Peaceful PuAn in Sanskrit

Peaceful PuAn in Sanskrit is a zither piece whose meaning in this scene is bound to a friendship between a musician and XuanKu. The elderly performer says many people have heard the song without understanding its underlying principle, while XuanKu listened repeatedly and recognized its Buddhist grounding; after learning of XuanKu’s death, the musician’s grief turns the piece into a private memorial.

The Song and Its Listener

The musician remembers the song as more than a performance. He says that although many people had heard it, they did not grasp its inner logic, whereas XuanKu understood that it was rooted in Buddhism and listened to it again and again. That contrast makes attentive understanding, rather than public hearing, the measure of the song’s significance.

The scene offers no account of the piece’s notes or structure. Its character instead emerges through the bond the performer describes: XuanKu was the listener who could hear what the music meant. The song therefore stands for a shared sensibility that the musician believes cannot be reproduced for an audience without that particular understanding.

Grief and Comic Excess

When XuanNan tells him that XuanKu has died, the elderly man first stands motionless, then leaps a zhang into the air and weeps before landing. He pulls at his beard, beats the ground with his legs, and laments that XuanKu did not meet him once more. His response gives the song’s remembered intimacy a physical force: the loss of its one discerning listener overwhelms him.

That sorrow is inseparable from comic self-absorption. The musician says that playing for XuanNan would be like playing a zither to a cow, because XuanNan might not comprehend the music as XuanKu did. XuanNan, initially moved by what seems straightforward grief, realizes that the old man is lamenting the loss of a musical soulmate and gently smiles rather than taking offense.

A New Song as Memorial

The musician says that he had worked hard to create a new piece for XuanKu, calling it Humming of a Reed. He describes it as a tribute to the Shaolin founder Bodhidharma and the tradition that he crossed a river on a reed. The new composition is distinct from Peaceful PuAn in Sanskrit, but the two songs meet in the same scene: one recalls the understanding XuanKu had given the musician, while the other is offered too late to its intended listener.

Unable to accept the finality of the death, the musician asks XuanNan to take him to XuanKu’s tomb so he can play the new song there. He even imagines that the performance might soothe the dead monk and perhaps revive him. The proposal makes music at once an act of remembrance and a fanciful refusal to let the bond end.

Significance in the Scene

The episode sets Buddhist understanding beside eccentric theatricality without making them equivalent. XuanKu’s capacity to recognize the song’s Buddhist grounding is the source of the musician’s attachment; the performer’s extravagant mourning, by contrast, makes that attachment both moving and absurd. XuanNan’s restrained response holds the two registers together, allowing the grief to be genuine even as the musician’s claim about playing to an uncomprehending listener invites humor.