Out of the mud

Zhou Dunyi wrote a short essay about flowers whose logic is exact. The peony was loved by everyone in the age before him. Tao Yuanming, he notes, loved only chrysanthemums, and after him few people did. He himself loves the lotus.

Then the description. The lotus grows out of the mud and isn't stained by it. It goes through clear water and stays clean. It has a hollow stem inside and no branches outside. Its fragrance spreads further and further. It stands clear and upright.

He closes by pointing out that the chrysanthemum is the flower of the recluse, the peony is the flower of wealth and status, and the lotus is the flower of the noble person.

The structure is a bit of a moral essay and the image is impossible to argue with. But I notice what he does not say. He doesn't say the lotus avoids mud. It's rooted in the worst water available, and the claim is not that it doesn't touch the mud, only that the mud doesn't come up through the stem.

There's a version of ambition that's just about moving to better water. That's fine and sometimes correct. It's also how people who were honest in difficult circumstances become different people in comfortable ones, because the water they move to has an easier smell.

The lotus says something harder. You can be in the mud and remain, in your interior, the thing you would be anywhere.

I'd rather have that sentence than most of the books I've bought.

MOJOWAY asks what a person keeps clean in conditions they did not choose.