WEI YING–WU

(c. 737 to 792)

LIKE HSIEH LING-YÜN, Wei Ying-wu was born into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the empire. But the family’s fortunes were in decline, and when Wei was about twenty, the An Lu-shan Rebellion ravaged the country, leaving the Wei family in ruins. The loss of his aristocratic life was a kind of awakening for Wei: he soon moved to Mind-Jewel Monastery (see here), where he stayed for several years. This marked the beginning of a life centered in quiet contemplation and poetry. He was by nature a recluse, but like Wang Wei, he never left government service completely: he needed the salary to survive, and he was also very concerned with the desperate plight of common people in an age of widespread poverty and devastation. He held a number of positions, both in the capital and in distant provinces. But it seems Wei was never really comfortable in these appointments, though some were quite important, and he generally ended up leaving them. He preferred the simplicity of a recluse life at a mountain monastery or farm, in spite of the hardship it sometimes entailed.

Wei Ying-wu’s poetry is historically noteworthy because it heralds the transition into the second phase of T’ang Dynasty poetry, which is characterized by more introspective and experimental work, for his poems often make elusive leaps that operate outside traditional poetic logic. But in Wei’s case, rather than the hermetic disorientations produced by the experimental poetries to come, those introspective leaps often identify self and landscape in a way that reflects a profound Ch’an (Zen) balance, revealing deep insights that go beyond logical thought structures. This poetics reflects the social situation of the time. Wei lived in the ruins of what was perhaps China’s greatest moment of cultural splendor, and his poems are often suffused with an ineffable sense of absence. Here lies the uneasy magic of Wei’s poems: in them, loss and absence often seem indistinguishable from the emptiness of an enlightened mind.