The Sung interiorization of wilderness came to another of its logical conclusions in the late work of Lu Yu. After a tempestuous and undistinguished government career, a time during which close bonds of friendship formed between Lu Yu and the other two major poets of the late Sung, Fan Ch’eng-ta and Yang Wan-li, Lu Yu retired to spend his last two decades as an increasingly impoverished recluse on a farm at his ancestral village in Shao-hsing. There, his long practice of Ch’an no-mind coming to fruition, he cultivated a profound transparency to experience: during these two decades he wrote no less than 6,500 poems (about one per day), which he arranged chronologically in his collection. This engagement had already led Lu Yu to write a celebrated mountain-travel diary that was unprecedented for its size and exhaustive detail, and it gives his poetic oeuvre the feel of a notebook or journal tracing the wanderings of a person’s attention through the days and seasons of a life.
It is remarkable how consistently successful Lu Yu’s poems are in the traditional sense of rendering a compelling poetic statement. But the mastery of the poems lies more in their form than in any particular statement they make, for they are quintessential Sung: rather than portray insight, they enact it. Lu Yu was beyond the need to distill or intensify experience into a privileged moment of insight. Instead, Lu’s poems have a texture of idle contentment deriving from his understanding that ordinary experience is always already enlightened, and wilderness resides as much in the everyday movement of perception and reflection as in high peaks and valleys. So transparency as the day-to-day form of life represents Lu Yu’s distinctive way of weaving consciousness into the fabric of wilderness, making every gesture in a poem wild.
To suggest this day-to-day form of transparency, the poems translated here are a consecutive sequence from an arbitrarily chosen moment in Lu Yu’s life: a few days in the autumn of 1205, Lu Yu’s 80th year.
What a joke that scholar’s office cap was. Not another word:
my hair’s white now, and I’m happy dozing in a river village,
though birds roosting in deep forests call one after another,
and boats moving through locks kick up that racket all night.
I’m sick, but get up and rummage all day in tattered old books,
and when sorrow comes, I just pour a little crystalline wine,
but how secluded is this life anyway? Just listen to this place!
It’s late, and still some monk’s out knocking at a moonlit gate!
Heading south from my brushwood gate, I start climbing
this mountain, grass sandals tattered among white clouds,
forgetting I’m so poor I may never repay my wine debts.
Ignoring a monk’s stone inscription, I abide in idleness,
my ancient three-foot ch’in a last trace of cook-smoke,
my ch’an staff a lone tree-limb of Hsiang River ripples.
I gaze north from my little hut here, into mist and cloud,
friends all scattered away, birds returning for the night.
Meandering these greens, azure all around, you plumb antiquity.
East of the wall, above the river, stands this ancient monastery,
its thatched halls we visited so long ago: you a mountain sage
and I here from Wei River northlands, half drunk and writing.
Painted paddle still, I drift awhile free. Then soon, I’m nearing
home, azure walking-stick in hand, my recluse search ending.
Old friends dead and gone, their houses in ruins, I walk through
thick bamboo, deep cloud, each step a further step into confusion.
I pass the whole day in utter tranquillity at my east window,
all that mirage and illusion of a lifetime gone, mind empty.
Autumn ch’i isn’t baring trees yet. But I’m old, and already
thinking of that first time I felt the hundred insects calling.
The ridges of a folding screen recall Thatch-Hut mountains,
and my wife’s high-peaked hat sacred Little-Forest summits,
but how could that flush of young health and strength last?
A vine follows the contours, recluse quiet wherever it goes.
The traveler is an instant friend, utterly clear and true:
even before we dip out wine, we share kindred thoughts.
The pillow is cold, but I don’t understand it’s all a dream
in the clear night. I just savor that vision of an old sage.
Star River tipped, Dipper sunk, ancient histories empty,
mist scatters and clouds leave. Our two bodies are mirage,
and mind is perfect clarity. It sees through this illusion.
Awake, you can’t avoid it: all things the same bittersweet.
An old-timer’s just a worn-out child. I can’t manage alone.
Though this mind is companion to sage ancient masters,
everything’s gone: firewood, water, servants, strength.
And I’ve even pawned my ch’in and books. It’s that bad.
Mortar and pestle are silent: I’m too sick to grind medicine.
The granary’s swept out: there’s nervous talk of hunger.
I still have a few years left. You’ll need to look after me.
Those misty ten-thousand-mile views will just have to wait.
Blazing summer days: no force could bring them back.
Clouds suddenly rising off the river, lovely, so lovely,
ducks leave a bridge’s shadow, paddling into fine rain,
and butterflies flutter out, frolicking in field breezes.
The willow won’t survive nights and days much longer,
and waterlilies will only open two or three more times.
If the changing sights of a single year haunt your eye,
why wonder that a palace lake is ash among the kalpas?
A three-plank boat, its sail made of ragged bamboo mats,
a fishing lantern anchored overnight at heaven’s gate:
forty-eight thousand acres of misty lakewater, where
the Maker-of-Things hurries narcissus flocks into bloom.
Scents of mountain vegetables and tender herbs everywhere,
the view’s regal down to sheep coddled for the emperor’s table.
I trust my thoughts to that voice of the ancient Liu Wen-shu:
it’s soy gruel that’s always been the most enduring of flavors.