Thirty Years of Learning and Practice

This reporter met with Ma Mengqing and his apprentice, Miss Deng Qingzhi, at the press. Ma is tall, lean, and appears younger than his age. Owing to a penicillin allergy, Ma became deaf in his right ear when he was three years old. Consequently he can only hear speech at a volume of 80 dB in his left ear. Having refused to learn sign language, he relies on lip-reading to communicate. Although capable of speaking only simple sentences, when talking about sutra engraving he is eager to share his thoughts and aspirations, despite communication problems.

The Jinling Buddhist Press officially recommenced operation in 1981. Ma Mengqing is one of over a dozen apprentices the press took on that year.

Sutra engraving is no easy task. One of Ma’s first exercises after joining the press was to engrave squares on a woodblock until he could make them uniform in size. One year later, Ma started to engrave mirror images of characters inside these squares, which also entailed meeting the requirement that character typefaces replicate computer fonts. Perhaps because of Ma’s partial deafness he studied harder than his fellow apprentices. “He is intelligent and meticulous. Unable to hear his teacher clearly, Ma observed his every move, and turned out to be a star student,” Deng Qingzhi said. After three years of study and practice, Ma was qualified to commence sutra engraving.

Unable to knuckle down to the rigor and hardship entailed in learning this craft, all of Ma’s fellows gradually left the press. Ma believes that his hearing disability enabled him to become enraptured in Buddhist sutras and discover the joy of engraving them on woodblocks.

When asked about the hardship of engraving work, Ma just smiled and showed us his heavily calloused hands. Owing to an accident the fourth finger of his left hand is almost the same length as the pinkie.

“Mending” blocks involves repairing damaged sections of ancient woodblocks to make them printable. The Jinling Buddhist Press has 125,000 ancient woodblocks, all of which are precious cultural relics. “We treat them with utmost care and try to preserve them in their original state. We only mend those that have been seriously damaged and which are needed to be printed and distributed in large volumes,” Deng Qingzhi said.

Mending blocks demands meticulous effort. First, the damaged section of the original block must be evened out and a section of Euonymus bungeanum wood placed on it. Mended characters must match the typeface and size of the originals exactly. “Ma Mengqing is the only one capable of doing mending work,” Deng Qingzhi said. Ma’s mended woodblock characters look and feel the same as the original.