Again Thinking

Earthly ambition may sound archaic and one usually associates it with long gone emperors and kings.

Not so sure since the Italian elections.

Perhaps we have just replaced the emperors and kings with the captains of industry and commerce or, heaven helps us, with politicians, presidents and prime ministers?

Monarchs often claimed divine right to rule and even today there is at least one monarch finding out that divinity does not sit very well with the hoi polloi these days.

This is not the forum to go into a full ranging discussion of the good and bad of the monarchy as a political system, but this thought has arisen: How do monarchs or even ordinary policians, think of themselves?

Do they capitalize their title and person even in their most private moments?

Or do they quietly accept their responsibility as a task to be accomplished in the midst of curtailment of liberties available to the commonest of their subjects, birds in gilded cages? What ambition can a bird in such a cage have and how can princely progeny be brought to accepting privation after a taste of freedom? Perhaps we should have learnt from the case of the Last Lord Lee.

The Last lord Lee (Lee Li) was emperor of the Southern Tang which preceded the Sung dynasty in China more than a thousand years ago.

He was a cultured man who wrote very personal (as opposed to the expected formalistic and professional) poetry and in fact was the pioneer of a tradition which carried onto and beyond Mao Tse Tung. He had very little earthly ambition but fell victim to someone who had.

He was not a very good general, was easily defeated by the first Sung emperor of China and carried off a prisoner from his capital city Chin Lin (now Nanking) to Peking .

He was called Earl Li the disobedient for having opposed the earthly ambition of the Sung emperor and eventually, it is said, made to drink poisoned wine.

In his short lifetime he wrote forty or so poems.

But these poems are read and memorized and treated as part of the corpus of Chinese culture and will continue to be.

So what price earthly ambition? We today remember the first Sung emperor more for his capture of the Last Lord Lee than any greatness intrinsic to himself.

Perhaps the Last Lord Lee himself answered this question in one of his most celebrated poems:


a short while ago
there was heavy rain
the wind raged
and the screen rattled
as autumn wept.
shifting shadows played
with dying candle light.

then everything stopped
and turned to silence.

why is sleep impossible
in this quiet hour,
why does unrest await
the sleepless victim?

all earthly achievement
one day washes like water
into anonymity
where only the drunk can sleep -


I hesitate on the threshold
of familiar dreams

unable to sleep



from
the poems and lyrics of The Last Lord Lee
translated by malcolm koh ho ping and chandran nair
Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975