Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

THE HISTORY OF Chinese poetry begins around 600 B.C.E., with the compilation of an anthology, the Shijing or Classic of Odes, which contains poems that probably date back several centuries earlier. It continues with barely a break down to the present day. Naturally, such an extended period of development saw the evolution of a number of different poetic forms and styles and countless ebbs and flows in the tide of artistic inspiration.

It has generally been agreed by Chinese critics—and non-Chinese students of the language have found no reason to disagree—that the highest peak in literary achievement in this long process of growth was reached during the Tang dynasty, which ruled China from 618 to 907 C.E., particularly the middle years of this period. This was the age of Li Bo, Du Fu, Bo Juyi, and numerous other figures renowned in Chinese literary history, when the art of poetry reached levels of expressive force and achieved a universality of statement it was seldom to rival again. I would like here to try to convey some idea of the nature of this poetry and discuss its appeal for English readers of today. Rather than attempting generalities, I will center the discussion around specific examples of Tang poetry, touching upon the qualities that can be effectively brought across in translation and those that must inevitably be lost.

Unlike the peoples of Europe and India, the Chinese did not develop a tradition of epic poetry. Though they had their internecine wars and campaigns against foreign invaders—Ezra Pound’s “Song of the Bowmen of Shu” is a translation of an early work from the Classic of Odes dealing with one such campaign—they seldom made feats of arms a theme of poetry. An overwhelmingly agricultural people, they have preferred in their poetry to focus mainly upon the scenes and events of everyday life, which accounts for the generally low-key and ungrandiose tone of so much of Chinese poetry. It is also one reason why many of their works, even those written centuries ago, sound strikingly modern in translation.

The first work to be quoted is by the government official and poet Bo Zhuyi (772–846). Bo was one of the most prolific of the major Tang poets, and his works are particularly well preserved, in part because he took the trouble to compile and edit them himself and deposit copies in the libraries of several important Buddhist temples. The poem was written in 835 and is addressed to Bo’s friend Liu Yüxi (772–842), a fellow poet and bureaucrat who was the same age as Bo. The Chinese frequently exchanged poems with friends, often replying to one another’s poems as one would reply to a letter, the practice constituting both an expression of friendship and an opportunity to exercise literary abilities and invite critical comment. When responding to a friend’s poem, one customarily employed the same poetic form and sometimes the same rhymes or rhyme words as the original poem, in order to add an element of challenge to the game.

The subject of the poem is so universal an experience and the presentation so straightforward that comment seems almost superfluous. The poet, sixty-three at the time, begins by speaking directly to his friend Liu but then quickly falls into a kind of private reverie on the subject of old age and the changes that it brings. In the very last line, he abruptly shakes himself out of his musings and addresses his friend once more. Unlike many traditional Chinese poems, this one employs no erudite allusions to earlier literature, though, as may readily be seen in the translation, it makes considerable use of verbal parallelism, a device common in both Chinese prose and poetry. The poem is in shi form, essentially the same form used in the Shijing or Book of Odes. It employs a line five characters or syllables in length, and it is in the relatively free “old-style” form, which means that there is no limit on the number of lines. A single rhyme is employed throughout, the rhymes occurring at the end of the even-numbered lines.

Bo Zhuyi is particularly remembered for his relaxed, warmly personal works. He himself, however, placed a much higher value on his poems of social criticism. Confucius had emphasized the didactic function of poetry, citing the poems of the Book of Odes as examples, and Confucian-minded officials in later centuries often employed poetic forms to voice criticisms of the government or expose the ills of society. Bo Zhuyi in his youthful years as an official enthusiastically carried on this tradition, writing a number of outspoken works that he hoped would bring about changes in government policy. The following is a famous example.

The poem is entitled “Light Furs, Fat Horses,” an allusion to a passage in the Confucian Analects (6.3) in which Confucius censures luxurious living among public officials. It was written in 810, when the poet held advisory posts in the capital and while the region south of the Yangzi River was plagued by drought. The poet had previously asked that the government take steps to aid the drought victims, but his pleas went unheeded. The poem depicts a banquet at a military encampment in or near the capital. It is in the same form as the poem previously quoted.

Tang poetry—or at least all that has come down to us—is almost entirely the product of a single group in society, the literati or scholar-bureaucrats, men who had received a firm grounding in the classical texts and had chosen to enter government service, often after passing the civil-service examinations. For these men, the writing of poetry was no mere hobby or diversion but an integral part of their lives as gentlemen and public servants, a means of airing their opinions, fulfilling their responsibilities to society, and furthering their spiritual cultivation.

