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My new Province is a land of bamboo groves; their shoots in spring
fill the valleys and hills. The mountain woodman cuts an armful of
them and brings them down to sell at the early market. Things are
cheap in proportion as they arc common', for two farthings I buy a
whole bundle, f put the shoots in a great earthen pot, and steam them
over the boiling rice. Their purple nodules broken, they suggest an
old brocade; their white skin gleams like new pearls.

PO CHU-I (A.D. 772-846)

Two hundred years after Po Chu-I, the Chinese poet Ou-yang Hsui
sang of the myriad leaves of the bamboo which give a thousand sounds
and all of them lamentations, the same beauty and sadness echoed by
the oldest and simplest and most melodious flutes in the world,
bamboo flutes made in immemorial traditions like the Japanese
shakuhachi, with its sweet pentatonic scale. Masters who make these
vertical flutes are very few in the world. They are fast disappearing
along with the whispering majesty of undisturbed bamboo groves and
the quiet hours spent in contemplating their grace. Masters who
fashion such perfection go alone each winter into the mountains and
select the stems they will use. They dry them upon their roofs for
three months and then place them in the dark for three years. The
cutting and shaping and boring of the shaft is an extended process of
meditation wherein the craftsman imbues the flute with the living
sigh of bamboo bowing in the wind.

The natives of Malacca pierce the stems of growing bamboo so that
a flute-like music is produced when the wind blows. Some are slit at
every internode, resulting in a harmony of as many as twenty notes.
They call these plants bulu perindu, 'the plaintive bamboo'. Beauty
and sadness commingle like the world and the brief life of man.
Echoes emanating from the groves of ancient times whisper of death
covered by growth, of graceful tenderness masted to inexorable
change. Surely these were the feelings shared by Li Ho when he
wrote: "There is a sad loveliness among the scented bamboos; white
powdered gnarls, leaves freshly green, furry grass drooping sorrowful
hairs, glistening dew shedding faint tears, a road winding to a green
cavern amongst dense leaves." A pathway winds in and amongst the
giant stems, gathering darkness and melancholy but skirting the edges
of exuberant growth. To be amongst the bamboo is to be surrounded by
a sense of peace which is not born of stillness. The branches and the
leaves far above are unresting and the vitality of the young sprouts
is almost tangible. Indeed, many people in old China used to go into
the groves on a quiet night to listen to the audible pop of sprouts
bursting through their sheaths as they emerged from the ground,
marking the beginning of each spring.

In the archaic annals of the West the first mention of the
word 'bamboo' was made in 400 B.C. by Ctesias, the court physician to
King Artaxerxes Mnemon of Persia. Most scholars consider it a Malayan
onomatopoeic word describing the exploding noise of the sprouts
bursting and of the canes when they are burning. Marco Polo observed
how in the Orient travellers would tie green poles together and
suspend them near the campfire so that they would explode at
intervals and frighten away any wild animals prowling about. The
Chinese word for bamboo is chu, which is rendered in calligraphic
form as two interdependent plants standing side by side. The Chu P'u
or Bamboo Treatise was published in the third or fourth century and
gives a detailed account of the bamboo and its multiple uses in
ancient times. A familiarity with such a work or the Chinese language
itself reveals a frequent use of the radical chu which enters into
the composition of many characters expressing some action or object
connected with the use of bamboo. The symbol for 'writing brush'
includes this character, as do those for gambling, dice, cards, mah-
jong, arrows, books and numerous other things which are made of or
even abstractly relate to this kingly grass.

Kaki-dake' to
Tombo to utsuru
Shoji kana!

The shadow of the
Bamboo fence, with
A dragon-fly at rest upon it,
Is thrown upon my paper window!

Japanese Haiku

The white-rimmed leaves of the kumazasa bamboo evoke the eloquent
scenery of the mountain. They are placed in bowls where wearied eyes
may rest upon them and drink in their fresh, moist curves. Thus
through art and symbol the Japanese revive and refine their souls in
thousands of ways. In the hottest weather, bamboo leaves rustling
give an illusion of coolness, of endless whispering. In the evening,
unobserved, women sprinkle water upon them so that visitors walking
through their garden are refreshed and enchanted by the jewelled
drops poised upon the curves of foiled leaves, suspended from their
cascading blades. "Moonlight slides up and down the stems of young
bamboo, swayed by the night breeze." It floods into the little tea-
house and illumines the tea-whisk, the water ladle, the flower vase,
the mats and paper windows, all fashioned of bamboo. The shadow of
the bamboo fence is one of myriad artistic elements of a delicate and
exquisitely simple scene. The dragon-fly is almost redundant.

