As a patriarch of perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful family in China, Hsieh Ling-yün was deeply involved in the turbulent political world for decades, but he was a mountain recluse at heart. When he was eventually exiled, finding himself in a period of quiet reflection at a beautiful site on a mountainous seacoast in southeast China, he underwent a kind of Buddhist awakening to wilderness. As a result, he abandoned politics and retired to his family home high in the mountains at Shih-ning—a move that he speaks of, like T’ao Ch’ien, as a return to “the sacred beauty of tzu-jan” (p. 25). And though he is traditionally considered the great originator of the wild rivers-and-mountains mode, many of his finest poems are oriented around the fields-and-gardens landscape of his family estate.
At the time of his awakening, Hsieh wrote an essay that is considered the earliest surviving Ch’an text in China, and its ideas provide a framework for his poetry, and for much of the rivers-and-mountains poetry to follow. It describes enlightenment as becoming the emptiness of nonbeing, and as such, mirroring being as it unfolds according to the inner pattern (see Key Terms: li), a key concept that recurs often in Hsieh’s poetry and throughout the wilderness tradition. The philosophical meaning of li, which originally referred to the veins and markings in a precious piece of jade, is something akin to what we call natural law. It is the system of principles according to which the ten thousand things burgeon forth spontaneously from the generative void. For Hsieh, one comes to a deep understanding of li through adoration (shang), another recurring concept in the poems (pp. 24, 36). Adoration denotes an aesthetic experience of the wild mountain realm as a single overwhelming whole. It is this aesthetic experience that Hsieh’s poems try to evoke in the reader, this sense of inhabiting that wilderness cosmology in the most profound way.
As with China’s great rivers-and-mountains paintings, Hsieh’s mountain landscapes enact “nonbeing mirroring the whole” (empty mind mirroring the whole), rendering a world that is deeply spiritual and, at the same time, resolutely realistic. Here lies the difficulty Hsieh’s work presents to a reader. It is an austere poetry, nearly devoid of the human stories and poetic strategies that normally make poems engaging. Hsieh’s central personal “story” is the identification of enlightenment with wilderness, and this is precisely why Hsieh has been so admired in China. Rendering the day-to-day adventure of a person inhabiting the universe at great depth, Hsieh’s poems tend more to the descriptive and philosophical, locating human consciousness in its primal relation to the Cosmos. In so doing, they replace narrow human concerns with a mirror-still mind that sees its truest self in the vast and complex dimensions of mountain wilderness. But as there was no fundamental distinction between mind and heart in ancient China (see Key Terms: hsin), this was a profound emotional experience as well, and it remains so for us today. With their grandiose language, headlong movement, and shifting perspective, Hsieh’s poems were especially celebrated for possessing an elemental power which captures the dynamic spirit and inner rhythms that infuse the numinous realm of rivers and mountains; and reading them requires that you participate in his mirror-still dwelling. Hsieh’s great poems may seem flat at first, and very much alike—but in that dwelling, each day is another form of enlightenment, and each walk another walk at the very heart of the Cosmos itself.
Quiet mystery of lone dragons alluring,
calls of migrant geese echoing distances,
I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a river, all those depths beyond me.
Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity
and too feeble to plow fields in seclusion,
I followed a salary here to the sea’s edge
and lay watching forests bare and empty.
That sickbed kept me blind to the seasons,
but opening the house up, I’m suddenly
looking out, listening to surf on a beach
and gazing up into high mountain peaks.
A warm sun is unraveling winter winds,
new yang swelling, transforming old yin.
Lakeshores newborn into spring grasses
and garden willows become caroling birds:
in them the ancient songs haunt me with
flocks and flocks and full lush and green.
Isolate dwelling so easily becomes forever.
It’s hard settling the mind this far apart,
but not something ancients alone master:
that serenity is everywhere apparent here.
Taking a little food, a light walking-stick,
I wander up to my home in quiet mystery,
the path along streams winding far away
onto ridgetops, no end to this wonder at
slow waters silent in their frozen beauty
and bamboo glistening at heart with frost,
cascades scattering a confusion of spray
and broad forests crowding distant cliffs.