The greatness of Tang poetry probably derives first of all from the tone of moral seriousness that pervades so much of it. There were other periods in Chinese literary history when poetry was mainly a pleasant pastime for members of the court or aristocracy, a vehicle for displaying verbal ingenuity or embroidering upon the patterns of the past. The Tang poets, though certainly not incapable of frivolous verse, generally had far more serious purposes in mind when they employed the medium, as we have seen in the example just quoted. They returned poetry to what they believed to be its original function: the addressing of important social and ethical issues.

At the same time, as evidenced in the first poem quoted above, they were not afraid to be frankly personal in their writing. Though this personal note was shunned during some periods, the best of the Tang poets, such as Du Fu or Bo Zhuyi, did not hesitate to record the experiences and emotional crises of their daily lives in their works, employing poetry much as the diary or autobiography forms are used in other cultures. To do so was for them a kind of literary and spiritual discipline.

The poet-official Wang Wei (699?–761), much of whose poetry describes the scenes of his daily life, purchased a country estate at a place called Wang River in the mountains south of Chang-an, the Tang capital. The estate had formerly belonged to another well-known poet-official, Song Zhiwen (d. 712?). In the following poem, the first in a famous series describing scenic spots on the estate, the poet muses on the passing of time, as graphically exemplified in the dying willows planted by the former owner, along with his own feelings of pity for Song Zhiwen and the pity that owners of the estate in years to come might feel for him. This ability of the Tang poets, often within the span of a scant four lines, to open huge vistas in time or space is one of the qualities that endows their poetry with its characteristic air of grandeur and mythic proportions.

The Tang poets in their subject matter did not confine themselves to the autobiographical, however. Following a very old practice in Chinese poetry, they frequently adopted a persona from the folk-song tradition in order to enlarge the breadth and social significance of their material, speaking, for example, through the voice of a peasant pressed into military service, a neglected wife, or a soldier on frontier duty. Here is such a work by Li Bo (701–762), a poet particularly famed for his lyric gift and his works in the folk-song form. It is entitled “Zi-yeh Song,” Zi-yeh being the name of a courtesan of earlier times who was noted for her brief and poignant songs. The poem is set in autumn, the time when women traditionally fulled (that is, scoured and thickened) cloth to make clothes to send to the soldiers at the border, and pictures a woman in the capital city of Chang-an dreaming of her husband at Jade Pass in Gansu, far to the west.

Before leaving the poem, we may note that, according to some commentators, the first line should be interpreted to read, “Chang-an—one swath of moonlight.” The question, in effect, is whether one chooses to imagine the women working under the thin crescent of a new moon or under a full moon that floods the ground with light. Famous as these poems are and as often as they have been commented upon, the nature of the classical Chinese language is such that differences of interpretation of this kind continue to exist.

The poems quoted so far have all dealt with the world of human affairs, but Tang poets did not neglect the natural scene around them, either. In very early times, nature was looked on as rather fearful, the abode of fierce beasts or malevolent spirits. But from around the fifth century on, Chinese painters and poets began to show a much greater appreciation of the beauties of the natural world, particularly the mist-filled mountain and river landscapes of southern China. The period was one of foreign invasion and political turmoil, and these mountain landscapes came to be seen as places of peace and safety where one might escape from the perils of official life and perhaps even acquire the secrets of longevity.

This interest in natural beauty continued to be an important theme in Tang poetry, and it was often bound up with religious overtones linking it to Buddhism or Daoism. The following poem, from a group of some three hundred poems attributed to a recluse known as Hanshan or the Master of Cold Mountain, is an example. Hanshan was said to have lived at a place called Cold Mountain (Hanshan) in the Tiantai mountains of Zhejiang province, the site of many Buddhist and Daoist temples. It is uncertain when he lived, though the late eighth and early ninth centuries has been suggested as the most likely possibility. The poem is untitled.

On the literal level, the poem is a description of the scenery along the kind of mountain trail that I myself have climbed in the Tian-tai range, with its rocky streambeds and pine-clad slopes. At the same time, the imagery of the ascent suggests a process of spiritual cultivation and the attainment of higher realms of understanding, while the white clouds of the last line—clouds that the Chinese believed were literally breathed forth by the mountain itself—are a frequently recurring symbol in Chinese literature for purity and detachment.