Along with the winter plum and pine tree, the bamboo forms the
Trio of the Winter Friends depicted so frequently in Chinese art. It
represents resistance to hardship and the smooth expanse between its
nodes symbolizes virtue or a long distance between faults. The hollow
interior is a sign of modesty signifying the inner emptiness which is
the characteristic of the scholar-gentleman who is upright in bearing
but humble. Because of these venerable associations, the bamboo is
the emblem of the Buddha. In India the seven-knotted bamboo staff
indicates seven degrees of initiation and invocation which are rooted
in wisdom and gentleness. This combination of unostentatious
flexibility and immense strength is the key to understanding the
natural symbol of the bamboo. They say the wise bamboo bows before
the wind but never breaks, and so the wise man lays low before the
storm but rises up fresh and unbroken when it has run its course. The
bamboo's gracefulness and constant growth exemplify a yielding but
enduring strength and pliability which the Japanese take as the
symbol of good breeding, lasting friendship and longevity. The long
canes reaching ever upwards represent truthfulness, while the curved
branchlets and trembling leaves express a beauteous devotion. So
auspicious and beauteous are the symbolic characteristics of bamboo
that it has served as the most enduring motif in oriental art, and
many a family in feudal Japan proclaimed at least a partial
exemplification of them by adopting a bamboo design as its
identifying crest.

There are over one thousand species of bamboo, making up fifty
genera which grow in varying distributions on every continent except
Europe and Antarctica. Growing from sea level tropics to thirteen
thousand-foot mountain slopes, the bamboo ranges from the size of
field grass to one hundred twenty-foot culms (trunks) measuring one
foot in diameter. At this height the great Dendrocalamus giganteus of
Burma weigh over two hundred pounds, despite their being hollow, and
such groves in India and Burma extend into millions of acres.
Describing the awesome experience of walking amongst these friendly
giants, one author wrote: "The foot-thick culms glisten in the
submarine light and rise for one hundred feet amongst dagger leaves
that stir with a susurrus like surf on a distant shore. A passing
breeze rubs the tapering stems together and subdued groans,
stuttering creaks, and a small scream fall from the moving canopy."
Vast forests of pure bamboo stands in Colombia were described by
Humboldt as being "several leagues in extent". Their culms and leaves
were used to build entire houses one hundred fifty years ago as they
are today, and their ninety-foot height created wide belts of lacy
chartreuse green which accented the darker surrounding vegetation. As
a building material bamboo is very strong indeed, its strength lying
in the bundles of fibres running the length of the culm held in a
matrix of pith. In a tree the living tissue is only in the outermost
ring under the bark, but in the bamboo the columns of living tissue
are scattered throughout the culm walls, giving a very high tensile
strength to weight ratio. In many parts of the Far East yellow bamboo
is used for scaffolding on high-rise buildings because it is lighter
and even stronger than steel.

Over three thousand years ago the Chinese classified the bamboo
as ts'ao, thus identifying it as one of the grasses of the world. It
is a botanical cousin to rice and corn and its specific family,
Bambusacea, is distinguished by the special structure of its culm,
its growth rate, the fact that it reaches its full height in a very
short time, and its flowering habits. Though the rhizomes (roots) and
the leaves are used, it is the culm which is so valuable and makes
the bamboo the most versatile plant in the world. In China there are
three hundred species of bamboo, while in Japan there are six hundred
sixty-two types, including the unique kikko-chiku (tortoise-shell
bamboo) which can be found in Kyoto. A variety of the mao chu (hairy
bamboo) used widely for furniture and construction in China, the
tortoise-shell bamboo grows in alternating humps, its culm resembling
a long line of turtles in tandem spiralling their way upwards.

