The rise of wilderness poetry in the early 5th century C.E. was part of a profound new engagement with wilderness that arose among Chinese artist-intellectuals for several reasons: the recent loss of northern China to “barbarians,” forcing China’s artist-intellectuals to emigrate with the government, settling in the southeast where they were enthralled by a new landscape of serenely beautiful mountains; an especially corrupt political culture involving deadly infighting drove many intellectuals to retire into the mountains rather than risk the traditional career of public service; and recent philosophical developments: the revival of Taoist organicist thought, the influx of Buddhist thought from India, and the intermingling of these two traditions, which eventually gave rise to Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism.
Feeling Chinese culture was under siege by the occupying “barbarians,” the intellectual class felt a kind of historical imperative to cultivate their tradition and renew it, and most of their epoch-making accomplishments can be seen as part of that new engagement with wilderness. The artistic accomplishments of the age were indeed revolutionary. The origins of Chinese rivers-and-mountains (landscape) painting can be traced to this time, probably beginning as illustrations of rivers-and-mountains poetry. Calligraphy was transformed by the organic spontaneity of Wang Hsi-chih, often called the greatest of Chinese calligraphers, and his no less great son, Wang Hsien-chih. And developments in the field of poetry were perhaps even more dramatic, for the two originary poets of the rivers-and-mountains tradition emerged at this time: T’ao Ch’ien and Hsieh Ling-yün.
Two great anthologies mark the ancient beginnings of the Chinese poetic tradition: the Shih Ching (The Book of Songs— 10th—6th centuries B.C.E.) and the Ch’u Tz’u (Songs of the South— 3rd century B.C.E.—2nd century C.E.). But T’ao Ch’ien (T’ao Yüan-ming) was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism that typifies the Chinese tradition. So T’ao Ch’ien effectively stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting. And in the quiet resonance of his poetry, a poetry that still speaks today’s language, later poets recognized a depth and clarity of wisdom that seemed beyond them.
Born into the educated aristocracy, T’ao was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government. Accordingly, he took a number of government positions. But he had little patience for the constraints and dangers of official life, and little interest in its superficial rewards, so he finally broke free and returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on the family farm at his ancestral village of Ch’ai-sang (Mulberry-Bramble), just northwest of the famous Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain. As mentioned in the general Introduction (p. XV), this was not a romantic return to the bucolic, but to a life in which the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan was the very texture of everyday experience. This outline of T’ao Ch’ien’s life became a central organizing myth in the Chinese tradition: artist-intellectuals over millennia admired and imitated the way T’ao lived out his life as a recluse, though it meant enduring considerable poverty and hardship (one poem tells of him going into a village to beg for food). And indeed, T’ao’s commitment to the recluse life went so deep that he chose “Ch’ien” (“concealed,” “hidden,” and so: “recluse”) as his literary name: Recluse T’ao.
This commitment, so central to the rivers-and-mountains tradition in poetry, was the one honorable alternative to government service for the artist-intellectual class. Already an ancient tradition by T’ao Ch’ien’s time, it was a complex political and personal gesture. Politically, it represented a criticism of the government in power: a refusal even to associate with such a government; a model of authenticity and simplicity for those in government whose vanity and greed were so destructive; and, finally, a kind of solidarity with the government’s victims among the common people. On the personal level, retirement represented a commitment to a more spiritually fulfilling life in which one inhabits that wilderness cosmology in the most immediate day-to-day way. Such a recluse life did not normally mean living the spartan existence of an ascetic hermit: it was considered the ideal situation for living a broadly civilized life and typically included, along with the wonders of mountain wilderness, a relatively comfortable house, a substantial library, art, wine, family, and friends. And this personal fulfillment had, in turn, clear political dimensions—for the wisdom cultivated in such a recluse life was considered essential to sage governing. Consider this extremely influential passage from the Confucian classic The Great Learning:
In ancient times, wanting to illuminate luminous Integrity in all beneath heaven, they began composing their nation. Wanting to compose their nation, they began putting their families in order. Wanting to put their families in order, they began cultivating themselves. Wanting to cultivate themselves, they began rectifying their minds. Wanting to rectify their minds, they began truing-up their thoughts. Wanting to true-up their thoughts, they began siting their understanding. And to site understanding is to see deep into things themselves.