Thinking it’s moonrise I see in the west
and sunset I’m watching blaze in the east,
I hike on until dark, then linger out night
sheltered away in deep expanses of shadow.
Immune to high importance: that’s renown.
Walk humbly and it’s all promise in beauty,
for in quiet mystery the way runs smooth,
ascending remote heights beyond compare.
Utter tranquillity, the distinction between
yes this and no that lost, I embrace primal
unity, thought and silence woven together,
that deep healing where we venture forth.
Woodcutter and recluse—they inhabit
these mountains for different reasons,
and there are other forms of difference.
You can heal here among these gardens,
sheltered from rank vapors of turmoil,
wilderness clarity calling distant winds.
I ch’i-sited my house on a northern hill,
doors opening out onto a southern river,
ended trips to the well with a new stream
and planted hibiscus in terraced banks.
Now there are flocks of trees at my door
and crowds of mountains at my window,
and I wander thin trails down to fields
or gaze into a distance of towering peaks,
wanting little, never wearing myself out.
It’s rare luck to make yourself such a life,
though like ancient recluse paths, mine
bring longing for the footsteps of friends:
how could I forget them in this exquisite
adoration kindred spirits alone can share?
Embracing the seasons of heaven through bright insight,
the impulse turning them, and the inner pattern’s solitude,
my grandfather came to this retreat in the dusk of old age,
leaving behind his renown engraved in memorial hymns.
He thought Ch’ü Yüan a fool for drowning himself in exile,
admired Yüeh Yi for leaving his country. And he himself—
choosing the sacred beauty of occurrence coming of itself,
he made the composure of these mountain peaks his own.
Looking up to the example that old sage handed down,
and considering what comes easily to my own nature,
I offered myself to this tranquil repose of dwelling,
and now nurture my lifework in the drift of idleness.
Master Pan’s early awakening always humbled me,
and I was shamed by Master Shang’s old-age insight,
so with years and sickness both closing in upon me
I devoted myself to simplicity and returned to it all,
left that workaday life for this wisdom of wandering,
for this wilderness of rivers-and-mountains clarity.
Here where I live,
lakes on the left, rivers on the right,
you leave islands, follow shores back
to mountains out front, ridges behind.
Looming east and toppling aside west,
they harbor ebb and flow of breath,
arch across and snake beyond, devious
churning and roiling into distances,
clifftop ridgelines hewn flat and true.
Nearby in the east are
Risen-Fieldland and Downcast-Lake,
Western-Gorge and Southern-Valley,
Stone-Plowshares and Stone-Rapids,
Forlorn-Millstone and Yellow-Bamboo.
There are waters tumbling a thousand feet in flight
and forests curtained high over countless canyons,
endless streams flowing far away into distant rivers
and cascades branching deeper into nearby creeks.
Far off to the south are
peaks like Pine-Needle and Nest-Hen,
Halcyon-Knoll and Brimmed-Stone,
Harrow and Spire Ridges faced together,
Elder and Eye-Loft cleaving summits.
When you go deep, following a winding river to its source,
you’re soon bewildered, wandering a place beyond knowing:
cragged peaks towering above stay lost in confusions of mist,
and depths sunken away far below surge and swell in a blur.
There are fish like
snake-fish and trout, perch and tench,
red-eye and yellow-gill, dace and carp,
bream, sturgeon, skate, mandarin-fish,
flying-fish, bass, mullet and wax-fish:
a rainbow confusion of colors blurred,
glistening brocade, cloud-fresh schools
nibbling duckweed, frolicking in waves,
drifting among ghost-eye, flowing deep.
Some drumming their gills and leaping through whitewater,
others beating their tails and struggling back beneath swells,
shad and salmon, each in their season, stream up into creeks and shallows,
sunfish and knife-fish follow rapids further, emerge in mountain springs.
On mountaintops live
gibbon, jackal, wildcat and badger,
fox and wolf, cougar and bobcat,
and in mountain valleys
black and brown bear, coyote, tiger,
bighorn and deer, antelope and elk.
Things gambol among branches soaring out over cliffs
and leap across rifts of empty sky within deep gorges,
lurk down through valleys, howls and roars perpetual,
while others climb, calling and wailing among treetops.
