Yang Wan-li represents a culmination of Ch’an poetics in rivers-and-mountains poetry. Although he had a successful official career—a trusted advisor to prime ministers and emperors at times, and at others banished to the provinces—Yang was always a very serious Ch’an practitioner, and he had a more thoroughly Ch’an conception of poetry than any other poet in the tradition. Like a Ch’an adept practicing directly under Ch’an masters, Yang studied assiduously with the poetic masters of the past, trying to match his poetic insights to theirs; until finally, at the age of fifty, this “practice” led to a moment of sudden enlightenment. Throwing over his ties to the literary tradition, he began working spontaneously in his own style from immediate experience, and tzu-jan seemed to present itself to him in poems that virtually wrote themselves. His poems were thereafter written with a kind of selfless spontaneity, a procedure which itself wove him into natural process.
Yang’s poetic enlightenment seems to have been part of a broader Ch’an enlightenment, and this awakening is reflected in the poems themselves. A typical Yang poem in the rivers-and-mountains mode attends to the passing moments of immediate experience with a resounding clarity, and this attention usually leads to a moment of sudden enlightenment: a startling image or turn of thought, a surprising imaginative gesture, a sudden twist of humor. But the depths of Yang’s enlightenment were such that he could make poems out of nothing more than that crystalline attention to things themselves. The rivers-and-mountains realm was the natural terrain for this attentiveness, as its grandeur so easily calls one from the limitations of self to the expansiveness of a mirror-like empty mind that contains all things. But more often than any other poet, Yang also attends to the most mundane aspects of wilderness—empty mind completely occupied with nothing special: a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill.
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Yang Wan-li was the last of the great Sung poets, and with him China’s rivers-and-mountains poetry had opened up virtually all of its possibilities. China’s poets would continue to actively cultivate this rich terrain up to the present, but there would be few truly fundamental innovations. This is perhaps a testament to the profundity of this tradition, for once the terms of our dwelling within this wilderness cosmology are established, we can simply settle into our mountain home, our poetry becoming a way of steadily deepening the gift of that dwelling.
The screen’s shade is faint, too faint to
hide clear skies,
and a goosefoot staff is keeping me fresh. It’s time
to go,
but lakeside mountains have gracious plans to keep me,
leaving
distant bells silent, sound itself as yet unknown.
As our boat lacing mists angles off the cove’s willow
shores,
cloud mountains appear and disappear among the willows.
And the beauty of climbing a mountain while adrift on a
lake?
It’s this lake’s mind— that gaze holding the
mountain utterly.
Chance sight on a windowsill, the fly sits
warming its back,
rubbing its front legs together, savoring morning
sunlight.
Sun nudges shadow closer. But the fly knows what’s
coming,
and suddenly it’s gone— a buzz heading for the
next window.
A hundred thousand sparrows descend on my empty
courtyard.
A few gather atop the plums, chatting with clear evening skies,
and the rest swarm around, trying to murder me with their
racket.
Suddenly they all startle away, and there’s silence: not a
sound.
These thousand peaks offer the beauties of
spring again,
and what do I offer them? Nothing but mounting alarm.
Clouds plunder cragged cliffs where birds sing in trees,
rain
swells mountain streams, cascades scattering petals,
and I can’t see past thatch roofs, a wisp of kitchen
smoke,
but I know exactly how starvation will look in this village.
I knew there’d be no meat for breakfast. But they
barely
even manage bamboo shoots: just two or three grams each.
I pour out a cup or two of emerald wine inside
the cabin.
The door swings closed, then back open onto exquisite
ranged mountains: ten thousand wrinkles unseen by anyone,
and
every ridge hand-picked by the late sun’s slant light.
The gorge’s river all empty clarity, rain
sweeps in,
cold breezy whispers beginning deep in the night,
and ten thousand pearls start clattering on a plate,
each
one’s tic a perfect clarity piercing my bones.
I scratch my head in dream, then get up and listen
till dawn,
hearing each sound appear and disappear.
I’ve listened to rain all my life. My hair’s white
now,
and I still don’t know night rain on a spring river.
To see them, look at mountains revealed and
unrevealed.
If you don’t, even looking at mountains is pure
delusion.
Ten thousand peaks of blue keep me enthralled all day,
and at
dusk, I linger out twilight’s last few purple spires,
but of those sightseers coming and going on riverboats,
gazing
out at mountains, how many see them absolutely?
Let those boatmen keep their reckless talk to themselves:
if
you scare the children, they’ll refuse to go anywhere.
Always wanting to fill a poet’s eyes to
the brim, old heaven
worries that autumn mountains are too washed-out and
dead,
so it measures out Shu brocade, unfurls flushed clouds of
Wu,
and rubs them lush and low across these autumn mountains.
Before long, red brocade thins into kingfisher-green gauze
as
heaven’s loom weaves out evening crows returning home,
then evening crows and kingfisher-green gauze are gone:
nothing
in sight but a clear river pure as sun-bleached silk.
A fisherman’s taking his boat deep across
the lake.
My old eyes trace his path all the way, his precise
wavering in and out of view. Then it gets strange:
suddenly
he’s a lone goose balanced on a bent reed.
The ox path I’m on ends in a rabbit
trail, and suddenly
I’m facing open plains and empty sky on all four
sides.
My thoughts follow white egrets— a pair taking
flight,
leading sight across a million blue mountains rising
ridge beyond ridge, my gaze lingering near then far,
enthralled
by peaks crowded together or there alone.
Even a hill or valley means thoughts beyond knowing—
and
all this? A crusty old man’s now a wide-eyed child!
A spring’s eye of shadow resists even the
slightest flow.
Among tree shadow, its lit water adores warm clear skies.
Spiral of blades, a tiny waterlily’s clenched against
dew,
and there at the very tip, in early light, sits a dragonfly.
Who says poets are so enthralled with mountains?
Mountains,
mountains, mountains— I’ve raved on and on, and
they’re still
clamoring for attention. A thousand peaks, ten thousand
ridges:
it’s too much for me. If I climb an hour, I need to rest for
three.
When your desk is piled full, you just can’t add anything
more,
and when your withered stomach is full, who can keep eating?
So what good’s even a faint scrap of mist or
kingfisher-green?
I’ll wrap it all up, send the whole bundle off to my
city friends.