Painting the Dao

127 ak24.4 The Cinnabar Stone of the Master of the Pot Ink and watercolour on cloud-dragon paper 184 × 99 cm, Sussex and Hong Kong, Christmas 2023 and early spring 2024 Five artist seals 水松石山房 Shuisongshi shanfang (Water, Pine and Stone Retreat) 竹虛老人 Zhuxu laoren (Old man as empty inside as bamboo) 山外山樵 Shanwai shanqiao (Mountain woodcutter who is not in the mountains) 墨者不朽 Mozhe buxiu (Let ink be my immortality) 如如居士 Ruru Jushi (Retired scholar who believes all doctrines equal) inscr iption In the world of red dust, strange stones rise elegantly from zitan stands as objects of aesthetic delight. They calm the mind that reaches for brush or qin to reify the inexplicable. Drifting smoke from an ancient censer seeks their crevasses like clouds, simurghs to transport the stone fool over unnavigable waters, on which even a feather cannot float, protecting the Isle of the Immortals. But Penglai, though shrouded from vulgar view, is accessible to ordinary understanding; other more mysterious realms lie beyond, obscured by pentachromatic clouds, inaccessible to perception. Like Fusang, cinnabar stones exist as elastic paradox in otherworldly realms known only to those who would be released from the corruptible body before its dissolution. Cinnabar stones are the embryonic harbingers of immortality, primal pneuma, original creative spirit of highest clarity, existing only in the mind and in the realm of the brush. In the phenomenal world they are just ground to dust to be transformed in the alembic of reason into the essential ingredient of elixirs. Who knows how many emperors and other fools have died of ingesting supposed potions of immortality? Inscribed by the Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat at the Garden at the Edge of the Universe, basking in the boon of luminescence as the brush dances with clouds and dragons in the early spring of 2024.