The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu | Granta

  • Published: 02/08/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847085221
  • 135x20mm
  • 128 pages

The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu

Sven Lindqvist

Translated by Joan Tate

‘During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese artist Wu Tao-tzu was one day standing looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly, he clapped his hands and the temple gate opened. He went into his work and the gates closed behind him.’ Thus begins Sven Lindqvist’s profound meditation on art and its relationship with life, first published in 1967, and a classic in his home country – it has never been out of print.

As a young man, Sven Lindqvist was fascinated by the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, and by the possibility of entering a work of art and making it a way of life. He was drawn to artists and writers who shared this vision, especially Hermann Hesse, in his novel Glass Bead Game. Partly inspired by Hesse’s work, Lindqvist lived in China for two years, learning classical calligraphy from a master teacher. There he was drawn deeper into the idea of a life of artistic perfectionism and retreat from the world. But when he left China for India and then Afghanistan, and saw the grotesque effects of poverty and extreme inequality, Lindqvist suffered a crisis of confidence and started to question his ideas about complete immersion in art at the expense of a proper engagement with life. The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu takes us on a fascinating journey through a young man’s moral awakening and his grappling with profound questions of aesthetics. It contains the bracing moral anger, and poetic, intensely atmospheric travel writing Lindqvist’s readers have come to love.

Turn to his depiction of the great Buddhist statues of Longmen and you encounter some of the most graphic, original and sophisticated descriptive writing on China. His visit to a Beijing bathhouse is a small jewel of empathy. Just as you feel he is wandering too convoluted a mystical labyrinth, he introduces a statement of cool critical force... complex, shifting and endlessly self-reflexive

Colin Thubron, The Times

Lindqvist has developed a literary form flexible enough for him to travel in time as much as space, combining the personal and the political, mingling historical investigation, travel and literary reportage and - increasingly - fierce polemic

Stuart Jeffries, Guardian

A writer of rare political engagement, [who], in order to convey the complexity and urgency of his beliefs, created a wholly new form of non-fiction. Philosophy, travel, memoir, essay, aphorism and polemic are all interwoven in his works

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

The Author

Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019) was born in Stockholm, and travelled extensively through Asia, Africa and Latin America. He was the author of thirty books, including A History of Bombing, Desert Divers, which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and Exterminate All the Brutes, which formed the basis of a major HBO four-part documentary series by Academy Award-nominated writer and director Raoul Peck.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Sven Lindqvist on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.