The Chinese poetic tradition consistently valued clarity and depth of wisdom, rather than mere complexity and virtuosity. In this, Po Chü-i is the quintessential Chinese poet. He was a devoted student of Ch’an Buddhism, and it was Ch’an that gave much of the clarity and depth to his life and work. This is immediately apparent in his voice and subject matter, but Ch’an is perhaps more fundamentally felt in the poetics shaping Po’s poetry. In Ch’an practice, the self and its constructions of the world dissolve away until nothing remains but empty mind—empty mind mirroring the world, leaving its ten thousand things utterly simple, utterly themselves, and utterly sufficient. This suggests one possible Ch’an poetry: an egoless poetry such as Wang Wei’s. But there is another possibility for Ch’an poetry: the poetry of an egoless ego.
The quiet response of even the most reticent poem is still a construction. Po knew this well, but it seems he came to realize that the self is also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient. Taoist thought would describe this insight rather differently, as the understanding that self is always already selfless: it is but a momentary form among the constant transformation of earth’s ten thousand things, and so is, most fundamentally, the emptiness of nonbeing, that source which endures through all change. This insight results in a poetry quite different from Wang Wei’s. Rather than Wang Wei’s strategy of emptying the self among the ten thousand things, this poetics opens the poem to the various movements of self, weaving it into the fabric of the ten thousand things, and Po Chü-i was a master of its subtle ways. As such, he initiated a major strand in Chinese poetic thinking: an “interiorization of wilderness” that came to be the most distinctive trait of Sung Dynasty poetry.
In a culture that made no fundamental distinction between heart and mind (see Key Terms: hsin), Po Chü-i inhabited everyday experience at a level where a simple heart is a full heart and a simple mind is an empty mind. Such is his gentle power: the sense in his poems of dwelling at the very center of one’s life, combining the intimacies of a full heart and the distances of an empty mind.
Emerald Ch’u mountain peaks and cliffs,
emerald Han River flowing full and fast:
Meng’s writing survives here, its elegant
ch’i now facets of changing landscape.
But today, chanting the poems he left us
and thinking of him, I find his village
clear wind, all memory of him vanished.
Dusk light fading, Hsiang-yang empty,
I look south to Deer-Gate Mountain, haze
lavish, as if some fragrance remained,
but his old mountain home is lost there:
mist thick and forests all silvered azure.
We share all these disappointments of failing
autumn a thousand miles apart. This is where
autumn wind easily plunders courtyard trees,
but the sorrows of distance never scatter away.
Swallow shadows shake out homeward wings.
Orchid scents thin, drifting from old thickets.
These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
lonely away— we share such emptiness here.
The moon’s risen. Birds have settled in.
Now, sitting in these empty woods, silent
mind sounding the borders of idleness,
I can tune the ch’in’s utter simplicities:
from the wood’s nature, a cold clarity,
from a person’s mind, a blank repose.
When mind’s gathered clear calm ch’i,
wood can make such sudden song of it,
and after lingering echoes die away,
song fading into depths of autumn night,
you suddenly hear the source of change,
all heaven and earth such depths of clarity.
Frost-covered grass silvered azure, insect song tightens.
No one north of the village, no one south of the village,
I wander out the front gate and gaze across open fields.
Moonlight shimmers, turning wheat blossoms into snow.
In the jade spring’s clear green depths,
this body’s far far off, a drifting cloud,
and a mind all idleness faces still water,
both perfect clarity, no trace of dust.
The gnarled bamboo staff’s in a hand,
the silk cap on a head. Come on a whim
and gone down the mountain, the whim
vanished: can anyone know who I was?
Facing Incense-Burner’s north slope,
just west of Love-Bequeath Monastery,
majestic rock towers, stately and white,
where a clear stream tumbles and flows,
where dozens of austere pines abide
and supple bamboo a thousand strong.
Pines kingfisher-green canopies spread,
bamboo hung with flakes of green jade:
they’ve harbored no human dwelling
for who knows how many long years,
just gatherings of gibbons and birds
and mist adrift on empty wind all day.
An adept sunk in such karma delusion,
I came here one day, a Po named Chü-i,
a man whose entire life seemed wrong,
and seeing it all, feeling mind settle
into a place that could nurture old age,
I knew at once that I would never leave,
so I framed thatch eaves against cliffs
and cleared a ravine for tea gardens.
To keep ears rinsed clean, a waterfall
washes across the roof and into flight,
and for eyes pure and clear, water lilies
drift white below a stonework terrace.
Nestling a jar of wine in my left hand
and a ch’in’s five strings in my right,
I admire how easily contentment comes
just sitting here in the midst of all this,
and marveling at the song of heaven,
I blend in a few tipsy words and let it
voice my nature: a far-country recluse
caught in nets of human consequence.