No other living thing grows so tall so fast. In Japan the ma-dake
bamboo has been measured at a growth rate of four feet in twenty-tour
hours. In Washington, D.C., an engineer who enjoyed entertaining his
guests with evening bridge sessions used to keep tabs on the time
spent by measuring the new shoots of bamboo that grew in his
stairwell at the beginning of the evening. When the session ended he
would measure them again and proclaim that "we have played one and a
half inches!" The bamboo sprouts and reaches its full height in six
to eight weeks, but the young culms are mostly water and will shrink
when cut. This does not, however, deter the bamboo from growing
through a sheet iron roof as it telescopes its way upwards towards
the light. The most common mode of growth is illustrated by the
monopodial or runner type of bamboo. The rhizome of the monopodial
plant reaches its full length in one season and lives for ten years.
Every node of it possesses buds, one of which may develop each year
into either a culm or a rhizome. In this way the running bamboo
extends itself from three to twenty feet in a year. In a quarter-acre
grove excavated in Kyoto, the length and weight of living and dead
rhizomes belonging to the ma-dake type measured over ten thousand
yards.

Two live as one
One live as two
Two live as three
Under the barn
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree.

T. S. ELIOT

The unrestrained multiplication of the bamboo will continue until
checked or disciplined by man. Its propagation by budding and
branching is asexual and continuous throughout an annual cycle that
may last as many as one hundred twenty years. But it does this in
alternating patterns and cycles. When the stem grows, the roots do
not, and when the stem stops growing, the roots begin to do so. It is
also the case that the bamboo tends to grow well and poorly in
alternating years, the new culms fluctuating in their number and
quality. Rhizomes yield culms, culms yield branchlets, and each
component axis consists of a series of nodes and internodes. There is
no central trunk or main axis. The entire growth of the bamboo is
clothed with enveloping sheaths that face alternative sides of the
axis at successive nodes. With minor exceptions, each sheath subtends
a bud or a branch complement. The segmentation, that is to say, the
regular alternation of nodes and internodes, is an expression of
physiological periodicity. The nodes are thus periodic centres of
morphogenetic activity alternating with internodes of rest and
extension.

"In the growing point it is at the loci later recognizable as
nodes that sheath primordia are initiated and segmentation first
comes into focus." The leaf of the bamboo is merely an appendage to a
sheath proper which embraces the developing internode, roots and
branches emerging only at the nodes. Each segmented axis is thus a
branch of another segmented axis. This pattern is echoed by the
rooting action of the rhizomes, which at each successive axis burrow
deeper into the earth in a series of 'necks' which take a horizontal
course only to turn upwards when a change in the physiological state
of the growing point induces an alteration in the pattern of the
tissues subsequently produced. At the curve of each of these rhizome
necks the axis takes on the form of a developing culm with negative
geotropism strongly developed. The culm then grows so rapidly that it
cannot provide sustenance for itself and is completely dependent upon
the 'mother bamboo'. The quality of the mother determines the quality
of the takenoko or 'bamboo children'. The monopodial mother
distributes her children abroad while the sympodial (clump style)
mother keeps her progeny close. The individual parent plant has done
all of its growing in one season and its function thereafter is to
gather nourishment for the new sprouts (to which it transmits its
characteristics) rather than for itself.

For most species of bamboo, flowering is like the swan-song of
their existence. Because of this, people in India interpret the
appearance of their flowers as the presage of some disaster. In fact,
certain types of Indian bamboo when flowering bear fruit which fall
in a ripe state and nourish multitudes of rats. The death of large
stands of bamboo is a tragedy to people who need them or make their
living from them, and the difficulty is aggravated by the increased
numbers of rodents who bring disease in their wake. Plants of the
same species, wherever they are in the world, tend to burst into
flower at the same time. When this happens the culms die but the
grove survives because some rhizomes continue to live, and seeds from
the dying flowers fall to reproduce sexually most of the new
generation. The tragedy for people who depend upon the bamboo lies in
the fact that it takes from five to ten years for the grove to regain
its maturity. This is sometimes of very serious consequence to other
forms of life as well. The Sinarundinaria nitida, which grows in
dense thickets in Szechwan Province in China, is the only source of
food for the fabled giant pandas. Shortly after these large bamboo
recently reached the end of their century-old cycle and began
flowering en masse and dying, one hundred forty pandas were
discovered dead in the hills.

