Poetry is China’s greatest art. No matter how wonderful its painting and calligraphy, its pottery and bronze casting, its sculpture and architecture, its music and dance, or its other literary arts, none of these has ever gained the universal appreciation and participation that poetry has enjoyed. This was especially true of the Middle Kingdom’s T’ang (618–906) and Sung (960–1278) dynasties, which Chinese ever since have called their Golden Age of Poetry. During the T’ang and Sung, poetry became the defining measure of human relationships and human understanding. Nothing was significant without a poem: no social or ritual occasion, no political or personal event was considered complete without a few well-chosen words in rhyme that summarized the subtleties of the Chinese vision of reality and that linked this vision with the beat of their hearts. Although this universal art form had been developing in China for millennia, its greatest flowering was in the T’ang and Sung, when suddenly it was everywhere: in the palace, in the street, in every household, every inn, every monastery, in every village square.
I don’t pretend to be able to explain the complex social changes that helped bring about this efflorescence in the T’ang and Sung, but by examining the word itself we can at least see why poetry held such an important place in Chinese culture. The Chinese word for poetry is shih (
) and is composed of two parts. The part on the left (
) means “language,” and the part on the right (
) originally meant “administrative court” and later came to mean “Buddhist temple.” But this was not the original form of the part on the right, and neither “court” nor “temple” has anything to do with the meaning of shih. This is because the second part was originally written chih (
), meaning “from the heart,” and the later form was simply the result of calligraphic shorthand and subsequent convention. Hence, the word for poetry does not mean the “language of the court/temple” but the “language of the heart.” The Great Preface to the Book of Odes says, “When it’s in the heart, it’s chih. When it’s expressed in language, it’s shih.” Thus, since the dawn of Chinese civilization 5,000 years ago, it has been the function of poetry to express this innermost square-inch of the Chinese heart.
China’s earliest known book of this “language of the heart” was the Shihching, or Book of Odes. This is a collection of ritual hymns, ballads, and folk songs that date back to the beginning of the Chou dynasty around 1100 B.C. Some are even said to have been passed down from the time of Yu the Great, founder of the Hsia dynasty in 2205 B.C. The collection itself is attributed to Confucius (551–479 B.C.), who reportedly sifted through some 3,000 poems from various parts of China and finally selected 305 as suitable for use in instructing his disciples.
Another collection of equal, if not greater, importance was the Chutzu, or Songs of Ch’u. This was a collection of the poems of Ch’u Yuan (340–278 B.C.) and other shaman-literati of the state of Ch’u compiled by an anonymous editor around the beginning of the Christian Era. Unlike the Book of Odes, the Chutzu contained the work of known individuals. And unlike the more aloof and stylized Odes, the poems in the Chutzu poured forth far more personal and heartfelt joys and sorrows. As a result, this book had a much greater impact on poets. Wang Wei (701–761) once said he carried two books with him wherever he traveled: the Vimalakirti Sutra and the Chutzu.
As time went on, other collections of poetry appeared. But aside from the Book of Odes and the Songs of Ch’u, no other anthology gained more than a limited audience—until the appearance of the Chienchiashih, or Poems of the Masters. This collection was first compiled at the end of the Sung dynasty by one of its most prolific writers, Liu K’o-chuang (1187–1269). Liu was also a leading literary critic, and at some point he decided to present his views on poetry through a collection of examples. Although no copy of Liu’s original anthology still exists, we know that he chose about 200 poems and arranged his selections under fourteen headings: flowers, bamboo, the sky, the earth, palace life, weather, tools, music, animals, insects, seasons, festivals, daily events, and human character. It was a great success. And as it enjoyed the good fortune of being published at the beginning of China’s printing revolution, it soon appeared in village schools and private academies across the country, where it established itself as eminently useful in teaching students the rhythms of language and also the heart, as well as the names of all sorts of things an educated person should know.
Over the centuries, Liu’s original edition was rearranged by different editors, and the number of poems increased to the present 224. In some editions, several poems dating from the Ming dynasty (1368–1643) were also added to this total, but I have followed most editors in deleting them as extraneous.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Wang Hsiang, who is better known for his works for and about women, rearranged the poems into four parts according to poetic form: 39 four-line poems with five characters to a line, 45 eight-line poems with five characters to a line, 94 four-line poems with seven characters to a line, and 46 eight-line poems with seven characters to a line. Readers interested in Chinese poetics should note that the four-line poems all follow the rhyme schemes and tonal patterns laid down for chueh-chu (detached quatrains), and all eight-line poems follow the more complex rules for lu-shih (regulated verse) that required a great deal of parallelism as well. Wang also arranged the poems in each section according to the seasons (more or less), and he composed the first commentary. Wang’s version of Liu’s anthology became so popular that the previous editions disappeared altogether, and I have generally followed Wang’s arrangement.
The Chinese title of this book is Ch’ien-chia-shih, which literally means Poems of a Thousand Masters. There are, however, only a hundred or so poets represented; hence, I have dropped the numeral. Despite the exaggeration, Poems of the Masters includes the most-quoted poems in the Chinese language by the most famous poets of China’s Golden Age of Poetry. And for the past eight centuries, it has been the most-memorized collection of verse in China and part of every student’s education.
When Sun Chu (1711–1778) published Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang in 1763—and Poems of the Masters finally had to share the poetry stage—Sun said in his preface that he based his own collection on the earlier anthology, and he admitted it was superior to his in terms of its shorter, easier-to-memorize poems. Although Sun’s collection eventually proved more popular with older readers, Poems of the Masters retained its preeminent place in the education of every schoolchild, as its emphasis on four-line poems made it much more useful in teaching poetry to students at an earlier age. Although China’s recent detour into communism saw the Chienchiashih replaced in schools with proletarian propaganda, it was still part of the national curriculum until the middle of the last century. And I suspect it will be again someday. Its success, like that of Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang, has been in large part due to its inclusion of poems that could be understood and appreciated by all sectors of society. And its poems are as meaningful today as they were when they were written.
In addition to translating the poems in this collection, I have included the original text for those able to read Chinese. I have also added a certain amount of background information to help readers locate these poems in time and space and in the lives of the poets. Scholars, however, are not always in agreement concerning events of a thousand or more years ago, and my choice among different accounts simply reflects what has seemed to me the most likely. But even without such information, and even if they did not fully understand the context in which these poems were written, the Chinese have always appreciated their “language of the heart” and continue to quote their phrases and lines in their speech today. Hence, I can think of no better way to reveal that hidden square-inch every Chinese holds dear and depends upon for inspiration than through this modest collection of poems.
Red Pine
Cold Dew, Year of the Horse
Port Townsend, Washington
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks for the continuing support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Stamp Program, the Port Townsend Food Bank, the Olympic Community Action Energy-Assistance Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit Program administered by the Internal Revenue Service, and the American Optometric Association’s Vision USA Program.