My best years offered up day by day,
I trust old age to this mountain return,
a tired bird finding its thick forests,
a worn-out fish back in clear streams.
If I ever left here, where would I go—
that peopled realm all trial and peril?
Three rooms and five spans—my new thatch hut boasts
stone stairs, cassia pillars and a bamboo-weave fence,
eaves lofty on the south to welcome warm winter sun,
doors and windows on the north for cool summer winds.
A waterfall sprinkling stonework dissolves into mist,
and bamboo brushing the windows grow lazy and wild.
Next spring, I’ll get a side-room ready here on the east:
paper screens and cane blinds for my wife, my treasure.
It’s the same Ch’ang-an moon when I ask
which doctrine remains with us always.
It flew with me when I fled those streets,
and now shines clear in these mountains,
carrying me through autumn desolations,
waiting as I sleep away long slow nights.
If I return to my old homeland one day,
it will welcome me like family. And here,
it’s a friend for strolling beneath pines
or sitting together on canyon ridgetops.
A thousand cliffs, ten thousand canyons—
it’s with me everywhere, abiding always.
I treasure what front eaves face
and all that north windows frame.
Bamboo winds lavish out windows,
pine colors exquisite beyond eaves,
I gather it all into isolate mystery,
thoughts fading into their source.
Others may feel nothing in all this,
but it’s perfectly open to me now:
such kindred natures need share
neither root nor form nor gesture.
It’s dusk, my boat such tranquil silence,
mist rising over waters deep and still,
and to welcome a guest for the night,
there’s evening wine, an autumn ch’in.
A master at the gate of Way, my visitor
arrives from exalted mountain peaks,
lofty cloudswept face raised all delight,
heart all sage clarity spacious and free.
Our thoughts begin where words end.
Refining dark-enigma depths, we gaze
quiet mystery into each other and smile,
sharing the mind that’s forgotten mind.
All the clothes and food I’ll need here before me,
a mind free of all happiness, free of all sadness:
it’s like some kind of afterlife. So what do you do
when you want nothing from this human world?
Eyes closed, I read classics of Way in silent depths,
and this idle, I hardly bow greeting Ch’an guests.
Luckily residue remains: a cloud-and-stream joy.
Every year I wander Dragon-Gate hills a few times.
The west wind just began a few days ago,
and already the first leaves have flown.
Skies clearing anew, I don slight clogs
and clothes thick against this first chill,
channels rinsing thin water slowly away,
sparse bamboo a last trickle of slant light.
Soon, in a lane of green moss, dusk spare,
our houseboy comes leading cranes home.
This hut isolate and clear beside the pond:
surely this is what lofty thoughts must be,
blinds in the occasional breeze stirring,
a bridge shining late sun back into water.
I’ve grown quiet here, company to cranes,
and so idle I’m like any other cloud adrift.
Why bother to go study under Duke Liu
or search wild peaks for Master Red Pine?
One anchorage of sand appears as another dissolves away,
and one fold of wave ends as another rises. Wave and sand
mingling together day after day, sifting through each other
without cease: they level up mountains and seas in no time.
White waves swell through wide open seas, boundless and beyond,
and level sands stretch into the four directions all endless depths:
evenings they dissolve and mornings reappear, sifting ever away,
their seasons transforming eastern seas into a field of mulberries.
Ten thousand miles across a lake where the grass never fades,
a lone traveler, you find yourself in rain among yellow plums,
gazing grief-stricken toward an anchorage of sand. Dark waves
wind keeps churned up: the sound of them slapping at the boat.
A day will no doubt come when dust flies at the bottom of seas,
and how can mountaintops avoid the transformation to gravel?
Young lovers may part, a man leaving, setting out on some boat,
but who could say they’ll never come together again one day?
A magisterial rock windswept and pure
and a few bamboo so lavish and green:
facing me, they seem full of sincerity.
I gaze into them and can’t get enough,
and there’s more at the north window
and along the path beside West Pond:
wind sowing bamboo clarities aplenty,
rain gracing the subtle greens of moss.
My wife’s still here, frail and old as me,
but no one else: the children are gone.
Leave the window open. If you close it,
who’ll keep us company for the night?
Nights hiking Sung Mountain in dream,
just a goosefoot walking-stick and me:
a thousand cliffs, ten thousand canyons,
I wander until I’ve explored them all,
my stride in dream as it was in youth,
strong and sure and so free of disease.
When I wake, spirit become itself again
and body returned to flesh and blood,
I realize that in terms of body and spirit,
body grows sick while spirit’s immune,
and yet body and spirit are both mirage,
dream and waking merest appearance.
Scarcely able to hobble around by day
then roaming free all night with ease:
in the equal division of day and night
what could I gain here, and what lose?