Once things themselves are seen deeply, understanding is sited. Once understanding is sited, thought is trued-up. Once thought is trued-up, mind is rectified. Once mind is rectified, self is cultivated. Once self is cultivated, family is in order. Once family is in order, the nation is composed. And once the nation is composed, all beneath heaven is tranquil.
T’ao Ch’ien is traditionally spoken of as founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition, in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yün, founder of the rivers-and-mountains tradition. This is a useful distinction, describing a real difference in emphasis not only in these two originary poets, but throughout the tradition to follow. But there is no fundamental distinction between the two: both embody the cosmology that essentially is the Chinese wilderness, and as rivers-and-mountains is the broader context within which fields-and-gardens operates, it seems more accurate to speak of both modes together as a single rivers-and-mountains tradition.
T’ao Ch’ien’s domestic fields-and-gardens feel is more a reflection of his profound contentment than some fundamental difference in his poetic world: unlike Hsieh Ling-yün, whose poems are animated by the need to establish an enlightened relationship with a grand alpine wilderness, T’ao effortlessly lived everyday life on a mountain farm as an utterly sufficient experience of dwelling, his poems initiating that intimate sense of belonging to natural process that shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility. And though this dwelling means confronting death and the existential realities of human experience without delusion, a central preoccupation in T’ao Ch’ien and all Chinese poets, the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan provided ample solace. If T’ao’s poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it’s because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead, they always begin with the deepest wisdom.
I’d long felt these mountains and
lakes
calling, and wouldn’t have thought twice,
but my family and friends couldn’t bear
talk of living
apart. Then one lucky day
a strange feeling came over me and I left,
walking-stick in
hand, for my west farm.
No one was going home: on outland roads
farm after farm lay in
abandoned ruins,
but our thatch hut’s already good as ever,
and our new
fields look old and settled.
When valley winds turn bitter and cold
our spring wine eases
hunger and work,
and though it isn’t strong, just baby-girl
wine,
it’s better than nothing for worry.
As months and years circle on away here,
the bustling
world’s ways grown distant,
plowing and weaving provide all we use.
Who needs anything
more? Away— away
into this hundred-year life and beyond,
my story and I vanish
together like this.
Nothing like all the others, even as a
child,
rooted in such love for hills and mountains,
I stumbled into their net of dust, that one
departure a blunder
lasting thirteen years.
But a tethered bird longs for its old forest,
and a pond fish
its deep waters— so now,
my southern outlands cleared, I nurture
simplicity among these
fields and gardens,
home again. I’ve got nearly two acres here,
and four or
five rooms in this thatch hut,
elms and willows shading the eaves in back,
and in front, peach
and plum spread wide.
Villages lost across mist-and-haze distances,
kitchen smoke
drifting wide-open country,
dogs bark deep among back roads out here,
and roosters crow
from mulberry treetops.
No confusion within these gates, no dust,
my empty home harbors
idleness to spare.
Back again: after so long caged in that trap,
I’ve
returned to occurrence coming of itself.
We had warm, wet weather all spring.
Now,
white autumn is clear and cold. Dew frozen,
drifting mists gone, bottomless heavens
open over this vast
landscape of clarity,
and mountains stretch away, their towering
peaks an unearthly
treasure of distance.
These fragrant woodland chrysanthemums
ablaze, green pines
lining the clifftops:
isn’t this the immaculate heart of beauty,
this
frost-deepened austerity? Sipping wine,
I think of recluse masters. A century away,
I nurture your
secrets. Your true nature
eludes me here, but taken by quiet, I can
linger this exquisite
moon out to the end.
In this meager home, guests rare, I
often
forget I’m surrounded by turning seasons.
