The Emperor’s Red Glaze

Long ago, in the antiquity of China, the tradition of pottery-making was a communal affair.

In order to prepare the clay, the raw material had to be siphoned from the earth by slaves and filtered in pools by peasants until the clay had the color and refinement of ivory clouds. Then the clay was set aside to be aged until it embodied the aroma of fermented wisdom. After many years, the clay was then wedged by the artisans’ apprentices, over and over, until its molecules aligned perfectly.

At one time in that long-ago era, there lived a well-known master potter by the name of Ah-Wei. He was as famous for his painted dragons as he was for his arrogance and fiery temper. His glazing technique had been imitated, but no one else could achieve Ah-Wei’s remarkable effects.

What he would do was this. He’d have his servants awaken him at 4am at the cusp of a new moon. All the glaze materials would have been prepared in advance, including his vat of liquor. With a dipperful of drink in his belly and a brush-load of glaze in hand, he’d fling the iron-laden glaze at a row of pots, all in a single motion. Sometimes Ah-Wei would mistake the glaze for the wine, or the wine for the glaze, but it didn’t seem to matter. Afterwards, he’d return to his room and sleep until evening. Only then would he return to the studio where he worked all through the night, teasing out the backbones of dragons, parsing out the billowing clouds with the tips of his fine brushes.

One day, when Ah-Wei was supervising the unloading of the great dragon kiln built into the hillside, he felt forebodings. A flood the previous month had overtaken the outskirts of the village and killed several of his stokers and loaders. Now he had to contend with new workers who were not born to the trade.

The worst of it was that his younger brother had been killed in the flood, and he, according to custom, had been required to step in and take his brother’s wife and all the dragging weight of her sorrow. He found that it was not an unpleasant task. As he stroked her skin, her softness aroused him because it felt like soft porcelain clay. And how smooth it was inside, much like a satin sheen of glaze. But who she was as a person, he had no idea. He paid little attention to her needs.

And now, this firing had taken days longer than it should have to reach white heat. As always, most stokers threw slats of wood into the main fire pit, while some fed smaller fires at the chambers further uphill. As the temperature rose, the fire roared louder and the fire stokers threw the wood from further and further back. None of them had eyebrows or hair on their arms anymore—it had long since been singed away to crusty skin. Urged on by the oaths of Master Ah-Wei, the men raced toward the main fire pit, eyes narrowed against the great heat, and flung in their armloads of wood.

All through the night, they tended the dragon’s thirst, but things had gone wrong toward the end. One of the new stokers had thrown in a piece of wood that was too big for that late stage of firing, and it choked off the air flow. Smoke issued from every gap in the kiln. Flames licked out of the chimneys. Huge clouds of smoke rolled up to heaven and spoiled the sleep of the deceased.

It was the time of near-white heat, and the roar was deafening. Ah-Wei ordered the stokers to stop feeding the fire, to close up the fire pits and go home. He refused to speak to his brother’s wife, and slept at the furthest end of the cot. While waiting for sleep to come to him, he mourned his life. He felt himself capable of great things, but at every point it seemed that his true greatness had been withheld.

After several more days, when the temperature of the kiln had cooled, Ah-Wei went out alone to unbrick the opening of the first chamber. He feared that the emperor’s favorite creamy white glaze would be ruined. He mourned for his inspired brushwork. Quickly he removed the bricks, one by one, tier after tier, until he saw the first pots. Much to his surprise, their glaze glistened with a depth that surpassed the traditions of the grandfathers. The smoke had not marred them. Overjoyed, he felt his youth return to him in a sudden burst.

Then, near the peephole, on a pot exposed by a broken sagger, he noticed a little vase that had a brilliant flash of red coursing over its shoulder like a wave. His painted dragon was rising out of that wave. Ah-Wei was overcome with wonder. Until that day glazes had been limited to grays, greens, browns, and blues. No one had ever achieved such a result as this before.

Cradling the red vase in a clean cloth, he carried it directly to the emperor and presented it to him as a special gift.

The emperor was so enchanted that he commissioned his master potter to make more of these red glazed pots.

Time passed, and for all his efforts, Ah-Wei could not duplicate his pot. He tried all combinations of ores and oxides. He sent teams of potters to the farthest regions of China to find red in the earth but they brought back nothing better than their own blood.

Finally, after many months, the emperor grew impatient and demanded that red pots be presented to him within a month’s time or the potter would be killed.

Ah-Wei had no time to experiment anymore. He had only enough time to load the kiln and to fire what he had at hand.

During the early stages of what would be the last firing of his life, he sat on his heels on a loose rock near the base of the kiln. His hair had whitened over the last few weeks. He no longer shouted orders, but let the workers do what they already knew how to do. Rather than listen to the fire’s progress, he listened to the stand of bamboo rustling behind him. The small leaves muttered like a dry rain, repeating, fatally flawed, fatally flawed.

Ah-Wei closed his eyes. He had changed. Since the firing of the red glaze, his son had been born. And this son had, at the moment of his birth, filled him with such a reservoir of love, such a lost valley of feeling. He had gazed at that small thing that was red in the face from shouting, eyes swollen from the departed warmth of his mother’s womb, his mouth turned into a wizened, somehow knowing expression of doubt.

Now he realized his own insubstantiality. Gains and losses balance out in strange ways, he thought. What was once not wanted became revered. What had been longed for was now lost. However unintentional the results, he had made a beautiful mistake, so why should he even try to set things to their supposed rights?

He let the stokers do their jobs. He counted the hours remaining in his life. On the last day of the firing, when the roar of fire worked its way into his dark thoughts, he felt drawn to the kiln. Clay and fire had been his life. He could not say, now, whether he had loved his work or hated it. His own fame and fortune had become irrelevant. Still, he could not, even now, suppress his hand. He went up to the first chamber’s peephole, and with long iron tongs, pulled out a test ring to see how it looked. He drew it out and held it up at arm's length, but there was no red in that wad of clay, not even a spot.

Ah-Wei stood alone near the main fire pit. Then in despair, unable to breathe through the image of his infant son's perfectly round and luminous face, he shut his eyes. There, imposed under the eyelids was the image of the elusive red glaze.

Without thinking, Ah-Wei rose. With a strength that shouldn’t have been possible, he grabbed the stone he had been sitting on and threw it into the fire pit. Ah-Wei was finished. He went home to his wife and child.

Days later, when the kiln had cooled down, after the whole village had looked for the master potter everywhere, a few of the senior stokers decided to open the kiln themselves. To their amazement, the kiln was filled with the most extraordinary pots. On the face of each one flashed the emperor’s red glaze, like the rosy blush on a child's cheek.

I've been practicing meditation since 1976, in the Korean lineage of Zen. As a writer and ceramic artist, I've long considered meditation to be an act of creativity. Continuously I ask myself, “What does equanimity look like?” In my ceramic sculpture I explore that question quite literally, by making original clay buddhas, some old or young, or male or female or a little of both, of various ethnicities—all sculpted with the complexity of a real life meeting the awakened moment.

As a writer, I recently explored the same topic by writing a book, Sid, Wisdom Publications, that retells the life of Buddha in contemporary terms–one that prominently features the wisdom of the women in his life.

In addition to my writing and clay work, I'm the guiding teacher at the Blue Heron Zen Community in Seattle, Washington.

More on Anita Feng’s work can be found on our Links page.