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c h a p t e r 1 2  “Invisible Pains” The year-long Emerson fellowship at Harvard supposedly offered Chiang Yee an opportunity to focus on his writing and painting with minimum disruptions, except for his weekly trips to New York to teach at Columbia. His Boston book was nearing completion, and the Zen poetry project finally got under way. He had done some primary research before the summer and had already made an outline of the book, estimated to be approximately two hundred pages, and he anticipated a completed draft by the end of 1958. He sent an inquiry to the University of London Senate Secretary on October 17 concerning his doctoral degree. He explained that he had enrolled as a student in the London School of Economics in October 1934 and then “worked on Chinese Buddhism for a Ph.D. thesis under the late Sir Reginald Johnston,”who later passed away in 1938. Then the war began, and he lost all his books and papers, including his registration card with the university, in the air strike of 1940. “I am writing this letter to ask if you can possibly find the record of my registration in your file such a long way back and also if you can tell me what steps I must take so as to be allowed to submit my thesis on ‘A Study of Chinese Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist Poetry’ next June.” He enclosed an outline of the contents for the proposed thesis. Yee circumvented the fact that his thesis subject in the 1930s had switched from Buddhism to Chinese calligraphy, out of which developed his successful monograph of the same name. He also neglected to mention that the Chinese Calligraphy manuscript he had written as a Ph.D. thesis was rejected by the department head. He needed an advanced degree to survive in an increasingly competitive academic world. The Zen poetry book would certainly be a solid scholarly work which could conveniently merit a doctorate if the university consented to consider his request. The matter was completely dropped eventually, and he stopped pursuing it further. He never earned a doctorate. So far as he knew, most of the professors of Chinese art in the West were not well-versed in Chinese classics and could not write well on the subject, and few were comparable to him in terms of expertise in Chinese art. Nevertheless, he had been passed over for various job opportunities simply 190 “invisible pains” 191 because he lacked a doctorate, which was similar to a union card in the academic world. To this, he simply exclaimed: “How funny the world is!”1 Suzuki was returning to Japan for his retirement, so Yee made appointments with him to discuss the translation of Transmission of the Lamp. He expressed his reverence and admiration in a letter, stating, “I feel that I have only just begun to receive your guidance in my study of Zen Buddhism. I would like to be with you all the time.”2 Transmission of the Lamp is the most important classical text in Zen studies, but there was, as yet, no English translation. Richard De Martino, a Columbia graduate student who was studying Zen Buddhism with Suzuki, wanted to take on the translation project. He got Suzuki’s endorsement, which suggested that he collaborate with Yee. In the fall of 1957, the two met several times to work on the project, but Yee soon decided to discontinue the collaboration in order to concentrate on his own work. He probably sensed that translating such a monumental work was too exacting a task and that De Martino, a novice in the subject area, could not be much help. In fact, Transmission of the Lamp, a multivolume work, is extraordinarily profound and abstruse. Yee could comprehend only about half of it after reading the entire work twice. Suzuki, an undisputable world-class master in Zen studies, was prolific in scholarly and popular works on religion but also a skilled English translator. In Yee’s opinion, the translation of Transmission of the Lamp should be completed by no one other than Suzuki. If Suzuki were the chief translator, he and De Martino could capably serve as assistants. Yee informed Suzuki, “I am for it whole-heartedly and am even ready to give up my teaching in Columbia after June, 1959, and to do the work for it.” Since his Harvard appointment would end that summer, he could travel to Japan...

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