Pu Nai-fu (pen name: No Name) was born in Nanking in 1917. A graduate of the Russian College in Peking, he has served as chief editor of the Northern China newspaper in Sian and the Chen Shan Mei Publishing Co. in Shanghai; as a journalist with the Sweep and Clean newspaper in Chungking, the Central Daily News in Kuiyang, and the Stand-Up newspaper in Hong Kong; and as a lecturer in literature at the National Cheng Kung University on Taiwan. He is currently an honorary professor at the Chung Shan Cultural College in San Francisco and a research fellow at the Contemporary China Research Institute. His works include some thirty volumes of novels, essays, poetry, criticism, lectures, and journalism. His collection of novels, the Book with No Name, is around 2.6 million Chinese characters in length.

I sat motionless in the floral room, quietly gazing at the orchids, like a Taoist adept in ancient times peering at the heavens. Although the entire room had but this single lovely star, I felt as though I had been transported to the midst of a star-filled sky.

I admired them quietly, lost in thought.

I recalled a springtime past in Hangchow, when I once saw a pot of Green Clouds, the most precious orchid of all. There were only a few stalks, set off by a delicate green cluster of kingfisher cloud grass, and they were no more than three or four inches long, shorter than the leaves of other orchids. Green Clouds are said to bloom only once every three or four years, a single blossom at a time. And they are extremely laborious to cultivate, dying quickly after the least carelessness. For that particular pot, for that particular pot, for that particular blossom, someone had offered thirty taels of gold, and the owner had still refused to sell it!

I had always considered them to be an extravagant luxury.

Now I realized that from their fragrant charm one could learn to comprehend the true spirit of the Orient.

Suppose its leaves were to grow another three or four inches, or suppose it were to bloom with two or three more blossoms, or were to bloom every year, or with a fewer petals, or live slightly longer, or not die so easily--grant one or more of these suppositions and it would no longer be so rare, so prized, so precious.

That little flower, which blooms only once every three or four years, had bestowed on me, petal after petal, an eternity of noble, rare, and fragrant charm.

That little flower--some people consider it more precious than life.

An orchid lover undergoes numerous hardships and deprivations to cultivate a single flower that blossoms but once every three or four years and, when it does, must be exposed to sunlight and fresh air to be fragrant. Cloudy weather, a rainy day, a cold spell, and the fragrance are gone. If too many people come to admire it, if they are too noisy or too clammy with perspiration, they will disturb the fragrance. A room with orchids is unsuited for smoking or drinking and must be kept free of extraneous odors or sounds. It must be sunlit, clean, and free of dust, and the person who wishes to appreciate them to the full should fast and bathe to cleanse the body first.

That afternoon was blessed with a clear sky, warm sunlight, and a gentle breeze, and in the orchid room at the Hsi-leng-yin Society not a soul was to be seen. I had the quiet emptiness of the room to myself. Sitting in a Chinesestyle marble-edged mahogany chair, I admired a pot of orchids set on a pitch-black mahogany tea table; although not Green Cloud, they were also a rare variety, perhaps Kingfisher Emerald No. 1. Lost in admiration and gradually closing my eyes, I sensed a wisp of some remote and tranquil spirit, borne on a wish of serene and tranquil fragrance, now distinct, now dim, until I felt as though I had been wafted to some distant cosmic sphere.

People may wait and wait for hundreds or thousands of days without enjoying, for an hour or half an hour, such a fine spring day, with such a sky and such a breeze.

Springtime in the south of China has but a few days of warm sunlight and gentle breezes; soon the weather turns cloudy or cold, burying that rare and precious fragrance.

Waiting for so long, just what is it they await?

Is it all for this rare fragrance brought wafting on a gentle breeze?

Hundreds of thousands of other scents won't do. Why do they wait only for this one?

Just what does it bring? Just what do they cherish?

Is it a touch of grace? A glimmer? A bud of wisdom? A petal of symbolism? The mystery, the evanescence of life?

Doesn't life need a fragrance that is truly sublime? Rarer and nobler than the others?

To nourish the sentience of the universe. And the grace and charm of earth.

Can all the gods and spirits give us such a bit of fragrance, of charm?

So pure it is, so clean, so refined, so genuine, that it seems more fragrant than the gods. It cleanses us, creates us. In the endless flow of life we seem to have found the highest source.

I contemplated deeply, breathed, and pondered. My entire life, at that moment, was wholly concentrated on that pot of orchids. Their flowers, leaves, stalks, petals, pistils, and stamens seemed to have transformed themselves into my own limbs, breast, nose, and tongue.

Gradually, imperceptibly, I came to realize that the eternity I had been seeking for the past twenty some Years--wasn't it just like that fragrance? Just such a drop, a moment, an instant, a flash, moment, an instant, a flash, but transforming itself, in its unbearable loveliness, into the inexhaustible ocean of life.

All from a single drop.

It was finding the unfindable, grasping the ungraspable, seeing the unseeable, hearing the unhearable. That moment, that breath of lovely breeze, had been bound to be, and my spiritual senses to breathe it--eternity, the noblest color, the grandest tone in the Milky Way.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand--nothing--and finally came a time when it appeared. At that moment . . . .

I contemplated, pondered, and plunged in meditation into that spot or red, red as the fur of a tongue. A batlike bit of red set off by the tender green of kingfisher cloud grass, a red that was refined, remote, and profound, like a recluse or a hermit. Gradually, I once again heard (not sniffed) its rare fragrance, its aromatic music of the spheres.