,
yet who can know how deep it grieves?
Moonlight fades, cold dawn breaks
Flower falls in morning breeze.

*Yao pool, Steve says, is the home of the "King mother Goddess".

White Lotus

"The plain white lotus is often abused by flowers of more seductive hues" begins this poem from the Tang dynasty, written centuries ago in China by Lu Guimeng. Steve Watkins, who is versed in both modern and ancient Chinese scripts, helped me to more clearly understand the meaning of the poem, and together we worked on finding words in English that both expressed the meaning and flowed well.

This silk painting is inspired by the poem and by a tea house on the shore of a large lotus pond in Huzhou. The peonies I added to be the "flowers of more seductive hues".

The sense the poem expresses of plain honest virtue being overshadowed by flash, is as meaningful today as it was over a thousand years ago. Today I sense the "plain" Chinese traditional knowledge, especially of food, being ignored in favor of Western glamour such as the very "modern" McDonalds!