The next poem to be quoted, by the ninth-century writer Gao Pien, also deals with the natural scene. But this is nature carefully cultivated and seen in close conjunction with human habitation. As the title “Mountain Pavilion, Summer Day” tells us, the scene is a pleasant country retreat in the hush of a long, hot summer’s day. We are shown the masses of shade trees surrounding the house, the reflections of the building and terrace as they appear upside down in the pond that fronts them, and the trellis of roses whose fragrance is so strong in the courtyard. Beyond the courtyard, a curtain strung with crystal beads stirs gently in the cool breeze, but just who is napping behind the curtains we are not told. The poem is an example of the kind of mood piece at which the Tang poets excelled, deft sketches made up of a few artfully chosen details that serve to rouse the reader’s curiosity and invite him to fill out the remainder of the scene from his own imagination.

This poem, along with the Wang Wei poem quoted earlier, is written in a form known as jueju, or “cut-off lines.” The form is limited to four lines in length and usually employs a line of five or seven characters. Chinese is a tonal language, and the jueju form, in addition to employing end rhyme, obeys elaborate rules governing the tonal pattern of the words. We do not know just how the four tones of Tang-period Chinese were pronounced, and even if we did, the effect of such tonal patterns could not be reproduced in a nontonal language such as English. But it is well to keep in mind that, though translations of Tang poetry may give an impression of relative freedom, the originals are often in highly controlled forms. That the Tang poets not only complied with the exacting prosodic restrictions placed upon them but even succeeded in dancing in their chains is one of the wonders of their poetry.

One writer who seems to have welcomed the challenges presented by such demanding forms and who produced in them works of great power and originality was Du Fu (712–770), often referred to as China’s greatest poet. He is particularly noted for the keen observations of nature recorded in his works as well as for his tone of passionate sincerity and concern for the welfare of the nation. The following poem, entitled simply Jue jü, was written in his late years, when conditions of unrest in the country forced him to live the life of a wanderer in the upper reaches of the Yangzi River, hoping always for an opportunity to return to his home in the northeast.

The poem begins with two lines in strict parallel form recording thoughtfully noted observations on the river scene: that the river gulls appear whiter than ever when seen against the intense blue of the river and that the buds of spring blossoms—probably peach-tree buds—seem like so many flames about to burst into color. In the second couplet, however, the tense objectivity of the opening lines suddenly gives way to a rush of feeling as the poet realizes that yet another spring has come and is about to depart while he is still far from his homeland.

The last poem in my selection, like the first one, is addressed to a friend and deals with the theme of friendship and separation. It was the custom of Chinese gentlemen to write poems of commemoration when they gathered for a banquet, outing, or other social occasion, and this was particularly true when the purpose of the gathering was to see one of their number off on a journey. Official assignments kept the scholar-bureaucrats moving constantly about the empire, and there are numerous works by Tang poets bidding farewell to a friend or thanking friends for such a sendoff. This poem is by Li Bo and is addressed to his friend Meng Hao-ran (689–740), who was sailing east down the Yangzi to Yangzhou (Guang-ling) in Jiangsu. The farewell party was held at a place called Yellow Crane Tower, overlooking the river at Wuchang in Hupei. All this information is carefully recorded in the heading of the poem, since the Chinese tend to feel that the circumstances that led to the writing of a poem are an important part of its meaning.

Like Wang Wei’s poem quoted above on the successive owners of his country estate, this one opens up vistas, here spatial ones that show us the sweeping mountain ranges and river systems of continental China. And unspoken but underlying it is the aching contrast between these vast, long-enduring features of the landscape and the frailty of human existence, as symbolized by the lone sail of Meng’s boat fading from view on the horizon.

Tang poetry, to sum up, stands out in the long history of Chinese poetic development because, eschewing the superficiality of an earlier age and the tendency toward bland impersonality and mannered manipulation of stock themes and images, it restored to Chinese poetry the lost note of personal concern. The Tang poets were not afraid to employ poetry to record their deepest and most intimate feelings, crying out for the alleviation of social ills, noting with wry candor the waning of their physical powers, longing for absent friends, or dreaming of the last journey home. And because they dealt with the basic impulses of the human being, their works easily survive the transition into another language and milieu. Tang poetry, as one who reads it will readily perceive, is not just the product of a particularly golden age in China’s literary history but a part of the universal human heritage.

Poems marked with an asterisk were translated especially for this article and are published here for the first time. Other poems are taken from my Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).