As for my
homes perched north and south,
inaccessible except across water:
gaze deep into wind and cloud
and you know this realm utterly.
Tracing the way back home here,
I might round North Mountain
on roads hung along cliffwalls,
timbers rising in switchbacks,
or I could take the watercourse
way winding and circling back,
level lakes broad and brimming,
crystalline depths clear and deep
beyond shorelines all lone grace
and long islands of lush brocade.
Gazing on and on in reverence
across realms so boundless away,
I come to the twin rivers that flow through together.
Two springs sharing one source,
they follow gorges and canyons
to merge at mountain headlands
and cascade on, scouring sand out and mounding dunes
below peaks that loom over islands swelling into hills,
whitewater carrying cliffs away in a tumble of rocks,
a marshy tangle of fallen trees glistening in the waves.
Following along the south bank that crosses out front,
the snaking north cliff that looms behind, I’m soon
lost in thick forests, the nature of dusk and dawn in full view,
and for bearings, I trust myself to the star-filled night skies.
I started thinking of impossible cliffs at dawn
and by evening was settled on a mountaintop,
scarcely a peak high enough to face this hut
looking out on mountains veined with streams,
forests stretching away beyond its open gate,
a tumble of talus boulders ending at the stairs.
Mountains crowd around, blocking out roads,
and trails wander bamboo confusions, leaving
guests to stray on clever new paths coming up
or doubt old ways leading people back home.
Hissing cascades murmuring through dusk,
the wail of gibbons howling away the night,
I keep to the inner pattern, deep in meditation,
and nurturing this Way, never wander amiss.
Mind now a twin to stark late autumn trees
while eyes delight in the flowering of spring,
I inhabit the constant and wait out the end,
content to dwell at ease in all change and loss,
in this regret there’s no kindred spirit here
to climb this ladder of azure clouds with me.
I spent the morning digging out orchids,
afraid frost would soon leave them dead,
passed the night among fringes of cloud,
savoring a moon up beyond all this rock,
chortles telling me birds have settled in,
falling leaves giving away fresh winds.
Sounds weave together in the ear, strange
unearthly echoes all crystalline distance,
though there’s no one to share wonders
or the joys in wine’s fragrant clarities.
We’ll never meet again now. I sit beside
a stream, sun drying my hair for nothing.
Though the cry of gibbons means sunrise,
its radiance hasn’t touched this valley all
quiet mystery. Clouds gather below cliffs,
and there’s still dew glistening on blossoms
when I set out along a wandering stream,
climbing into narrow canyons far and high.
Ignoring my robe to wade through creeks,
I scale cliff-ladders and cross distant ridges
to the river beyond. It snakes and twists,
but I follow it, happy just meandering along
past pepperwort and duckweed drifting deep,
rushes and wild rice in crystalline shallows.
Reaching tiptoe to ladle sips from waterfalls
and picking still unfurled leaves in forests,
I can almost see that lovely mountain spirit
in a robe of fig leaves and sash of wisteria.
Gathering orchids brings no dear friends
and picking hemp-flower no open warmth,
but the heart finds its beauty in adoration,
and you can’t talk out such shadowy things:
in the eye’s depths you’re past worry here,
awakened into things all wandering away.
• • •
Above jumbled canyons opening suddenly
out and away, level roads all breaking off,
these thronging peaks nestle up together.
People come and go without a trace here,
sun and moon hidden all day and night,
frost and snow falling summer and winter.
• • •
scale cliffwalls to gaze into dragon pools
and climb trees to peer into nursery dens.
• • •
no imagining mountain visits. And now
I can’t get enough, just walk on and on,
and even a single dusk and dawn up here
shows you the way through empty and full.
• • •
Cold cutting through thin openwork robes
and not yet time for gifts of winter clothes:
this season always pitches me into depths
all grief-clotted thoughts of ancient times.
I’ll never sail on thousand-mile oars again
or think through the hundred generations,
but Master Shang’s distant mind my own
now, and old Master Hsü’s recluse ways,
I wander these winds boundless and clear,
and the headlong rush of autumn streams.
Rivers and mountains open away through
that alluring luster cloud and sun share,
and when twilight’s clarity infuses it all,
I savor a joy things themselves know here.