The flowering of one type of bamboo occurring simultaneously all
over the world is regarded as satisfying proof that the genus sprang
originally from a single stock at some period now obscured in the
mists of time. Some types flower in cycles of sixty, ninety or one
hundred twenty years, some in lesser cycles. But the gregarious
flowering is thought to be due to a genetic imprint in the plants.
The Indian fruit-bearing bamboo Melocanna baccifera flowers every
thirty years in a dependable cycle like an alternating waxing and
waning of fortune. The species is slated to flower again in the year
1992. In the meantime, it will be put to innumerable uses and provide
food and shelter for millions of people. All over Asia the bamboo is
the poor man's timber. Farmers live with it from birth to death. In
India, China and Japan the umbilical cord was traditionally cut with
a bamboo knife and cradles were fashioned from its canes. Bamboo
tools are used throughout a lifetime and the leaves feed the
elephants and the cattle who toil with their masters in the fields.
It can truly be said that for over one-half of humanity, life would
be completely different if there were no bamboo.

In Japan the structural uses of bamboo are seemingly endless. It
provides the ceilings, moulding, rain spouts, gutters, corner-posts
of the tokonoma (the viewing alcove), paper for walls and windows,
and the mats on the floor. It is the raw material for peace or war,
being the stuff of which baskets, furniture, umbrellas and rope are
made, as well as bows, arrows, kendo swords and slatted armour. The
finest fishing rods in the world were first manufactured long before
the Christian era from Tonkin cane which grows on the Sui River near
Canton. This excellent bamboo is now exported from China to be used
for horticulture in Europe, snow markers and ski poles in
Scandinavia, furniture and fishing rods everywhere and pole vaults
for the athletic connoisseur. Observers have noted that a Chinese
junk is almost one hundred percent bamboo. In addition to the boat
itself and the sail, paper, nails, buckets, lanterns, fish traps,
pillows, anchor and nets are all fashioned from bamboo. Oriental
ships descend from ancient bamboo sailing rafts from which they take
their box-like design. The idea of watertight compartments was
inspired by the bamboo and later imitated by shipbuilders from the
West.

The earliest records in China were written upon bamboo slips
which, strung together with silk, comprised annals used by the rich
and powerful as sources of knowledge and law. Medicine was extracted
from the rhizomes and culms of various species, including a secretion
called tabasheer which forms and hardens between the nodes. For
millennia this substance was considered a panacea, and though its use
has been dismissed by modern science as the remnant of a popular
superstition, more recent knowledge has vindicated the wisdom of its
application. As a silica, tabasheer acts as a catalyst to remove
toxic products by absorbing them into its own insoluble structure
where they are fixed and rendered incapable of causing any further
harm.

Hanging cables of twisted bamboo are ancestral to cables of the
world's suspension bridges. The great bridge of Szechwan which spans
the two hundred fifty-yard width of the Mi River hangs from split
bamboo twisted into cables seven inches in diameter. Each of twenty
of them is wound around the capstans on either side of the nine-foot-
wide span so that they can be tuned like strings upon a lute. No iron
or nails are used anywhere in this bridge, and yet it has served for
more than a thousand years and is renowned as one of the engineering
marvels of the world. Its strength and beauty have been described in
Chinese bamboo books which, when passed on into Japanese culture,
were probably read by the light of candles made of the wax coating
scraped from the nodes of yearling culms. Such candles illuminated
the homes of the great lords in medieval times; and hundreds of years
later in America, after experimenting with six thousand different
materials in his search for a filament for his newly invented light
bulb, Thomas Edison chose bamboo. It was delicately fashioned from
the charred fibres of ma-dake bamboo which grows around Iwashimizu
Hachiman, a Shinto shrine on a hill in Kyoto.

