The Bamboo Grove is Elder Brother’s secluded hermitage, a carefully made Chinese garden and a place of study where Joseph Knecht’s intellectual apprenticeship became a personal awakening. Knecht went there seeking instruction in the I Ching; he stayed for months, learning not only its signs and divinatory method but also the daily work that sustained the garden. The retreat’s significance lies in this pairing of disciplined practice with a life beyond Castalian abstractions: it altered how Knecht understood himself, his vocation, and the hierarchies in which he had been formed.

Setting and Origins

The Bamboo Grove was established by Elder Brother, formerly the most promising student in the Chinese Department. Exceptionally skilled in brush writing and the deciphering of ancient texts, he also tried to make himself Chinese in outward practice. He refused to address his superiors by their titles, calling them “My Elder Brother”; the appellation eventually became his own nickname. His special devotion to the I Ching and skill with its traditional yarrow stalks set him apart within a department whose rationalistic, antimystical, and explicitly Confucian temper he found constraining.

Elder Brother left the institute that might have kept him as a teacher and travelled on foot with a brush, an ink saucer, and a few books. After visiting members of the Order, he found a place for the hermitage he imagined and persisted in petitioning both secular authorities and the Order until he received permission to settle and cultivate it. The result was an idyllic retreat governed by ancient Chinese principles. Some regarded its founder as a crank; others revered him as a kind of saint. He spent his days meditating and copying old scrolls, turning to the garden whenever those pursuits allowed.

The garden was miniature but not merely decorative: it was a worked environment with its own routines and order. A Chinese pavilion stood among bamboos, a wooden pipe fed a fountain, and overflow ran into a masonry basin where plants grew in the crevices. Goldfish moved through the clear water; inscribed stone slabs punctuated the grass. The place’s composed scale and cultivated detail gave Knecht a setting very different from a school or institute: knowledge here was bound to tending, preparing, observing, and living within a particular space.

Knecht’s Arrival and the Oracle

Knecht’s interest in the I Ching had begun at the Far Eastern College, where he studied Chinese language and classics, made rapid progress in reading and writing, befriended Chinese scholars, and memorized odes from the Shih Ching. In his second year he turned more intensely to the Book of Changes. The college could offer information but no suitable introductory course; after repeated requests for an instructor, Knecht learned of Elder Brother. He also sensed that the subject led into territory the teachers preferred to avoid, so he became more guarded in his inquiries. Having hurriedly completed a seminar paper, he set out on foot to find the hermitage.

The journey brought him through mountain passes into a southern landscape of terraced vineyards, brown stone walls, chestnut groves, and high country softened by blue distance. He reached the Bamboo Grove late in the afternoon. There he met the frail, shy hermit beside a flower bed and greeted him in Chinese as a young disciple paying his respects. The meeting’s reserve and formality gave way to an encounter structured by the oracle: Elder Brother cast the yarrow stalks, read the resulting sign, and announced the judgment, “Youthful folly wins success.” Knecht understood the result as permission to stay. The divination was not an ornamental prologue to instruction; it established the terms of a relationship in which the learner would approach knowledge through patience and practice.

A Life of Study and Work

Knecht remained for months. Elder Brother gave him an hour each day to practise counting the stalks, learn the grammar and symbolism of the oracular language, and write and memorize the sixty-four signs. He read ancient commentaries with him and, on especially good days, told him stories by Chuang Tzu. The teaching was exacting, but it was only one part of the disciple’s education. Knecht tended the garden, washed brushes, prepared Chinese ink, made soup and tea, gathered firewood, observed the weather, and learned to use the Chinese calendar. The hermitage connected learning with the small tasks that made its secluded life possible.

Knecht’s attempts to bring the Glass Bead Game and music into their spare conversations usually came to little. Elder Brother answered such efforts with a proverb or a forbearing smile, but did not forbid Knecht’s music: when Knecht had a small clavichord sent from Monteport and practised an hour a day, his teacher raised no objection. Knecht once said that he hoped to learn enough to incorporate the I Ching’s system into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed and warned that although a person could make a small bamboo garden in the world, the gardener might not succeed in incorporating the world into that garden. The exchange exposes a difference of intellectual scale and purpose: Knecht sought a synthesis, while Elder Brother’s practice remained rooted in the bounded world he had cultivated.

The setting also belongs to a wider pattern in Knecht’s years of free study. He preferred places where he could work alone or with only a few others, and remembered some of them with lifelong gratitude. He stayed at Monteport, sometimes as the Music Master’s guest and sometimes for a musicological seminar, and twice attended the twelve-day Great Exercise of fasting and meditation at Hirsland. Yet he spoke with particular affection of the Bamboo Grove, where, as he put it, he learned and experienced things of decisive importance. The hermitage was not simply another institution in his itinerary: it joined concentrated study to a distinctive human encounter.

Awakening and Significance

Knecht later described his months at the Bamboo Grove as an unusually happy time and repeatedly called them the beginning of his awakening. After this period, awakening became a recurrent image in his remarks, related to but distinct from the sense of vocation he had formerly associated with his calling. The biographical account suggests that the change involved knowledge of himself and his place within Castalia and the wider human order, while increasingly emphasizing his recognition of a singular position and destiny. At the same time, the established categories of both the general hierarchy and the Castalian hierarchy became more relative to him. The retreat thus marks a change not by severing Knecht from learning, but by changing the scale at which he understood it.

His Chinese studies continued after he left the hermitage, especially in the direction of ancient Chinese music. In older Chinese writings he encountered praise of music as a primal source of order, morality, beauty, and health, an ethical conception already embodied for him by the Music Master. The Bamboo Grove therefore did not replace his Castalian education or erase its traditions. It offered a distinct encounter through which he could test the limits of his existing intellectual habits and bring them into relation with other forms of knowledge.

That difference remained visible years later. By then an important figure at Waldzell, Knecht invited Elder Brother to teach a course there and received no answer. The silence preserves the distance between the hermit’s chosen life and Castalia’s institutional world: Knecht could carry the experience of the grove forward, but he could not simply absorb its founder into the structures he served. In the account of Knecht’s development, the Bamboo Grove endures as both a remembered refuge and a turning point, a place where learning became a practice of attention and where awakening began to loosen the authority of inherited ranks.