Zi Zhongyun: Making Profound Ideas Accessible Is the Highest, Hardest Realm for Scholarly Writing
What makes a good article? This is a question on which different people have different views. The renowned Chinese scholar and translator Zi Zhongyun once put forward a view: she holds that "making the profound accessible" (shen ru qian chu) is the highest and hardest realm for an article of genuine scholarly substance. If an author can write a highly specialized article in a way that appeals to both the refined and the popular and is compelling, then that author's grounding is beyond the reach of ordinary people. This is rather like the way Bai Juyi wrote poetry—good poetry should always be understandable to everyone and able to strike a chord in all.
Zi Zhongyun believes that most beautifully written prose reads clear and fluent, looks plain and unadorned, and yet is extremely refined in its rhetoric; the more this is so, the harder it becomes to translate precisely and vividly into another language. The view she advocates is very much like my own teacher's.
When I first began learning to write, I once envied many writers who could write ornate articles, feeling they had great literary grace. But my own teacher did not think so; he felt that ornate writing was inevitably a bit too flashy, and that truly good prose should be approachable, yet reveal the author's deep grounding between the lines. So he spent quite some time and effort to correct the style I had once let go astray.
Mr. Ji Xianlin wrote plainly and without ornament, and his essays are easy to read; yet his profound scholarly cultivation and his mastery of language were not affected in the least by the plainness of his writing. Mr. Ji is said to have been the same kind of person; even after becoming vice president of Peking University, he still wore, year in and year out, an extremely plain set of clothes and a pair of ordinary cloth shoes. So much so that when a new student arrived at Peking University to register, he mistook Mr. Ji for a school janitor. The student needed to go through the registration procedures and had no one to watch over his pile of luggage, so he asked this elderly man who looked like a janitor to keep an eye on it; Mr. Ji said "all right" and dutifully stayed there watching the student's bags. Only when Mr. Ji spoke at the opening ceremony, standing on the rostrum, did that student realize that this plain old man was the famous Mr. Ji Xianlin.
Mr. Fei Xiaotong's essays are the same—they are not the least bit hard to read. Mr. Fei was a distinguished student of the famous anthropologist Malinowski and enjoyed great renown in anthropology and sociology. Sociology is a very dry discipline, but in Mr. Fei's hands it is shown to be wonderfully lively. His prose reads like a friendly chat; his *From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Xiangtu Zhongguo)* brings Chinese society vividly to life, and many people enjoy reading it.
The renowned Qing-history expert Mr. Dai Yi wrote an article titled "Data, Thought, Literary Grace, and Morality—Four Requirements for the Historian." In it he says that one should strive to write fluently and with literary grace. He believes that "when writing an article to present the results of research, you must first write it clearly and plainly, so that people can easily understand your findings; strive to present profound principles in a simple yet accurate way. If the article is abstruse and obscure, then your research will be hard for people to understand and accept."
He gave an example to illustrate his point: a scholar who studies pre-Qin history and oracle-bone inscriptions wrote a paper and asked Guo Moruo to critique it. Guo Moruo said, I read your work several times, but I did not understand what it meant. If an article written by a historian is incomprehensible even to someone like Guo Moruo, then I am afraid no one in the world will be able to understand it.
I cite these gentlemen's examples not to show off my book learning, but to express this point: when it comes to writing, the true masters almost all agree with Zi Zhongyun's view. The purpose of our writing is to be read; if the reader cannot tell what the author is saying and reads it as dry sawdust, then such an article had better be left for the author's solitary admiration, with no value of dissemination.
When I read some good popular-science books on medicine and biology, I get so absorbed that I forget to eat and sleep; after finishing one, I long to buy all of that author's works and read them through. This is not because I myself am so studious, but because the author's writing grounding is simply too profound; articles by such authors are both easy and interesting to read. After finishing a book, the reader feels not the slightest fatigue, and imperceptibly has also learned a great deal. I greatly like such authors and am very grateful to them.
Gorky said that books are the ladder of human progress; for someone of average intelligence like me, a modifier must be added before that word "books"—understandable books are the ladder of my progress, while incomprehensible books are simply my nightmare, the precipice on which I go to ruin. Some authors' books make me wonder whether I am half-witted.
Some people who study Chinese medicine write books and articles that are truly unfathomably profound; it is said that only people of great spiritual awakening can understand them. The implication is that if the reader cannot understand the author's article, the problem lies not with the author but with the reader's insufficient enlightenment. I respectfully decline such TCM articles; knowing that my own enlightenment is not high, I do not risk having my intelligence flayed alive by forcing myself to read such lofty books or articles. I do not want to spend money buying someone's book, only to be secretly laughed at for my stupidity after finishing it.