And now falling leaves litter courtyard
emptiness, I grow
sadder, realizing it’s
autumn already. Fresh sunflower thickets
fill north windows.
Sweet grains in south
fields ripen. Though I’m far from happy
today, I know
next year may never come.
Get the kids together, I call to my
wife,
it’s the perfect day for a nice long walk.
Turning seasons turning wildly
away,
morning’s majestic calm
unfolds. Out in spring clothes,
I roam eastern fields.
Lingering
clouds sweep mountains clean.
Gossamer mist blurs open
skies.
And soon, feeling south winds,
young grain ripples like
wings.
I live here in a village house without
all
that racket horses and carts stir up,
and you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells
apart is itself
a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see
South Mountain
far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home.
All this means something,
something absolute: whenever I start
to explain it, I forget
words altogether.
Color infusing autumn
chrysanthemums
exquisite, I pick dew-bathed petals,
float them on that forget-your-cares
stuff. Even my passion for
living apart
grows distant. I’m alone here, and still
the winejar
soon fills cups without me.
Everything at rest, dusk: a bird calls,
returning to its forest
home. Chanting,
I settle into my breath. Somehow, on this
east veranda,
I’ve found my life again.
This new year makes it fifty suddenly
gone.
Thinking of life’s steady return
to rest cuts deep, driving me to spend
all morning wandering.
Skies clear,
air’s breath fresh, I sit with friends
beside this
stream flowing far away.
Striped bream weave gentle currents;
calling gulls drift above
idle valleys.
Eyes roaming distant waters, I find
ridge above ridge:
it’s nothing like
majestic nine-fold immortality peaks,
but to reverent eyes
it’s incomparable.
Taking the winejar, I pour a round,
and we start offering
brimful toasts:
who knows where today might lead
or if all this will ever come
true again.
After a few cups, my heart’s far away,
and I forget
thousand-year sorrows:
ranging to the limit of this morning’s
joy, it
isn’t tomorrow I’m looking for.
Life too short for so many lasting
desires,
people adore immortality. When the months
return to this day of promise, everyone
fondly hears ever
and ever in its name.
Warm winds have ended. Dew ice-cold,
stars blaze in crystalline
skies. And now
swallows have taken their shadows south,
arriving geese keep
calling and calling.
Wine eases worry, and chrysanthemums
keep us from the ruins of
age, but if you
live in a bramble hut, helplessly watching
these turning
seasons crumble— what then?
My empty winejar shamed by a dusty cup,
this cold splendor of
blossoms opens for itself
alone. I tighten my robe and sing to myself,
idle, overwhelmed
by each memory. So many
joys to fill a short stay. I’ll take my time
here. It is
whole. How could it be any less?
Seeing off the year’s final day,
windblown
snow can’t slow this warm weather. Already,
at our gate planted with plum and willow,
there’s a
branch flaunting lovely blossoms.
When I chant, words come clear. And in wine
I touch countless
distances. So much still
eludes me here— who knows how much when
there’s
such unearthly Manifest Mountain song?
It’s all an empty boat, oars dangling
free,
but return goes on without end. The year
begins, and suddenly, in a moment’s glance,
midyear
stars come back around, bright
sun and moon bringing all things to such
abundance. North woods
lush, blossoming,
rain falls in season from hallowed depths.
Dawn opens. Summer
breezes rise. No one
comes into this world without leaving soon.
It’s our
inner pattern, which never falters.
At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.
A bent arm my
pillow, I keep empty whole.
Follow change through rough and smooth,
and life’s never
up or down. If you can see
how much height fills whatever you do, why
climb Hua or Sung,
peaks of immortality?
Days and months never take their time.
The
four seasons keep bustling each other
away. Cold winds churn lifeless branches.
Fallen leaves cover
long paths. We’re frail,
crumbling more with each turning year.
Our temples turn white
early, and once
your hair flaunts that bleached streamer,
the road ahead starts
closing steadily in.
This house is an inn awaiting travelers,
and I yet another
guest leaving. All this
leaving and leaving—where will I ever
end up? My old
home’s on South Mountain.