Cangjie and the First Writing

After rain, the softest ground in a yard always lies right at the edge of a puddle. Anyone who crouches there and looks very closely will see that the mud is not smooth. The mud has marks.

A bird that has just walked past leaves three thin toes pointing forward, the middle one the longest, and one more toe pointing back. The family dog leaves four soft round pads gathered around a bigger one, with a few sharp dots from its claws. A cat prints four round pads as well, but not a single claw mark, because a cat walks with its claws tucked in. A duck leaves a whole little fan, three toes joined by webbing.

Sit a little longer and one thing becomes clear. No two kinds of animal leave the same mark. The animal is long gone. It is no longer standing there to say its name. And yet, just by looking down at the mud, a person can still name it correctly.

A trace is what stays behind after whoever made it has gone. It sounds simple, but the idea is far bigger than it looks. People in China long ago had a whole story about the first person who bent down to look at footprints on the ground and understood how big that idea was.

That story is in a very old book called the Shuowen Jiezi, written down by Xu Shen nearly 2,000 years ago. The book says that in those days there was no writing yet. In a still more distant age, Fuxi looked up at the sky and down at the earth. He studied the patterns on the feathers of birds and the fur of beasts, and then he drew the eight trigrams. These are eight signs, each made of three lines, and each line is either broken or unbroken. By the time of Shennong, people kept track of the world's affairs with knotted cords.

Take a rope. A big knot for a big matter, a small knot for a small one, several knots in a row for something done several times. That worked well enough while there was little to keep track of. But each day there were more people and more matters, and the rope began to fall behind. A knot could count how many, but it could not say what. It could not hold a name. It could not hold a promise. Two people could hold the same rope and remember two different things, and mistakes kept creeping in.

At the court of the Yellow Emperor there was an official whose work was keeping records. His name was Cangjie. His whole job came down to one word: remember. He remembered on behalf of everyone. Who had paid how much, who had agreed to which day, who had said what. But one person's memory is only as big as one person.

Then one day Cangjie went outside, and he bent down to look at the ground.

There were bird tracks on the ground, and the claw marks of beasts. He looked for a long time. Then he saw exactly what any child sitting beside a puddle can see. Each kind of creature makes its own sort of mark, and the marks can be told apart. None is mistaken for another.

And from there he took one more step, the most important step of all. The bird had left its mark without ever meaning to. It was only passing by. But if a mark made by accident could say that a bird had passed this way, then a mark made on purpose could say much more. People could draw marks of their own, by hand and with intent, to keep hold of words once spoken.

That is what writing is. Not a miracle, and not a magic charm. Writing is a trace left behind on purpose.

So the first written characters were pictures. They followed the shapes of things, each stroke true to how the thing looked, and people of old called that layer of writing wen. Later they learned to join a picture with a sound, which let them make a great many new characters, and they called this later layer zi. The book says these later characters multiplied like the children and grandchildren of one family, more in every generation. And when the characters were written on strips of bamboo or on pieces of silk, they were called shu.

This is the part worth sitting with for a moment. The world after that day was quite different from the world before it. Every trade found its order, and every matter could be looked into clearly. A promise made in spring was still lying in the same place in autumn, for anyone to open and read again. From then on, spoken words no longer simply flew away.

Another old book, the Huainanzi, records that day in a very strange line. It says that on the day Cangjie made writing, the sky rained down millet, and in the night there was the sound of weeping.

The line is very short, so later readers have understood it in different ways. It can be heard as an old way of speaking in images. Millet was a grain people grew to eat every day, yet that day it fell from the sky, a wonder no one had ever seen. The weeping in the night is not there to frighten anyone. It can be read as saying that whatever had long hidden in the dark could no longer hide so easily, because now there was a way to write it down. Put the two images together and they seem to say one thing. On that day the world changed, and it could never go back to how it was.

Whether Cangjie was real, no one can say for sure. The book records him as the official who kept records for the Yellow Emperor, and the Yellow Emperor himself stands on a borderline, where legend and history run together. People do not tell this story to settle who came first. They tell it to keep the idea at its heart, an idea anyone can check beside a puddle tonight. A trace lasts longer than whoever left it.

There is a time each year to watch a mark being made on purpose: the days just before Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. Old-style calligraphers spread out their mats and sit down to write. They gather beside Văn Lake, in front of the gate of the Temple of Literature. The Spring Calligraphy Festival there opens in the last days of the old lunar year and runs on into the first month of the new one.

In front of each calligrapher are an inkstone, a stick of ink and a stack of red paper. The ink is ground slowly, until it is black enough and no more. The brush is dipped, then wiped lightly on the rim of the inkstone to shed a little ink. Then the tip touches the red paper, and a character appears right in front of the people watching. Grown-ups often ask for Phúc, blessings, or Lộc, prosperity. They also ask for Thọ, long life, or An Khang, peace and good health. For children, people often ask for Học, learning, or Hiếu, devotion to parents. Lễ, good manners, is another choice for children. The paper is taken home and hung on the wall. All year long, every morning, it says exactly the same thing it said on the first day.

Tonight, if the rain has just stopped, the yard will have soft mud again. Anyone can sit down there and find the three thin toes of the bird, the four round pads of the dog, the webbed fan of the duck. Then they can pick up a stick and, on purpose, draw one mark of their own beside them.

By morning the mud has dried. The bird's footprint is still there, though the bird flew away long ago. And the mark just drawn is still lying there too, waiting for someone passing by to read it.