Introduction
Some stories endure not because they give answers, but because they remain inexhaustible. They continue to open, to trouble, to mirror. Yuen Ren Chao’s playful yet disorienting riddle, “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” belongs to this rare class. On the surface it is a linguistic labyrinth. Beneath that surface it becomes a parable of perception itself - of how easily naming something replaces seeing the real entity of that something; teaching once again how quickly certainty substitutes for meaningful encounter, and how effortlessly the human mind turns symbol into object and object into threat.
Over time, this riddle has become for me less a puzzle of language and more a lens on culture. It exposes a recurring human pattern:
we often destroy what we do not understand, devour what we have misrecognized, and sanctify our hunger as virtue.
In this sense, Mr. Shi is not merely a fictional poet. He is a recurring posture within civilizations - political, religious, and personal.
The reflections gathered here below approach the riddle not as a clever word-game but as a living, resident allegory. They draw upon a Whiteheadian-processual sensibility, further informed by Daoist and Zen intuitions, exploring how reality itself is better understood as relational becoming rather than static cultural substance. Within such a framework, democracy is not a finished structure to be defended once-and-for-all, but an unending, evolving relationship between unlike social entities to be continuously, lovingly cultivated. Similarly, faith is never a fixed possession nor proposition - but an ongoing response to the lure of divine novelty in every moment of every day.
From this vantage, the contemporary rise of MAGA-Trumpian politics and MAGA-Christianity appears less as an anomaly and more as a tragic intensification of an ancient error: consuming the symbol while missing the spirit, attacking statues while believing we have slain monsters. The danger is not simply moral failure. It is perceptual failure - a collapse of symbolic literacy, a forgetting of how to dwell within ambiguity, and a refusal to exercise humility before reality's evolving icomplexity.
About the Poem
The poem that follows does not aim to argue in the usual sense. It seeks instead to invite a different mode of seeing. Its voice is intentionally allegorical, meditative, and spacious. It tries not to speak in a register of denunciation, but in the quieter register of lament and possibility. It gestures toward a world in which arrows are lowered, jaws are unclenched, and the long work of relational becoming can begin again.
What remains, then, is not a final word, but an opening. A cave whose entrance is still unblocked. Lions still unchewed. A future still capable of learning how to love itself into existence.
The Stone Lions We Mistook for Enemies
The Lion-Hunter walkedwith a quiver full of certainties,
arrows tipped in slogans,
and eyes trained on shapes
Here, the Threat, he remarked.
And all Evil, he flatly stated.
And so he loosed his arrows
No breath fled from living life.
Only rising dust falling
stacking them like trophies
inside the chambers of his chest,
sharpening his hunger.
When he chewed,
His tongue met ash.
His mouth filled with the taste of nothing.
lay a constitution yet breathing,
a gospel still whispering,
a democracy wanting to become.
So he called judges, demons,
neighbors invaders,
life's questions treason,
and compassion weakness.
He mistook scaffolding for chains,
and tore down the erected house,
that he might feel free again.
He said he ate Christ.
He swallowed crosses
without ever touching mercy.
without learning their pulse.
He polished a militant savior,
cast in the image of his fear,
praying to the echo of his own voice.
When he broke his teeth
he blamed love for being too soft.
The tragedy is not that lions were slain,
the tragedy is that they were never lions.
They were symbols of fear.
Doorways to enter.
Invitations to love.
Stony figures pointing toward living depths.
And yet, the hunter aimed
It is a wandering path moving forward.
Nor is difference a beast to be conquered -
but a life practicing more ways to sing.
Still, the Lion-Hunter
and certainty shaped like control.
They offered a living participation,
The offer to the hunter
to step into the unfinished light
The fearsome lions were never enemies -
of a world still learning
how to love each other
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Lessons Learned
MAGA, Misrecognition, and the Ruins of Symbolic Life
1.
They aimed at lionsand shattered statues.
They swallowed stone
and called it strength.
When a culture loses the art of symbol,
it begins to eat its own metaphors
starving while chewing.
Power that cannot listen
turns imagination into weapon,
and weapon into theology.
4.
The greatest danger is not false gods,
but mistaking stone for spirit
and violence for devotion.
5.
Every age is tested
by whether it can tell the difference
between what threatens it
and what invites it to become.
6.
Authoritarian faith does not believe in God.
It believes in certainty.
7.
What we consume shapes what we become.
Those who feed on fear
inherit its emptiness.
8.
The ruins of a civilization
begin where symbols are treated as enemies
instead of teachers.
9.
When power devours meaning,
it calls the hunger holy.
10.
Democracy dies first as imagination
before it dies as law.
11.
Faith dies first as relationship
before it dies as doctrine.
12.
The lion was never the enemy.
The inability to see was.
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