On "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow"

Ru Chun: When I read this poem in my youth, I found it exceedingly beautiful and was moved by its deep emotion. Reading it again now, I deeply understand my own foolishness and the absurdity of this poem. In times of peace and prosperity: "One smiling glance back, a hundred charms are born; the beauties of the six palaces pale into nothing" — she alone gathered the favor of three thousand. When national calamity struck: "The six armies would not march — nothing could be done; the fair one, writhing, died before the horses." The beauty became the source of calamity, bearing the blame in the emperor's stead. The hypocrisy of the sovereign: "The sovereign covered his face, unable to save her." How hypocritical and fickle the love between man and woman is, and how pragmatic the sovereign: to preserve his dynasty, he sacrificed his beloved, using her life to extinguish the fury of the six armies so that he himself could flee.

The poet glorified this heartlessness as the profound love of an emperor, making it an immortal masterpiece: "In heaven, we would be birds flying wing to wing; on earth, we would be branches intertwined. Heaven and earth, long-lasting as they are, will someday end; this regret stretches on without end." If so, why did the consort die while the sovereign alone survived? Why does he not hate himself for causing Yang's death with his own hands, but instead resent that his deep love now has nowhere to be placed? Is this not absurd? One wonders what the poet was thinking, and whether the original intent was to use the poem to awaken the world. But the overall effect of the poem is more one of misleading and concealing the emperor's political incompetence and the ugly, true face of his heartlessness, hypocrisy, and selfishness. It attributed the political failure to Yang Yuhuan being too beautiful and too captivating — a beauty who brought calamity — as the cause of the dynasty's decline. Did the imperial consort, in the end, manage to see through the suffering and falsity of romantic love? Did she reflect on how she had grown arrogant through favoritism, indulging in the glory and splendor of a flourishing age and thus reaping today's bitter fruit? Her merit exhausted, she perished — whom can she blame?

From ancient times to the present, how many men and women have wallowed in and indulged in material things and romantic love, blindly throwing themselves into the flame like moths, not knowing for what, caring only for this moment's feelings, savoring even the bitterest of them as if they were sweetness, refusing to turn back no matter how great the price. People in this world also crave fame and achievement. This poem has been passed down through the ages, recited by tens of thousands, stirring people's envy and longing for romantic love. Yet romantic love is the primary cause of saṃsāra — the more one craves and clings, the more one is bound. What kind of karma must one bear for this? It is truly terrifying to think about.

Humanity's karma determines that people will have these intense cravings and aspirations, these shallow mental capacities and emotions, and these erroneous patterns of thinking — to reverse them is extremely difficult. Not only do sentient beings not weary of these sufferings, they instead crave and cling to them. The six faculties constantly crave the six sense objects, which is tantamount to constantly craving suffering — not knowing suffering, craving suffering. How can there be liberation in this? Only great bodhisattvas can pull up this stubborn karma and reverse humanity's deeply rooted cognitions and cravings — it is comparable to a genetic engineering project for humankind, and by no means easy. The more one can contemplate the sufferings of the world, the more grateful one becomes toward the Three Jewels.