Once on a Moonless Night Read Online Free PDF

bringing on migraines that clouded his little round eyes and made imaginary motes of dust dance across his field of vision, but he forced himself to apply a system conceived by one of his former tutors with the aim, after considerable circumnavigations, of identifying one word or phrase that might have sprung from the great translator’s hand in an unguarded moment, betraying the secret to the labyrinthine construction of this unknown language. One day, when he was reading the nineteenth volume of one of the seven versions (the number of pages and contents of each version vary and even contradict each other depending on when they were written, constituting several areas of controversy) of the Buddhanusmri Tisamadhi-Sutra (a meditative sutra that evokes different manifestations of Buddha), he had a sudden conviction that all An Shih-Kao’s translations belonged to the classic tradition of Hinayana, a school of thought known for its strict discipline and which had fallen out of usage long since in China but was, and still is to this day, very widespread in Burma, Sikkim, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. Convinced he was on the right track, Puyi then noted these countries down in red ink and sent their heads of state or their British guardians official letters essentially asking for their help in deciphering the signs. At first these letters went unanswered without upsetting Puyi at all, because he had now turned his research to another field of investigation: the origins of Chinese writing. His aim was to find the oldest glyptic signs which might have a link to those in the manuscript and that a linguistic genius like An Shih-Kao would have been able to write. Puyi would certainly never have thrown himself into such an enterprise had he had any idea of the complexity this work entailed or the erudition it required. To some historians, this long march towards the origins of the Chinese language represents a final flurry of patriotism from the last emperor, but they also hold that he ended up losing himself along the way, which, in my humble opinion, is by no means a certainty, because a man in a state of mental torture is sometimes better equipped to approach the truth than scholars. Puyi had three thousand chests of national treasures and he started by asking to see a collection of small, thin-walled bronze alcohol flasks made during the Zhou era (late eleventh century-256 B.C.). Using a magnifying glass, he studied their minute inscriptions, where he found no trace of the unknown language, but—examining the signs that soothsayers had had carved onto these small yet solemn and imposing receptacles—he felt for the first time that they constituted a separate ritual language with little connection to Chinese writing. This idea was reinforced when he scrutinised another, still older glyptic language used by soothsayers about two thousand years before our era. He found it in his collection of rare antiquities that had never belonged to previous emperors, but had been given to him by a private collector at the beginning of the twentieth century: inscriptions on sections of tortoise-shell, which had been used for divination by reading the patterns of cracks on them, kinds of diagrams that soothsayers created by burning the shells; the interpretation (in some cases propitious, in others not) of these diagrams, the date, name of the interested party and reason for the sacrifice were later engraved on the shells, themselves so thin and fragile that most would barely want to touch them with their fingertips for fear they would crumble to dust. During this period Puyi’s doctors, concerned to see him laugh a great deal of the time for no apparent reason, worried about his mental health. I myself am convinced he was at last savouring a brief moment of happiness when he could forget the outside world, his political dilemma, his impotence, etc., as he laid out those tortoiseshells and wandered along pathways through an ornamental garden