Truly said is the Vietnamese proverb: "The bamboo is my brother."
It has bowed to the needs of man since man's memory has ushered it
forth as a civilizing agent in the world. The Chinese poet Pou Sou-
tung eloquently asserted this when he stated: "Without meat we become
thin; without bamboo we lose serenity and culture itself." The
closeness of the identification between man and bamboo is affirmed in
many songs and fables that tell of the woodcutter discovering a
heavenly child within the womb of a bamboo. Though this child usually
leaves the earth to return to her celestial abode, her earthly
sojourn is timelessly remembered in the conical perfection of Mount
Fujiyama or other such inspirational markers. In the Chu Shu (Bamboo
Books) of ancient China, full accounts of such supernatural and
marvellous events have been preserved. They tell that bamboo was
first brought to China by Hwang Ti, the legendary Yellow Emperor who
ruled Cathay at the dawn of recorded history. Huang Ti corresponds to
the element of the earth, and his reign, together with the appearance
of bamboo, marks the beginning of civilization as we know it. This
idea must have spread through the Orient and into the islands of
Oceania like the rhizomes of monopodial bamboo, for the notion that
human life and culture sprang up and multiplied in and through the
bamboo is one of the common mythical themes throughout this
geographical area – man and bamboo, each affected by the nature of
the other, and man seeing in the latter a symbol of himself. In a
garden in Kyoto are seven small black bamboo on a tiny island. The
garden is over six hundred years old and the seven bamboo are
descendants of an original group planted in memory of the seven
pupils of the great teacher Muso-kokushi. The pupils thus stand
eternally upon an island of serenity created for them long ago by a
wise and loving master.

I love, bamboo, your fidgets
And sudden sighs, bamboo;
Awake, alone I listen
To secret susurration
Like paper scraping stone,
Stroking the inner surface
Of this old heart, bamboo.

So close to man, so utterly capable of capturing and reflecting
the hidden longings that emanate from the hollowed sanctity of a
humble man's heart, the bamboo is truly a brother. It serves and it
guards, like the shihochiku which possesses pointed spikes at its
nodes and is planted near the gates of temples and houses to ward off
evil powers. It is an extension of man's vision, his artistry, his
creative flexibility and his enormous endurance. The interlocking
roots of bamboo support and restrain the earth during earthquake or
flood in the same way as the interconnecting and multiplying ideas of
man lay the basis of civilization. And the works and arts of man
flower in their swan-song and decline as does the bamboo in its
cycles, but the grove of human civility does not die. It lies resting
in seed form for a while and then begins its telescopic growth
pattern through the alternating movements of a developing cultural
dialectic which rises up in distinctive shoots but also turns deeply
into hidden channels in order to proliferate. The bamboo is a living
symbol of man's past and future potential, and it is a bridge which
leads him in seven knots, like the narthex which carries the flame,
to the knowledge of himself.

In the Amazon jungle, people of the Guarayo tribe play a haunting
melody on bamboo flutes to their Grandfather of the Ancient Skies,
Tamoi. At the dawn of time, Tamoi ascended from the east to the top
of a bamboo where he released spirits who struck the earth through
the culms. Thus the bamboo is seen by the Guarayo as the chief
benefaction of their solar god and they consider it to be an
intermediary, a bridge-like flute which they can sound. Through the
spirits of the culms, the seven vowels of the Word, they call forth
the Divine Presence. They believe in a periodicity of events and
readily recognize its appearance in the regular alternation of nodes
and internodes of the bamboo. They understand something about the
morphogenetic activity that can be evoked by those who attempt to
work with Nature's hidden currents. They recognize the growing-point
where the "sheath primordia are initiated" and the regular
alternation of development "first comes into focus".

There is a point when the rooting process in the soil of the
world is sufficient and the rhizome turns upward towards the light. A
change in the physiological state of the growing-point occurs and the
axis takes on the form of a developing culm. Like Bodhisattvas
gracefully pointing to heaven, they send down all their light and
nourishment to their multiplying offspring, who in their turn will
rise up and join the ranks of the benefactors of the world. The
alternating pattern of their growth draws upon the powers of the four
corners of the universe and synthesizes them in axes of matchless
endurance and exquisite flexibility. In the bamboo the spirit of the
Bodhisattva, of the refined human soul, is eloquently expressed. It
is echoed thousands of times over in the artifacts, poetry and music
that have sprung from the hearts and hands of countless craftsmen and
dreamers. And it is conveyed by the bamboo itself, by its whispered
rustlings, its graceful swaying in the moonlight and its yielding but
dependable service. The bamboo is our brother and it lives and
propagates and serves infallibly. And it can convey a deeply moving
message of brotherhood. A few years ago a celebrated maker of fishing
rods in the United States discovered in a shipment of bamboo from
Guangdong a culm inscribed with a column of characters. A Chinese
field-worker, knowing that the cane he cut would travel across the
sea, had inscribed upon one of them: "Peoples of the brotherhood of
man! May our friendship last ten thousand years!"

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